Monroe N. Work was an African American sociologist, scholar, and researcher who spent his life collecting information and helping others to understand it. The highlight of his career, according to Work, was the nine editions of the Negro Year Book between 1912 and 1938. Each edition was an encyclopedic collection of yearly facts and data that covered many aspects of African American life as compiled by Work from data submitted from the wider community. Each subsequent edition quickly became the essential source of Black data in the United States and was reported on widely by the White and Black press and used as a resource equally in many schools in America and abroad. 

But their author, Monroe N. Work, remains far less known than his contemporaries W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington despite collaborating directly with both leaders. After sharing research with Du Bois early in his career, Work had the opportunity to start the Department of Records and Research at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, which was presided over by Booker T. Washington. 

This positioned him at the intersection of Black leadership and education in the US for most of his life, to which Monroe Work threw himself into the task of expanding public consciousness through data. In order to drive the importance of certain datasets, the Negro Year Book went a step further by featuring a number of hand-drawn charts focusing on education, healthcare, and mortality. 

Collecting data may not be the calling for the most extroverted people, and this certainly was the case with Monroe Work. He was a soft-spoken, hard-working, and tenacious collector of facts whose dedication to data provided generations of scholars with the empirical ammunition to fight for equality and justice.

Find all editions of the Negro Year Book, plus my full research documentation in this public folder.

The road to Tuskegee

Born to formerly enslaved parents, Work had a protracted education (he didn’t get to attend high school until the age of 23) which eventually brought him to enroll at the University of Chicago to become a sociologist. After graduating in 1903, Work moved to Savannah, Georgia to work at Georgia State Industrial College, which offered a small salary but gave him access to a vibrant Black community and a start for his research.  

Moving to Savannah provided Work proximity to W.E.B. Du Bois in Atlanta, who welcomed him into a long-standing collaboration as a fellow Black scholar. After publishing several articles in Du Bois’s journal at Atlanta University, Du Bois personally invited Work to the initial meeting of the Niagara Movement conference in 1905 as a member of the “Committee on Crime, Rescue, and Reform” as well as the “Committee on Interstate Conditions and Needs.” 

Savannah, Georgia was a charged social environment and Work flourished as a key member of Black society. He established the Savannah Men’s Sunday Club with over 300 members and featured speakers (including Du Bois, Robert E. Park, and others) sharing new ideas on education, healthcare, crime, housing, and other factors inhibiting social equity—topics known collectively at the time as the “Race Problem.” This gave Work a platform to mature professionally and share a number of important papers on health and crime, as well as his early research on African languages. Savannah was also where Work met his wife of 41 years, Florence Evelyn Hendrickson.

He quickly became professionally respected as a fastidious keeper of the facts and his activism-through-research caught the eye of Booker T. Washington, a skilled and charismatic orator, fund-raiser, and president of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (later University) in Alabama that pioneered industrial, agricultural, and higher-education for African Americans. Washington at first contacted Du Bois to start a history department at Tuskegee, but when he declined, Work was contacted to consider the post. The decision to move to Tuskegee seemed like an easy decision, here’s what Work—and his wife Florence—had to say about it:

After arriving in Alabama, Work created the “Plan for Making Tuskegee a Greater Center for Information Relating to the Negro,” which mapped out a system for expanding a library as well as a “systematic gathering of data” relating to the Black experience that encompassed both historical and current events.

After publishing his first few papers and pamphlets on behalf of his new department, Booker T. Washington suggested that Work publish a “yearbook of Negro progress” to honor the 50^th anniversary of emancipation in 1913. The first edition of the Negro Year Book was published as a joint effort by Work and Tuskegee in 1912 at a hefty 225 pages. It sold for 25¢ and was mailed for 5¢ more—which is equivalent to $10 today. The first edition sold 5,000 copies quickly, which provided the necessary funds and enthusiasm to triple the page count and print run by the 1914-15 edition.

The first edition of the Negro Year Book in 1912 set the tone for the series by dividing its content into three sections: an overview of African American life (with supporting data) in 1911, an overview of Black Americans in context to the world’s Black population, and a final section documenting the story of enslavement and emancipation. More than anything, the first edition essentially converted the assorted newspaper snippets and assorted data already collected by Work and his team as a first-of-its-kind resource for collective Black memory.

By the 1914 edition, the Negro Year Book also solicited facts about African Americans as part of a campaign to collect information. This took the form of a contest for the “most practical suggestion” with a hefty prize of $50 (roughly $1,500 today). Collecting information was central to Work’s plan for his department, and by this time he had already been receiving newspaper clippings, quotes, and assorted notes from universities and researchers across the country. By turning this into a contest, Work created a real incentive for laypeople to contribute, and in essence, it helped him to crowdsource his archive.

Author Linda McMurry elaborates on his impact in her book Recorder of the Black Experience: A Biography of Monroe Nathan Work:

While the Negro Year Book was, and still is, a valuable asset to the historian and sociologist, its impact was also significant among laymen. The facts it supplied inspired blacks with confidence in their ability to progress and refuted the rumors of black decline that were widespread among whites. The prestige of Tuskegee Institute lent credence to the facts presented in the yearbooks and allowed them to be distributed through white newspapers and to be accepted in both the North and South. There are many mentions of the Negro Year Book in newspapers across the country. A periodical called The Republic even declared, “The Social, legal, financial, and educational contrasts between the American Negro in 1863 and 1913 are by the very dispassion of their telling made miraculous. The book is written for reference use, yet many successive pages read like romance.”

Work himself considered the Negro Year Book as his most significant accomplishment, saying:

The answering of inquiries about the Negro, which came to Tuskegee from all parts of the world, became an important aspect of the work of the Department of Records and Research. I kept the recipes to all questions received. On the basis of these replies there was published in 1912 the first Negro Year Book, a compilation of facts relating to the Negro. Almost immediately the Negro Year Book became a standard reference on all matters pertaining to the race. Its circulation in the course of time became world-wide.

What follows is a series of examples from various editions of the yearbooks. Every edition focused on education, an area that Work was particularly passionate about. (I’ll explore other topics of interest in forthcoming articles.)

Visualizing educational inequality

Work added a series of charts on education in the 1914-15 edition. By the next edition in 1916-17, the education chapter was elaborated to 58 pages and included the most number of charts. While W.E.B Du Bois created remarkable charts for the 1900 Paris Exposition on the same subject, Work focused on the bigger story of American education and the lack of investment in Black children.  

The series of charts begin with “Per Cent Negro Children In School And Out,” which features horizontally stacked bar charts sorted by the percentage of Black children in school, with Oklahoma at the top with about 62% in school and Louisiana at the bottom with about 28%.

What is immediately evident is the humble way the chart is printed. The chart is straightforward and the design is clean despite being hand-drawn. The chart is arranged in three sections—the group at the top being above 50%, then Texas at 50%, and the rest of the states trailing below 50% (all of them Southern).

Work presented the data in this format originally in the 1914-15 edition but then reworked the design over the next 10 years. As you can see below, his first chart was hand-drawn, while the next two versions are printed as rudimentary bar charts. The last two versions include data on White students, but use tick marks to show those out of school. It’s interesting to consider how Work experimented with the design of this chart over time, yet collected the data in the same way from the beginning.

The second chart in the series is as unique as any that shape our field. In my opinion, it is equally as captivating as Florence Nightingale’s rose and as engaging as Du Bois’s spiral:

This is the 1914-15 version of the chart, and the first time it appears in the Negro Year Book. It is hand-drawn, like most of the charts from this edition, but the measured conception of the chart really packs a punch. “Days Of Schooling Per Year If Each Negro Child Of School Age Got His Share” is a unique design that connects Work’s statistical analysis directly to his argument of unequal investment in education. Each five-spotted dice pattern represents a week in school, each dot a school day.  

Work divides the total number of days attended by the number of children of school age to get the per-capita average for each state. It’s a great way to show the scale of the issue in a way that creates empathy and grabs attention. (On a personal note, can you imagine every African American child in Louisiana only being in school for a month and two days per year?)

Work hid the real surprise in a data table that followed the chart. There, he showed the average number of years that it would take a child to complete an elementary course (grades 1-8). By this accounting, it would take an African American person 33 years to get an elementary school education in South Carolina. 

This chart was recreated twice in the following editions. In 1916-17, the chart was typeset instead of hand-drawn:

While it’s interesting to consider how the impact of the hand-drawn versus printed charts cultivates different emotional responses, the data, itself, is equally stirring. While Louisiana and South Carolina are relatively unchanged, Maryland and North Carolina see significant improvement. Texas initially improves between the editions but then stagnates in the subsequent version.

The 1918-19 edition was the last year this chart was included, and it was oriented vertically on the page with more standardized typesetting. The story in the data is effectively the same with the overall trend in the data flattening out. Louisiana and Georgia see modest gains while South Carolina actually drops to 25 days annually, down from 26 days.

By changing the format and design of this chart, the charm is completely gone. The proximity of the dots doesn’t visually align with the idea of a five-spot dice and the numbers are lost on the page. It’s heartbreaking to see this version because it doesn’t live up to the impact of the previous versions. 

It’s uncertain what exactly changed, was this a different printer? Why did the orientation become vertical? Why did they use asterisks instead of dots? Regardless, it’s an interesting exercise in design exploration. It’s clear that Monroe Work could visualize data to make an efficient and compelling argument, but access to funding and technology likely forced him to focus his efforts elsewhere.

The next chart in the series compares investment in White versus Black schools.

The chart is sorted in descending order by White investment and the bars themselves appear to be made from a kind of tape in the printing process. As you’ll see this technique is used across many of Work’s charts and I assume this is due to how the book was printed, likely using an offset lithography process—the standard at the time. 

While the story in the data is clear, the chart could be made more self-evident. As I show in this chart based on the original data, if Work would have removed some of the states where investment was more equitable, then the scale of unequal investment in Black and White schools would be more obvious. But this was not his intention, as Work was interested in presenting as much data as possible to challenge popular opinion and erode misconceptions.

Work’s factual approach furthered his book’s reach significantly by making it less controversial for White publications and schools to cite. The Virginia Vicksburg Herald published a feature article calling the 1915-16 edition “helpful and inspiring almost beyond measure,” while the Denver Star called Work an “Historian who knows his business.” The Colorado Statesman even ran a front-page essay about the overall inspiration of his work concluding with thanks to Work for “this timely message to our people… for the benefit of making them firmer in the cause that concerns them and is of the greatest importance in their lives.” Because Work collected and presented the data without emotion, it gave visibility to the facts at a time when prejudice could easily have omitted them. (See here for my collection of reporting on Work and the Negro Year Book.)

Interestingly enough, the previous edition of the Negro Year Book in 1914-15 featured a novel and very different approach to this data:

I’ve mentioned the humble printing methods of the book mainly because they stand out for their ingenuity despite an obvious lack of resources. The sophistication of the story of Work’s data is nuanced and clever; its hand-made nature appeals to us as dataviz practitioners because we can see the hand behind the analysis.  

This chart is essentially a unit chart of “$” signs struck many times with a typewriter to create a crude icon for “dollar.” These units are arranged in rows with the corresponding amount at the end of each row. We see the values for White and Black schools with the most per capita spent in Washington, DC. For Mississippi, we are left with only 93¢—not even enough for a single icon.

Again, we see Work experimenting with the format of the chart to make a point. One certainly wonders if Work had seen Du Bois’s Paris Exhibition charts, or if he was informed by other charts used in sociology. There are references to additional charts by Work and his department in an exhibition at the Georgia State Fair in 1908 and also in some of his earlier pamphlets. Further research is needed to help them come to light.

While the publication was expanding between the editions—from 228 pages to 488 in just three years—Work emphasized collecting more facts. Following each of Work’s charts is a table of the data. Interestingly, there isn’t a chart on this data on the number of teachers despite the inclusion in the paragraph that introduces the chapter on education. It is fascinating all the same.

In order to highlight access to education, Work focuses the next two charts and a map to explore Illiteracy:

Work shows that African American illiteracy in 1915-16 was clearly connected to age and geography. The data is stark. The depth of illiteracy in the Southern states presages the impending Northward Black Migration for better living conditions.  

The next chart shows the total scale of education by attainment for African Americans. It’s a chart that Work continues to publish even after the rest of the charts fall away in later editions because I believe it shows the urgency of Black scholarship. 

The remaining suite of three charts round out the yearbook’s education chapter and are included and updated from the second edition of 1913-14 through the eighth edition of 1931-32 in similar formats. All are created out of the same “tape” to create the bar charts.

In these charts, Work explains the finance of Black education. These numbers would have signified vast amounts of money at the time. Collecting and quantifying the sum total of Black education in America shows the scale of the inequity in a way that few other metrics can. While the African American population is an ethnic minority in the United States, the data proves how little had been invested at a time when the need for education would have been imperative. By compiling the total costs for all education, then breaking out the funding opportunities available, Work not only points the way for other Black educators to get access to funds (which he lists in detail at the end of the chapter) but also brings his story full circle in detailing the massive investment by African Americans directly into their community schools.

Setting the record (straight)

At the beginning of his career in sociology, at the age of 37, Monroe N. Work began to define what would be his life’s work: “If Sociology has primarily to do with human beings in their associative capabilities, then its primary function is thorough investigation and research, to collect a body of information that will point out, make clear, what these relationships are and what in the present, the now, should be done in order that these relationships may be made more harmonious, more just and proper.”

Work’s collaborator and friend Jessie P. Guzman noted in writing his obituary:

Work biographer Linda McMurry writes, “The principle driving force in Work’s life was neither accommodation nor protest, rather it was an abiding faith in the ‘impact of fact’. His main concern was to obtain the best possible outlet for the fruits of his research.”  A few chapters later, she adds, “With his faith in the impact of fact and his uncharismatic demeanor, Work’s quiet, scholarly presentations were in keeping not only with Tuskegee’s program but also with his own personality… Indeed, throughout his almost 40 years at Tuskegee, Monroe Work was a quiet but insistent voice for change in the institute’s approach to both education and race relations.”

Through a steadfast belief in facts, Monroe N. Work not only established the structure for how data on African Americans was collected, but he also invested his life in presenting it to the world at large. There is much in Work’s life to share; in a follow-up to this story, I’ll present a body of charts that he created to effect dramatic improvements in African American health conditions. 

Special thanks

Monroe Work first came to my attention by Dr. David H Jackson Jr., Provost of North Carolina Central University. It was his guidance to explore the Negro Year Book which has continued my exploration into Black scholarship. I believe that data visualization may have played a significant role for many activists and scholars throughout the beginning of the twentieth century, the civil rights movement among them.

Thanks very much to Emily Barone for editing!

You can find every image from this article as well as all editions of the Negro Year Book here in this public Google folder containing all my research materials:

While Monroe Work is a remembered figure in African American history, his life has not received much documentation. There is only one book about his life and work, Recorder of the Black Experience: A Biography of Monroe Nathan Work by Linda O. McMurry from 1985. Her care and deep empathy for Work’s life does his legacy a great service.

Prior to McMurry’s biography, an accounting of Work’s life was compiled in 1949 as an in-depth obituary by Jessie P. Guzman, who collaborated with Work from 1938-44 when she took over for him after his retirement at the Tuskegee Institute Department of Records and Research.  She went on to compile and edit two subsequent volumes of the Negro Year Book in 1947 and 1952. 

There is also a lengthy article, “You Can’t Argue with Facts: Monroe Nathan Work as Information Officer, Editor, and Bibliographer,” by Mark Tucker published in 1991. While he focuses on an enormous bibliography that Work assembled later in his career, it is a great summation of his work and contains additional research and scholarship.

Additional links

Monroe Work portrait in National portrait gallery: https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_S_NPG.67.28

Site created highlighting Work’s documentation of Lynching: https://plaintalkhistory.com/monroeandflorencework/

Tuskegee archives: http://archive.tuskegee.edu/repository/digital-collection/the-negro-yearbook/

The post Pioneer in Black Data: Monroe N. Work and the Negro Year Book appeared first on Nightingale.

The talk was titled Data + Diversity: Exploring the Data Visualizations of W.E.B. Du Bois. Facilitated by writer and adjunct professor at Columbia University, Allen Hillery, the webinar explored the charts of W. E. B. Du Bois two ways: Jason Forrest brought us through a detailed history of Du Bois’ visualizations, from concept through development, and their presentation at the 1900s World’s Fair. In the second half, Anthony J. Starks took us through his efforts to digitally recreate some of the originals. This is my review of that webinar. 

W. E. B. Du Bois was an African American sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist who lived during the turn of the 20th century. Jason’s presentation focused on his 1900 Paris World’s Fair Exhibition, titled The Exhibit of American Negroes. 

I intended to leave the talk on in the background while I fought with a belligerent waffle chart. But as Jason took us through Du Bois’ work, slide-by-slide, my attention to my own work fell away. 

It was my first exposure to Du Bois’ work. What I saw floored me. I saw graphs and charts, but none like I’ve ever made–each was hand-drawn, hand-painted. Without computer assistance, he made precise lines, sharp edges, and powerful points. And they kept coming. In all, we looked at over thirty different visualizations, each one depicting a different aspect of life as a Black American in the early 20^th century. By the end of the webinar I was in shock. The clarity in Du Bois’ visualizations was devastating. Tears were rolling down my face.

I only had one thought in my head when it was over: what just happened?

For me, what happened was a layering of different contexts that, when combined, moved me like nothing before. First, was the context of the past: W. E. B. Du Bois’ original Paris exhibition as it was presented in 1900. Jason’s part of the presentation underlined how the impact of Du Bois’ work was reliant on the context in which it was originally presented. He went through Du Bois’ and his team’s painstaking effort to hand-collect, hand-illustrate, and exhibit life as a Black American at the turn of the 20^th century. He described an ambitious struggle, a careful balance of time, money, prejudice, and people. 

As Jason spoke, I must admit, I felt guilty. I was watching the presentation on a computer more powerful than what was used to send people to the moon – certainly more powerful than anything Du Bois had access to. It’s a humbling thing, that moment when you realize you’re taking something for granted.  

The narrative Du Bois was trying to create was also ambitious. Jason explained that Du Bois was making a push to “…sway the world’s elite by upending the stereotypes and presenting a modern, successful, and educated people.” Equally disruptive was Du Bois’ method of visualization. Jason explained that Du Bois was one the first practitioners of interactive dataviz, as some of the charts invited visitors to touch and feel them. Jason’s own journey through W. E. B. Du Bois’s work brought him to the Library of Congress, where he was able to observe one of the original charts, allowing him to see the fingerprints and smudges left by exhibition attendees as they laid each on top of the other, to view information in layers. 

Ambitious as it was, Du Bois’ message was not without challenge. Though he received a gold award in Paris, the message fell flat back in the United States. It would take until 1964 for America to pass the Civil Rights Act, which legislated the prohibition of discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Du Bois’ work fell into obscurity well before that, only being digitized in 2013. By the end of Jason’s presentation, it was clear to me that Du Bois tried to effect positive change by bringing the narrative of a burgeoning Black America to a new audience, but his message was ultimately stymied by the limited reach of the Paris exhibition.

Where Jason’s part of the presentation was an invitation to see the context of the past, Anthony Stark’s part of the presentation served as an invitation to apply the technological contexts of today to Du Bois’ work. Anthony recreated several of Du Bois’ original visualizations, going into detail on how he used decksh (pronounced “deckshell”), a Domain Specific Language (DSL) package to create charts and other visualizations as presentation slides using the Go language. With decksh, Anthony brought some of Du Bois’ hard copies into the digital era. He provided his datasets and code on github. He also invited us to share our recreations online. Anthony’s presentation made for a low-barrier way to accept that invitation to interact with the data in a way that appeals to today’s data practitioner.

Watching each presentation made me aware of the privilege of my own situation–I have access to resources Du Bois didn’t have: a computer, ease of access to information, self-publishing, and self-promotion capabilities as simple and as broad-reaching as a tweet. Basically, I have access to things Du Bois only wished for. Jason read a reflection from The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois, where Du Bois states how he regretted failing to advertise his efforts: “I did the deed but failed to advertise it… in the long run Advertising without the Deed was the only lasting value.” 

A lingering thought persisted in the back of my mind as I realized this: would the impact of Du Bois’ work be any different if he had the same access to technology and social reach as any one of us in today’s age? 

It turned out that question was less hypothetical than I thought; Jason and Anthony made mention of the #DuBoisChallenge hashtag, and that people from all over the world were posting their recreations on Twitter. “What effect was Twitter having on the message of W. E. B. Du Bois,” was the question on my mind.

I found that the hashtag was introduced to Twitter in February at the same time as this presentation. This was no coincidence, as our facilitator, Allen Hillery, was also one of the people who started the hashtag. Curious to learn more about the origins of both, I asked Allen if he’d like to talk about the presentation and the #DuBoisChallenge. Here’s what he said.

Pearle: How did the Tableau talk originate?

Allen: Sekou Tyler and I are on Tableau’s Community Equity Task Force (CETF). This is a group that is committed to making sure that the Tableau Community is inclusive and recognizes opportunities for everyone to engage. For the Data and Diversity Talk, I proposed that we cover W.E.B. Du Bois as an intersection of Black History Month and data! W.E.B. Du Bois does not get enough credit for his contributions to the world of dataviz. It’s my aim for that to change. This is also inline with the spirit of the Tableau CETF – to ensure everyone has a voice. We started organizing speakers for the event and the rest is history!

Pearle: How do you think the Tableau talk went?

Allen: It went well! There were a lot of comments from the audience during the talk about how inspired they were from the presentations. There were also a good number of people who did not realize that Du Bois had done such work. We are all impressed about the level of intricacy behind the visualizations themselves including the spiral graph and wraparound bar charts. We had about 2,000 people who registered and over 1,200 people in attendance! 

Pearle: What were your takeaways from that experience?

Allen: I was very humbled and proud by the experience. I pitched the idea and believed it would be awesome for everyone to explore. Getting all the amazing feedback on how everyone learned a lot about Du Bois and the data visualizations is immensely fulfilling. It is important to highlight him and widen the narrative of data visualization from a diversity point of view as well as application. Du Bois’s work had set the ground for sociology. He designed a framework to intrinsically measure and survey communities. The results of those surveys are represented in the visualizations.

Pearle: How did you and Sekou Tyler decide to put the #DuBoisChallenge on?

Allen: Sekou and I were chatting one weekend about doing something to honor W.E.B. Du Bois. His thought was for he and I to recreate Du Bois’ data visualizations and share them on Twitter. Thinking about community data projects like #MakeoverMonday, #TidyTuesday, and #WorkOutWednesday, I proposed we start a community hashtag where everyone could join in the fun!

Pearle: What impact did the #DuBoisChallenge have on the dataviz community?

Allen: The #DuBoisChallenge brought a lot of learning and collaboration. Many were challenged and excited in recreating DuBois’ visualizations. A lot of participants commented on how challenging some of them were, like the Du Bois spiral!

Pearle: What impact did the hashtag have on you?

Allen: I was able to work with some awesome people in the space to make this challenge happen.  It’s been great to work with Sekou and Anthony. I learned so much about Du Bois and the historical context of his work. Discovering that someone who looked like me made such a huge impact on the data visualization field has given me a sense of pride and confidence in my data journey. It’s an honor and pleasure to get his work to be more of a household name in data cubicles.

As a data storyteller and someone who teaches the topic, I see Du Bois’s work having the perfect ingredients for a well-balanced story. He uses data, emotion and credibility seamlessly to show the resilience of Black Americans in a post-slavery/Jim Crow era. In spite of all the challenges Black Americans endured socially and legally, they were showing an increase in the basic fabrics of life. This included education, home ownership, and income.

Pearle: Did anything unexpected come from the hashtag?

Allen: When we started the challenge the intent was to engage the data visualization community. As the challenge progressed, we gained interest from the humanities fields. Another great surprise was hearing from the R community via #TidyTuesday. So we ended up collaborating with another hashtag!! Sekou, Anthony, and I didn’t expect the challenge to take off like it did. Sekou put together a dashboard to measure the engagement and reach of the challenge! We had 445 tweets around the challenge from February 2021 through May 2021. This sparked a follow up to the Du Bois challenge to see how the community would visualize the Twitter data!

Pearle: How did Anthony Starks get involved in the #DuBoisChallenge?

Allen: I met Anthony at a Data Visualization Society event. We got to talking and he mentioned his Du Bois project! Anthony has not only recreated all of the Du Bois visualizations, he built his OWN tool to help him do so. As Sekou and I were building out the requirements for the challenge, I knew I had to contact Anthony. Thankfully he said yes. We owe Anthony so much for making this challenge what it is! He provided the data source as well as picked out the visualizations we should have in the challenge.

Pearle: What will you always remember when you think about the #DuboisChallenge?

Allen: I will always remember the excitement and enthusiasm from the participants! I will remember the awesome people who either tweeted about the challenge or used their platforms to promote it.  I will remember expanding our reach beyond the data visualization community and tapping into the humanities and sociology communities. We also have been able to talk at school events. 

Pearle: What’s next for the #DuBoisChallenge?

Allen: The challenge has been going in so many great directions! As I mentioned, we have been able to talk to classes and user groups about diversity and data, social justice, and leveraging social media to amplify your message. Another great path we’re taking with the challenge is to build a course out of Du Bois’ visualizations. 

Pearle: What would you tell a person who wanted to do more along the lines of the #DuBoisChallenge?

Allen: I would tell them to participate in the challenge and understand the historical context. I would also encourage people to make Du Bois and his work part of the data visualization narrative because he is. One last thing I challenge folks to help me with is to find out more about the team that helped Du Bois build the visualizations! I would love to learn more about Du Bois’s point person William Andrew Rogers! 

Fast forward to today, and I’m still thinking about this webinar. Something enduring persists in my mind about what happened on that February morning. When it was over, I exited the online webinar silently while the chat was a blur with many “THANK YOU!!!” and “Goodbye from [insert state here]” messages. I took off my headphones and sat back in my chair in silence to reflect on what I had gathered along the way. I had pieces of context. These pieces–the history of the past, Du Bois’ sense of opportunity lost, and the promise of today’s technology–-they feel like the beginning of something, like a persistent nudge, early in the morning before the sun comes up. Some days it’s just too early and you roll over and go back to sleep. But some days you wake up, and that’s when you see small things change around you; the sky gets lighter, things get clearer, the birds start chirping.

Maybe that’s what this webinar is. It’s a gentle, but persistent, nudge to see. You don’t have to, of course. But if you do, maybe you’ll see things you might not have noticed before. And what you do with that knowledge can make a difference. At the end of the presentation, Jason Forrest left us with this thought: “If you know the past, you are inspired to leverage it to create positive change.” This webinar joins the idea of knowing the past with the tools of action in today’s digital world, and invites the audience to consider what positive change we can create when we use these tools to advertise–and amplify–the deed Du Bois started over 121 years ago.

The post REVIEW: Data + Diversity-Exploring the Data Visualizations of W.E.B. Du Bois appeared first on Nightingale.

While Du Bois’s legacy is cemented in American history, his data visualization remains relatively unknown. I’m passionate about Du Bois’s story and have been discussing it via a series of articles through the lens of a UX Designer working in data visualization. My hope is that these posts inspire more academics, designers, and data visualization specialists to explore this work further in order to place the work into the proper historical significance.

The word “Negro” will appear frequently in this series. It’s not a word I take lightly. It is the term Du Bois references throughout this phase of his career and I think it’s best to honor and contextualize his use of language for this article.

Understanding the sequence of the charts

There are sixty-three of Du Bois’s charts from “The Exhibit of American Negroes” in the collection of the Library of Congress and there are a number of reasons why understanding the sequence of the charts is important. If we learn the order that each chart was created, it would help us to understand why Du Bois developed the unique forms and methods that underlie the entire series. Then, by considering the order in which Du Bois displayed these works to the viewer, we can understand how he communicated his complex data story.

Even with the publishing of the new book “W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America,” which seeks to tell the story of the exhibit and briefly touches on the individual charts, this body of work remains under-researched. Since there is little historical documentation, not much is known about how the charts were created and the exact sequence of the charts will probably never be known.

We know that the charts were created in less than four months, and we know that after the Paris Exposition, the exhibit was displayed in Buffalo, NY, and Charleston, SC. Since the exhibit was created in collaboration with Daniel Murray, assistant librarian at the Library of Congress, Du Bois had known the works would eventually be part of their collection. In my correspondence with the Library of Congress (LoC), they assumed that the order of the charts was likely established by Murray himself, which does lend the sequence quite a bit of credence.

As I’ve written in previous posts, Du Bois set off on a 10-year study of “The Negro Problem” which began with the publishing of “The Philadelphia Negro” in 1899. Encouraged by the positive reaction, he immediately continued his research in both Virginia and Georgia.

Du Bois was already planning to craft a high-level overview as part of his larger body of research. So when “The Exhibit of American Negroes” was organized at the end of 1899, Du Bois naturally took the opportunity to use the exposition to expand the scope of his sociological work. As a result, he then organized the statistical charts to explore data on three levels: international, national, and local.

The charts themselves are split into two groups: “The Georgia Negro” which focuses on the “typical” state of Georgia, which had the second-largest African-American population at the time (Virginia was the largest), and the highest Negro to White ratio. It contains charts #1–36.

The other section is called “A Series of Statistical Charts Illustrating the Condition of the Descendants of Former African Slaves Now in Residence in the United States of America”, which focuses on the national and international view of the data. It contains charts #37–63.

Doubts about the sequence of the charts

As discussed in my last article, the chart “Income and Expenditure of 150 Negro Families in Atlanta GA, USA,” which is #31 in the LoC sequence, is actually displayed on the top of a stack of the charts and acts as a “key” to the larger exhibition. It is shown in conjunction with the two “title” charts for each series – but I’ve always thought it was odd that the 31st work in the series was shown as the key to understanding the rest of the works.

Another aspect of the sequence that has perplexed me is how the works are titled. For most of the second series, the titles are printed and pasted onto the card while the first series labels are all hand-lettered. This is important because it suggests that the second series would have been done first in order to get the titles confirmed in time for the printing. Of course, on further examination of the second series, that’s not entirely true as 8 of the 27 works are hand-titled. Then, if we consider the time it took to conduct the research for “The Georgia Negro” and then hand-draw the thirty-five 24″ x 27″ charts in that series, it seems likely that this group of charts would have to be crafted after the other series.

I propose that the two series were actually created in the opposite order. I believe Du Bois and his students crafted the second series while the research was being conducted for The Georgia Negro. Then, after both series were created, Du Bois added additional hand-titled works to the second series in an effort to complete the storyline in both series. I believe the “key chart” (“Income and Expenditure of 150 Negro Families in Atlanta GA, USA”) was actually among the last of the charts created, as it seems to situate the statistical charts to the larger exhibit.

Below is an image of all the charts in the two sequences. Looking at the entire sequence in this way shows how visually different the two series are, and also displays how innovative the charts are across both series.

The mystery of William Andrew Rogers

Yet another mystery is the relationship between the creation of the work and a graduate student named William Andrew Rogers.

Listed on the official Atlanta University record (above) as a non-resident graduate student residing in Virginia, Rogers was first rediscovered by Shawn Michelle Smith in her amazing book Photography on the Color Line. In an article from the Atlanta Journal from 1900, Rogers is cited as “drawing and coloring” all the charts, but the documentation for the newspaper article has been elusive and my continued attempts to learn more about Rogers have been fruitless.

While it certainly makes sense that a single student oversaw the organization and drafting of the charts, there is not currently any footprint of Rogers’ work (or identity) outside of this mention. While the credit on each chart is listed as “Done by Atlanta University”, and the charts are understood to be created in collaboration with his students, I think Du Bois’s lifetime of innovation and thought leadership justifies him to be the author of this series of charts.

Discovering a previously unknown chart

As you can tell, I’ve been interested in the sequence of the charts since the beginning of my research. As I looked for clues about their sequence, I returned to the original exposition photograph to get an understanding of what the team prioritized as important.

What I found was shocking.

While the two “cover” charts are on display, as well as “Taxpayer Property of Negroes in Three United States”, I realized that the top-right chart was not part of the original Library of Congress collection.

From here I enlarged the image and played with the contrast levels to try to learn more about the chart.

I could see it was indeed a unique new piece that had not been studied before but the resolution was not high enough to understand it. So I emailed the librarians at the Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and much to my delight, they responded with a high-res image in just a few hours. I was then able to zoom in on the missing chart. Much to my surprise, the entire work was now legible:

This previously unknown work was hidden in plain sight.

“The Decrease of Illiteracy Among the Black Freedmen of the United States” is a lost work now understood to be part of the second series. The quality of the image is high enough to decipher the text, and for the purpose of this article, I was also able to re-color the work based on the corresponding grey scales in the image.

The chart shows the 36% percent drop in the illiteracy of Freedmen over a 30-year period. The steady decrease statistically proves the voracious appetite for education among African-Americans and defies the racist stereotype of the typical American Negro as an ignorant slave. The newly discovered chart creates a correlation between freedom and education. This chart shows just how systematic Du Bois was in crafting his message and reinforcing it throughout the entire series of statistical charts.

The newly discovered chart acts as a missing link between the 3 views of data for both Illiteracy and the proportion of Freedmen.

Lastly, a footnote on color before moving on.

Since Du Bois employed a limited palette, the grey scale in the photograph could only suggest certain color combinations. Since we know that the newly discovered chart was on display in the exhibit, we know it was meant to be a strong visual. The options below display a few of the possibilities, but I think the green/black combo creates a clear relationship to the other charts in the series.

Systems Thinking in the “Exhibit of American Negroes”

While the discovery of this chart is extremely exciting, it underscores the importance of storytelling in this series of statistical charts. Exploring the relationships between the charts and the cumulative effect of knowledge building that results is ultimately an endeavor to understand how Du Bois considered the persuasive impact of his work.

In November of 1900, Du Bois wrote “The American Negro at Paris” as a report on the exhibition as well as a summary of the events in Paris. In it, he states: “The history of the Negro is illustrated by charts and photographs; there is, for instance, a series of striking models of the progress of the colored people, beginning with the homeless freedman and ending with the modern brick schoolhouse and its teachers. There are charts of the increase of Negro population, the routes of the African slave trade, the progress of emancipation, and the decreasing illiteracy…”

The relationship between freedom to education was one of the most important stories for Du Bois. It’s even more striking that one of the main charts focusing on illiteracy is missing from our historical understanding of his work. By discovering this chart, we gain further insight as to how Du Bois sought to change the perception of African-Americans in Western society.

A lot more work to do: some thoughts on my research

It’s been a remarkable journey. When I began back in March, I thought it would be a fun exercise to learn more about these charts. I was hungry to learn more and couldn’t find anything substantial about them at the time. As I began writing the first article I realized there was so much to be discussed that I expanded my focus to a series of four articles. In the second article, I learned more about the background of the exhibit and began to correspond with several Du Bois scholars, including Eugene F. Provenzo and Silas Munro (one of the authors of the new book). With their encouragement — and a lot of support from the community — I continued to explore Du Bois’s work and eventually was granted a visit to the Library of Congress. I still had more to learn, so the series expanded again to six articles.

There are still many unanswered questions about Du Bois’s data visualizations: Why did they draw the maps in the first series? How are Du Bois’s themes manifested across the entire series? Are more charts missing from the Library of Congress? What role did William Andrew Rogers play and did he create other data visualizations? How was this work received in the exhibits in Buffalo, NY, and Charleston, SC?

Now, at the end (?) of my research, I’m proud to think that I’ve made some contributions to the understanding of Du Bois’s data visualizations. With the release of the new book “W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America,” and with my own work, there is a great deal of new excitement about this previously less-considered work. By exploring Du Bois’s work at the Paris Exposition, a new generation of historians can leverage Du Bois’s charts in the study of African-Americans in US history. By understanding Du Bois’s sociological methods, we gain inspiration in using data to fight prejudice in today’s world.

There are strong indicators that Du Bois’s work will finally be written into the history of data visualization as well. Several leading voices in the data visualization community, like Mona Chalabi, RJ Andrews, and Bill Shander regularly refer to Du Bois’s achievements with hopes that others will follow. While Du Bois’s impact on statistical chart-making may have been overlooked, perhaps his story and ideas can at least be shared within the timeline.

Our understanding of history is changing

We find our global culture at a critical nexus; caught between an embattled version of history that was crafted by the consensus of few, and a more nuanced version of history discussed by many. What began with the crowd-sourcing of knowledge in Wikipedia, now compels us to challenge historical accounts in search of a more diverse approach.

Notable personages are emerging in many disciplines, upending our conventional understanding of timelines and movements. Hilma af Klint’s retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York is radically challenging the previous understanding of modernism. The publishing of the little-known book “Color Problems” by Emily Noyes Vanderpoel in 1901 challenges the terminology and methods for evaluating color relationships. The history of computing now references Grace Hopper and Margaret Hamilton while Katherine Johnson’s contribution to space exploration was turned into a major motion picture in “Hidden Figures.”

The history of data visualization is also far from complete. The amazing book “The Minard System” by Sandra Rendgen presents the collected works of Charles-Joseph Minard, but where is the detailed research on Florence Nightingale? Manual Lima’s remarkable Book of Trees and Book of Circles uncover a wealth of historical visualizations, but who is examining the individual works for their systems and techniques? By exploring the data visualizations of the past, we gain inspiration on how to create new forms of visual communication in the present and future.

I’ll end this series as I did in my presentation at the Tapestry Conference a few weeks ago. I’ve discovered so much on my journey this year. The opportunity to explore the unexplored history of data visualization is manifest. Interest in historic data visualization is growing, our community is supportive, and the global conversation on what is data and how to understand it is a cultural imperative.

So I ask you. What other stories are out there to be found and re-told?

Thank you, thank you, thank you

In each article, I thank the people who have helped me edit and discuss this work — but since this is the last of the series, it’s important to say a few more words to say just how important they have been in encouraging me.

My colleagues at McKinsey’s People Analytics and Measurements team: Rebecca Anderson, Tyler Curtis, Rachel Ramsay, and Lauren Rebagliati for their amazing attention to detail, persistence, and support across 6 articles and 22,000 words

To Bhavna Devani who inspired me to really dig in and explore this work. Who counseled me on writing on race-related issues at the beginning and continued to support and champion me along the way.

To RJ Andrews, Elijah Meeks, and Martin Telefont who always write me back on Twitter and continue to inspire me with their amazing work day after day.

To the Du Bois scholar Eugene F. Provenzo and Silas Munro, who wrote about the charts in the recent “Data Portraits” book, for answering loads of Du Bois questions and sharing their passion and curiosity with me.

To my wife, Jen Ray, for entertaining my endless conversations about 19th-century history and reading each of these long articles a bunch of times.

I also want to send my heartfelt gratitude to the data visualization community which has been so encouraging, especially those attending the Tapestry Conference. I feel like I found my “tribe” this year and I endeavor to contribute to the discussion of our work. It’s gonna be fun!

*Lastly, thanks to Peter Dalgaard for some French corrections on the new image above!

The six-part series:

W. E. B. Du Bois’ staggering Data Visualizations are as powerful today as they were in 1900 

An introduction to the 1900 Paris Exposition, and context for a few charts on history and population growth.

II. Data Journalism and the Scientific Study of “The Negro Problem”

Places this body of work within Du Bois’ larger sociological focus and continues the exploration of many of the charts from the exposition with a focus on education, literacy, and occupation.

III. Exploring the Craft and Design of W.E.B. Du Bois’ Data Visualizations

A detailed examination of how Du Bois drafted his charts, a consideration of this work as a precursor to modernism, and a discussion of his more artistic charts on land ownership and value.

IV. Style and Rich Detail: On Viewing an Original Du Bois Chart

Discoveries on viewing an original chart and further exploration of Du Bois’ more innovative designs dealing with occupation, business, and mortality.

V. Du Bois as Social Scientist and the Legacy of “The Exhibit of American Negroes”

Discusses Du Bois’s body of work and his frustrations with social science despite widespread attention.

VI. The Exhibition as a Whole: an Exciting Discovery

To close out the series I present a previously unknown chart from the series, and discuss the importance of understanding the sequence of the works.

This article originally appeared in Medium but in moving to NightingaleDVS.com, I edited the original text mostly to update some grammar and language substitutions, January 2023.

The post Discovering an Unknown Chart from W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Exhibition of American Negroes” (Part 6) appeared first on Nightingale.

Activist and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois created “The Exhibit of American Negroes” at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris in collaboration with Booker T. Washington, prominent black lawyer Thomas J. Calloway, the assistant librarian at the Library of Congress Daniel Murray, and students from historically black college Atlanta University.

While Du Bois’s legacy is cemented in American history, his data visualizations remain relatively unknown. I’m passionate about Du Bois’s story and have been discussing it via a series of articles through the lens of a UX Designer working in data visualization. My hope is that these posts inspire more academics, designers, and data visualization specialists to explore this work further in order to place the work into the proper historical significance it deserves.

The word “Negro” will appear frequently in this series. It’s not a word I take lightly. It is the term Du Bois references throughout this phase of his career and I think it’s best to honor and contextualize his use of language for this article.

The Story of “The Exhibit of American Negroes”

When I began this series it was spring, and now as I finish it, the shadows grow longer and autumn is slipping into winter. So too is the story-arch of “The Exhibit of American Negroes.” It is a story rich in promise with significant accomplishments, but ultimately, slips into darkness. It’s an amazing story.

It’s 1899 and a century of unprecedented change is coming to an end. The very term ‘science’ was invented in 1833 and the impact of scientific invention was omnipresent across cultures. Profound social change was underway and slavery was greatly reduced on a global scale. The painful mid-century Civil War in the United States reshaped the young country and brought about the 13th Amendment which abolished slavery in 1865.

As a result of Reconstruction, many former slaves were now granted unprecedented rights under the 14th Amendment. At the same time, many racist lawmakers gained power across the southern states and Jim Crow laws began to radically roll back these rights under the guise of “separate but equal” segregation.

Outraged at the racist displays found in the 1893 Chicago and 1895 Atlanta Expositions, lawyer Thomas Calloway sends a letter to hundreds of African-American leaders across the country:

“To the Paris Exposition… thousands upon thousands will go… a well selected and prepared exhibit, representing the Negro’s development… will attract attention… and do a great and lasting good in convincing thinking people of the possibilities of the Negro.”

The leaders rally to his call and decide that an exhibit will be created under the direction of the brilliant young sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois and will present the very best of African-American life and culture. $15,000 in funding is unanimously passed by Congress and signed by President Mckinley.

What follows is a frenzy of activity.

In just 4 months, prominent citizens, educators, and students across the country begin to assemble the materials. “The five great negro schools”: Atlanta, Fisk, Howard, Hampton and Tuskegee Universities prepare exhibits. The assistant librarian of Congress, Daniel Murray, collects more than a thousand books and pamphlets by Negro authors while Du Bois and his students conduct a sociological study in Georgia and draft the 60+ charts. War heroes are documented. Businesses, churches and black newspapers from across the country send in photographs of their finest and best. 400 patents are collected. As a subtle nod to systematic prejudice, Du Bois hand-writes over 400 pages documenting the Black Codes. As a final touch, a bronze sculpture of Frederick Douglass is included.

Pulitzer prize-winning scholar David Levering Lewis in the book A Small Nation of People writes about the effort: “The Negro exhibit at Paris was a racial imperative, a momentous opportunity and obligation to set the great white world straight about black people.”

The resulting exhibition was a targeted attempt to sway the world’s elite to acknowledge the American Negro in an effort to influence cultural change in the USA from abroad. David Levering Lewis continues “In many ways, The Negro Exhibit… represented the last hurrah of men and women of culture and accomplishment who still aspired to full citizenship rights regardless of color.”

After working tirelessly on the exhibit for months, Du Bois was “threatened with nervous prostration… and had little money left to buy passage to Paris” — but arrived just in time. He quickly sets up the exhibit in time for the judging, despite missing some of the materials from the Universities, but the judges still recognize the Exhibit by awarding it several prizes including an overall Grand Prix and Du Bois a special Gold medal.

While the exhibit was praised by officials and the Paris Exposition as a whole broke attendance records, the direct impact of “The Exhibit of American Negroes” is hard to measure.

While the African-American press reported on the exhibit with gleeful excitement and enthusiasm, the European media only moderately mentioned the effort — and only then as a small element of the massive Exposition. The white American press, however, completely ignored the exhibit and the American public at large remained unaware of the “The Exhibit of American Negroes”.

David Levering Lewis writes about the poignant aftermath of the exhibit: “What Du Bois and Calloway had wanted to demonstrate to the world about the progress and promise of people of color in America had become almost an epistemic impossibility for the majority of their white countrywomen and -men by the dawn of the twentieth century. For, just as a significant percentage of Du Bois small nation of people stood ready to walk onto the world stage as aspiring, able, even assimilated, participants in the social contract, a peculiarly American version of white supremacy twinned with [master race] democracy, consigned all black people to the shadowy margins of the national life where their invisibility would long remain indispensable to the identity of white people.”

Despite the work by Du Bois, Calloway, and the extended community to show off the best of what African-Americans had to offer, the exhibit was met with indifference as the exhibition had failed to bring about social change.

This brings me to the biggest question that I’ve been considering since I began this project:

Why don’t more people know about Du Bois’s data visualizations?

The story of “The Exhibit of American Negroes” is both inspiring in its brilliance and originality, and tragic in its overlooked state — barely even a footnote in history. While writing and thinking about this work, I have developed a few thoughts as to why this work is just not better known.

1. The Exhibit did not bring about social change.

As discussed at the close of my last article, Du Bois chanced upon the actual remains of Sam Hose who was lynched by a crowd of hundreds, his body was ripped apart and distributed around the state. It shook Du Bois to the core. In the face of such violent hatred, Du Bois realized science just wasn’t enough:

“Two considerations thereafter broke in upon my work and eventually disrupted it: first, one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved; and secondly, there was no such definite demand for scientific work of the sort I was doing…”

Had the exhibit caught the attention of the European press, maybe Du Bois would have made a name for himself as a sociologist instead of a social activist, and the “Du Bois Spiral” would be considered equivalent to Florence Nightingale’s “coxcomb” in historic significance.

2. Prejudice in the Sociological community obscured Du Bois’s importance

After his return from Paris, Du Bois became increasingly disenchanted with social science — especially in the face of violence and racism. Toward the end of his life he reflects on his change of heart, writing: “So far as the American world of science and letters was concerned, we never ‘belonged’; we remained unrecognized in learned societies and academic groups. We rated merely as Negroes studying Negroes, and after all, what had Negroes to do with America or science?”

Recognized social theorist Patricia Hill Collins argues that “different versions of a logic of segregation shaped all aspects of American society, including American sociology”. While Gurminder Bhambra, in his article outlines the stark reality: “the lack of attention given to alternative traditions of thought within the metropole has tended to elide the colonial past and drown out other voices…”

In studying the Negro, Du Bois simply explored a subject that White America just didn’t care about — especially at the dawn of the twentieth century. Despite his academic pedigree and exhaustive rigor, Du Bois’s work was largely ignored by white academia which left his work underexposed. Certainly calls for re-exploring Du Bois’s sociological importance have been regularly called for over the years, but only in the past decade can his impact be felt more clearly.

Just last month Harvard University hosted a symposium to discuss Du Bois’s impact on sociology. The lectures and panels retraced his rise to prominence, discussed his methodical practices, and Du Bois’s importance in the world today. Indeed, as you can see to the left, the ‘Du Bois spiral’ is the leitmotif of the conference — an icon of hand-made progress and precision.

3. As racism became more vicious, Du Bois became more outspoken

Looking back at his time in Paris and as a social scientist, Du Bois recalls the very real needs of those trying to break through to a larger audience:

“Where had I failed? There were many answers, but one was typically American, as the event proved; I did the deed but I did not advertise it… in the long run Advertising without the Deed was the only lasting value. Perhaps Americans do not realize how completely they have adopted this philosophy. But Madison Avenue does.”

Three years later Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk. It was a different kind of book than what Du Bois had previously published, one that married Negro culture to current events and history but with a palpable anger that demanded attention. Du Bois struck a deliberately non-scientific tone in the book, using fragments of Negro spirituals to illustrate his point rather than data visualizations. His change of approach worked and the book’s emotional appeal and intellectual brilliance was able to connect with a global audience bringing Du Bois the attention he sought and deserved.

4. A small chapter in a massive career

Du Bois begins the first series of charts with the now famous phrase: “The problem of the 20th-Century is the problem of the color line.” It is a statement he used in his speech at the First Pan-African Conference in London that same year, and it is also included in the introduction of The Souls of Black Folk.

In crafting an exhibit exploring the excellence of the 19th-century Negro, Du Bois assembled the most definitive counter-argument to Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Compromise of 1895. His passionate refutation of Washington in The Souls of Black Folk set Du Bois on a path that eventually establishes him as the leader of the Niagara Movement, and co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.

His tireless activism, lectures, and books saw him to be a central figure in global politics. A renowned figure hosted by world leaders, perpetually independent (and controversial), Du Bois was a socialist, then a communist, and eventually expatriated to Africa.

He died on August 27, 1963 — the day before the famous civil rights March on Washington. Roy Wilkins, a civil-rights leader who had worked with Du Bois at the NAACP, announced Du Bois’s death at the march and asked for a moment of silence:

“Regardless of the fact that in his later years Dr. Du Bois chose another path, it is incontrovertible that at the dawn of the twentieth century his was the voice that was calling you to gather here today in this cause. If you want to read something that applies to 1963 go back and get a volume of The Souls of Black Folk by Du Bois, published in 1903.”

The Civil Rights Act, was enacted the year after Du Bois’s death. It outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin and prohibits unequal application of voter registration, racial segregation in schools, employment, and public accommodations. The rights that Du Bois had fought his entire life for were finally a reality.

Acknowledging the legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois

As history is being rewritten to be more inclusive, Du Bois’s innovations in statistical chart-making deserve an equal place in the history of data visualization as well. As his influence triggers new research efforts, so should his work inspire new methods for visual communication.

A major advancement in the cause of exposing Du Bois’s work to a wider audience can be seen in the new book “W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America.” Co-edited by Britt Rusert and Whitney Battle-Baptiste with essays by Aldon Morris, Mabel O. Wilson, and Silas Munro, the book discusses Du Bois’s work predominantly from an African-American studies perspective and includes annotated prints of all the charts in the collection of the Library of Congress.

With every new article, the story of “The Exhibit of American Negroes” continues to spread Du Bois’s daring, brilliance and vision. Hopefully his work will inspire historians, data journalists and designers to continue to challenge the conventions of the world around them by telling stories with data in new and innovative ways.

I’ll end with a quote from Du Bois’s Autobiography.

“On mountain and valley, in home and school, I met men and women as I had never met them before. Slowly they became, not white folks, but folks. The unity beneath all life clutched me. I was not less fanatically a Negro, but “Negro” meant a greater, broader sense of humanity and world fellowship. I felt myself standing, not against the world, but simply against American narrowness and color prejudice, with the greater, finer world at my back.”

This is almost the end of the series, and as I have written before, it’s been a surprising journey. In the final article in this series I’ll discuss an extremely exciting discovery that I’ve made and in addition, I’ll list all the charts in sequence and even supply links to the majority of my research materials.

The six-part series:

W. E. B. Du Bois’ staggering Data Visualizations are as powerful today as they were in 1900 

An introduction to the 1900 Paris Exposition, and context for a few charts on history and population growth.

II. Data Journalism and the Scientific Study of “The Negro Problem”

Places this body of work within Du Bois’ larger sociological focus and continues the exploration of many of the charts from the exposition with a focus on education, literacy, and occupation.

III. Exploring the Craft and Design of W.E.B. Du Bois’ Data Visualizations

A detailed examination of how Du Bois drafted his charts, a consideration of this work as a precursor to modernism, and a discussion of his more artistic charts on land ownership and value.

IV. Style and Rich Detail: On Viewing an Original Du Bois Chart

Discoveries on viewing an original chart and further exploration of Du Bois’ more innovative designs dealing with occupation, business, and mortality.

V. Du Bois as Social Scientist and the Legacy of “The Exhibit of American Negroes”

Discusses Du Bois’s body of work and his frustrations with social science despite widespread attention.

VI. The Exhibition as a Whole: an Exciting Discovery

To close out the series I present a previously unknown chart from the series, and discuss the importance of understanding the sequence of the works.

This article originally appeared in Medium but in moving to NightingaleDVS.com, I edited the original text mostly to update some grammar and language substitutions, January 2023.

The post The Legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Exhibit of American Negroes” (Part 5) appeared first on Nightingale.

Activist and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois created “The Exhibit of American Negroes” at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris in collaboration with Booker T Washington, prominent black lawyer Thomas J. Calloway, the assistant librarian at the Library of Congress Daniel Murray, and students from historically black college Atlanta University.

While Du Bois’ legacy is cemented in American history, his data visualizations remain relatively unknown. I’m passionate about Du Bois’ story and have been discussing it via a series of articles through the lens of a UX Designer working in data visualization. My hope is that these posts inspire more academics, designers, and data visualization specialists to explore this work further in order to place the work into the proper historical significance it deserves.

The word “Negro” will appear frequently in this series. It’s not a word I take lightly. It is the term Du Bois references throughout this phase of his career and I think it’s best to honor and contextualize his use of language for this article.

Viewing an original Du Bois hand-drawn chart

This research project has been a rich and surprising journey. It began with the discovery of the exhibition, exploring the historic details of each chart, then meeting other researchers and designers who have also found passion in exploring this work.

Along the way, I learned that the original works were too fragile to view. As my research intensified, so did my questions, and I found myself in contact with the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division. After six weeks of correspondence with the LoC librarians, I was permitted a very special exception to view only one of the Du Bois original charts in person. I chose a chart I had never researched before, a chart that stands out from all the others and acts in many ways as a sort of key to the entire series in the exhibition.

As you can tell, this image is different from the rest of the 60-ish charts for a few reasons. It is one of only five horizontal formatted charts and the only one that uses mixed media including pasted photographs and gold leaf. It is the only chart to have been colored using some sort of crayon, so it has a different color scheme than the rest of the works. But most importantly, Du Bois uses this chart to explain — and personify — his population.

Part of the “Georgia Negro” series, the chart displays the demographic information for the Negro population of Georgia and outlines the economic groups by income from “poor” ($100 — $300 a month) to the “well-to-do” ($1000 and over).

The top row features a snapshot of a “well-to-do” family across the top of the chart. Each section — rent, food, clothing, taxes, and savings — is mapped to a color, which then flows down to each stacked bar as they run down the page. This brilliantly illustrates the percentage of each group’s monthly spending. The color of each category in the legend ranges from black (rent) to clear (savings) showing the impact on each of the income groups.

This chart is one of the most complex in the series and is filled with details such as the scientific description of the average diet (split by animal and vegetable), photographic examples of the dress of a young man and woman, tax bracket descriptions, and even a gold-leafed illustration of a dollar coin. If the illustration of the eagle is a bit simplistic, the overall line work of the chart more than makes up for it with delicate arrows and curves that defy the crudeness of the tools used to draft them.

Another surprise was how large the chart was — 27″ x 22″. Du Bois and his team of students set out to draft this work knowing that it would be easier to standardize drawn elements that were larger and more easily measured. The large size of each chart was likely determined so they could be drafted with precision, as each line and object relate in size to the hand and pen. The drafting would, therefore, benefit from a gestural line (drawn with the arm) rather than a dexterous one (drawn from the hand) and be easier to read from a few feet away.

Another important aspect of this chart was its importance in the exhibition design. Only a few of the charts were framed — as most of the displayed works are photos of notable African-American leaders and displays from historically black colleges. Indeed most of the exhibition was dedicated to the roughly 500 photographs Du Bois and team had assembled to present the radically progressive representation of African-Americans that had never been seen on the world stage.

As David Levering Lewis outlines in the book A Small Nation of People, which focuses on the photographs in the exhibition: “[Du Bois] designed his exhibit to subvert conventional perceptions of the American Negro by presenting to the patronizing curiosity of white spectators a racial universe that was the mirror image of their own uncomprehending, oppressive white world… but the display offered much more, he explained. ‘ Beneath all this is a carefully thought-out plan.’ ”

Since the chart we’re discussing is more decorative and includes photos it acts as a bridge to the rest of the statistical charts. In fact, this work is not just the “key” to the entire series, it is also the first chart the exhibition audience would have interacted with, as it was the first chart on a stack of works — as visible in the original documentation:

Additionally, the bottom of the chart is clearly labeled, “For Further Statistics Raise This Frame”, so this chart was always planned to be the “first” of the statistical graphics.

I’ll argue that Du Bois is actually among the first designers to consider their visualizations to be “interactive”. Since the charts were crafted to be handled and they were sequenced to expose new layers of data in each subsequent work, Du Bois clearly intended for each work to be viewed within the construct of his study. Since most of the charts show similar types of data across international, national and state views. It’s likely that a jump from one chart to another was synonymous in Du Bois’ time to a “double-click” in ours.

The last insight I have to share was only possible because I had the opportunity to see the original document. As previously noted, the works are extremely fragile. Once the Library of Congress digitized the works, they placed them in a highly controlled environment and severely restricted the handling of these works to an absolute minimum. The works are literally crumbling.

At the left one can see a number of scratches on the surface of the chart. Since it was placed on the top of the stack in the exhibition, I think these scratches are from the actual fingernails of the patrons when they handled the boards. The indentations seen in the image are certainly the same size and curve of a fingernail. Discovering the visible evidence of the human touch from 19th-century hands was certainly exhilarating and reinforced the age of these amazing works.

Visually exciting and unusual charts by design

As we’ve been discussing throughout this series, the simplicity of these hand-made charts resonates so strongly with our modern aesthetics and preoccupation with data. Legendary designer Michael Bierut, on his podcast with Jessica Helfand, says of Du Bois’ work:

“A stunning revelation. I had no idea this work existed and I still can’t believe it exists.”

Let’s continue our look into some of Du Bois’ most unique and visually exciting charts in the series.

The above is a completely unique variation on the pie chart by Du Bois. The circle is split into six categories representing different types of occupations. Each slice of the pie is then divided to show the percentage of Negro to White workers for that occupation. The sections are separated by red lines and each white slice is slightly differentiated by thin lines radiating around the center.

By introducing direct comparisons inside each slice, Du Bois twists the conventional understanding of the pie chart. Traditionally, the pie chart equals 100% and its slices represent the proportions of the whole. In Du Bois’ version, the six slices represent 100% of 5 different categories, with the sixth representing the total of all five. While the logic seems complex, the ability to compare categories and relationships between Negro and White workers is actually quite easy to understand.

While much maligned today, the pie chart was very popular in the 19th century. Invented by William Playfair in 1802, the circular chart could be seen across European and American scientific work with regular innovations taking the form of sunbursts, fan charts, and other types of experiments which can be seen in the extraordinary “Book of Circles” by Manuel Lima.

While the design of the chart is unique, the draftsmanship is equally elegant. The crisp line work, circular graphic labels, thin red highlights, and subtle arrowheads all display a mastery of craft that begs to be compared to the fine arts. In fact, the chart above has a similar feeling to a Sol LeWitt artwork from 1973 in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Du Bois likely regarded the radiating lines as a means to differentiate each category, but minimalist artists would explore the same graphic elements for their visual rhythm and spiritual connotations sixty years later.

One of the more complex-looking charts in the exhibit, the above is actually quite easy to read. It displays the marital status of men and women from birth to 65+. A central axis runs down the center of the page, with the data for men and women spreading out from the center into three types: Single (blue), Married (red), and Widowed (green).

This is another chart where we can see Du Bois the sociologist at work. In his landmark book “The Philadelphia Negro” from the previous year (1899), Du Bois describes the same type of data, providing some interesting context for the chart above:

“…the number of married women, too, is small, while the large number of widowed and separated indicates widespread and early breaking up of family life. The number of single women is probably lessened by unfortunate girls, and increased somewhat by deserted wives who report themselves as single…

The lax moral habits of the slave regime still show themselves in a large amount of cohabitation without marriage. In the slum districts, there are many such families, which remain together years and are in effect common law marriages. Some of these connections are broken by whim or desire, although in many cases they are permanent unions.”

Interestingly enough, one of the few existing sources of statistical data pertaining to the African-American population that Du Bois references in “The Philadelphia Negro” is the “Statistical Atlas of the United States” by Henry Gannett of the United States Geological Survey. A master of the statistical chart, Gannett features a chart on the conjugal condition by age in the 1890 version of his Statistical Atlas. Since Du Bois clearly respected Gannett’s work, and because he knew other scientifically minded Europeans would also know Gannett’s work, it makes sense that he crafted a similar version using a known method of visualization for his own demographic.

The above chart is another original Du Bois design, this one slightly more enigmatic. At first, I thought it might be a sort of Marimekko Chart, but I realized this chart has no scale and only shows relationships between the categories by proportional areas.

Each of the rectangles in the chart represents the estimated capital of Negro Businessmen in the United States based on total capital of $8,784,637. Since there are no numbers on each shape, this chart is designed only to show simple comparisons. Negro-owned Grocers and General Merchants are the largest types of businesses by far and the smallest are Negro-owned Banks and Building and Loan Associations, both colored bright red for emphasis.

Du Bois was especially interested in studying African-American businesses at this time in his life. Less than a year before the Paris exposition, Du Bois hosted the Fourth Atlanta University Conference on the subject of “The Negro In Business” — the first time the subject had been systematically studied in the United States. As Eugene F. Provenzo outlines in his great book on the exhibition, Du Bois “sent ‘schedules’ of questions to approximately fifty co-researchers to administer in local communities across the south… Du Bois wanted to know different types of business ventures that Blacks undertook, ‘the order of their appearance, their measure of success and the capital invested in them.”

A total of 200 businessmen sent in detailed accounts, some of which are included in the exhibition. One of them was Mr. C.C. Dodson of Knoxville, Tennessee who described his experience: “With close attention to business, by observing frugality, and by manifesting a disposition to please my patrons with courteous treatment and efficient work I have succeeded so my critics say ‘well’… As regards to the second question, it is rather difficult to tell how a white man really regards a Negro, especially when there is something to be gained to the former from the latter. A white man has a remarkable power of self concealment. Those whom I deal treat me well. Those whom I do not deal with do not molest me. I don’t know how they regard me.”

What’s important to remember is that across the charts, as well as the collected photographs, records and documentation, Du Bois continues to build and cross-reference the story of an emerging people.

This chart represents just how few African-Americans were actually classified as ‘Almshouse Paupers’. Almshouses were tax-supported residences where people were required to go if they could not support themselves — a sort of catch-all “poorhouse” which might also include a number of elderly, children, and the “feeble-minded”.

By focusing on this demographic Du Bois seeks to usurp racist assumptions. The 2-part chart novelly shows the proportion of 88 Negro paupers (the tiny red section) to every 100,000 Negros ( the huge brown area)— only .09 % of the total population. Then, at the bottom of the page, he breaks that population numbers into two semi-equal areas representing gender.

While Du Bois presents data that rejects European presumptions, it is likely he was reporting the official numbers of African-Americans in state-owned institutions. This doesn’t tell the whole story. Many African-Americans, including the lowest socioeconomic groups, rejected the systems created by White society and found support from their own community.

Iris Carlton-Laney, in her fantastic 1989 paper, explores 19th-century “Old-houses” and outlines the problem: “…Black social welfare was not a priority particularly in the South where segregated institutions were prevalent. As Blacks observed and experienced such racial injustices, the need to develop their own social services was reinforced.”

Most African-Americans were supported by Black churches, women’s organizations, secret orders, and fraternities. Carlton-Laney continues: “Next to Black churches, the secret societies had the longest history of any voluntary organizations… These organizations which were secret in procedure yet benevolent in purpose, offered opportunities for Black men and women to manage their own affairs and to rise to leadership positions-opportunities not afforded them in the larger society…. Blacks, motivated by the fear of almshouses and pauper burials, nonetheless, made financial familial sacrifices to join ‘beneficial societies.’ Membership in these societies offered some measure of psychological peace and satisfaction.”

This work is a unique piece in the series as it doesn’t communicate any statistical data beyond the written information. It belonged to the second set of charts in the series focusing on data on a national level and is depicted by a rectangle split diagonally into four parts showing the value of taxpayer property in three states plus the total value of all three: $34,893,684.

This infographic was originally hung on the top left wall in the exhibit and likely served two purposes: first, to underscore the financial scale of African-Americans in terms of millions of US dollars, and second, to give that value some visual weight in the booth.

To get some concept of the financial scale, if we look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer price index, $34,000,000 in 1900 is equivalent in purchasing power to $992,152,380.95 in 2017. Reporting such a massive sum was designed to shake the racist assumptions of African-Americans as ‘Negro savages’. As historian and Du Bois biographer David Levering Lewis says in his essay in A Small Nation Of People: “the representative Negroes — of the educated, the prosperous, the phenotypically advantaged — are cynosures of all the characteristics and virtues of which most whites, either in ignorance or from bigotry, believed most blacks to be devoid.”

A typical example can be seen in the satirical magazine Puck which published “Darkies’ Day at the Fair”. Shawn Michelle Smith examines this drawing in her book Photography on the Color Line: “Africans and African-Americans alike, despite the extreme distinction in nation, ethnicity, and culture, all become the same Sambo types — all of them have huge white lips of the American minstrelsy, and all of them are waiting for watermelon. The Puck cartoon demonstrates how the scientific “facts” of eugenicists and biological racialists and the racist caricatures of white supremacists mutually reinforced one another…”

Du Bois places this striking graphic to loom above the exhibit — a testament to the economic gains African-Americans were able to achieve in spite of systematic prejudice and economic repression.

A lifetime later in 1963, Ralph McGill, the anti-segregationist editor, and publisher of the Atlanta Constitution newspaper, traveled to Ghana to meet Du Bois in person. He brilliantly captures the ethereal mood of his meeting with Du Bois shortly before his death; a frail expatriate, razor-sharp and angry.

“Until one met him he was myth grown out of some seventy-five years of the often turbulent and tragic history of the South’s and the nation’s trauma of race.” McGill recounts how Du Bois begins the conversation with a sobering story:

“…Walking to [the Atlanta Constitution’s] office, I passed by a grocery store that had on display out front the drying fingers of a recently lynched Negro.’

He fell silent. No one else said anything. Outside the windows of his spacious house, provided by the government, in the old residential section of Ghana, there was a sound of children at play. A breath of air blew in past the flowering shrubs near the windows.”

He was speaking of the brutal lynching of Sam Hose who was accused of killing his landlord and raping the landlord’s wife. Hose was mutilated by a group of about 500 people before being tied to a tree and burned alive. The mob then cut off pieces of his dead body as souvenirs and sent them to businesses across the state for public viewing. While walking to the Atlanta Constitution office to submit a statement about the increase of African-American lynchings, Du Bois actually chanced upon Hose’s knuckles displayed in a local Atlanta store.

The fact that this memory was so present in Du Bois mind at the end of his life underscores its importance as he begins to question his scientific research. He states in his 1968 Autobiography, “Two considerations thereafter broke in upon my work and eventually disrupted it: first, one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved; and secondly, there was no such definite demand for scientific work of the sort I was doing…”

In the next article, I’ll discuss the legacy of Du Bois’ data visualizations and explore some reasons why they remain lesser known. Shortly thereafter I’ll publish the last piece in the series that outlines all the charts in order plus discusses an extremely exciting discovery that I’ve made. But again, no spoilers yet. This six-part series will cover:

The six-part series:

W. E. B. Du Bois’ staggering Data Visualizations are as powerful today as they were in 1900 

An introduction to the 1900 Paris Exposition, and context for a few charts on history and population growth.

II. Data Journalism and the Scientific Study of “The Negro Problem”

Places this body of work within Du Bois’ larger sociological focus and continues the exploration of many of the charts from the exposition with a focus on education, literacy, and occupation.

III. Exploring the Craft and Design of W.E.B. Du Bois’ Data Visualizations

A detailed examination of how Du Bois drafted his charts, a consideration of this work as a precursor to modernism, and a discussion of his more artistic charts on land ownership and value.

IV. Style and Rich Detail: On Viewing an Original Du Bois Chart

Discoveries on viewing an original chart and further exploration of Du Bois’ more innovative designs dealing with occupation, business, and mortality.

V. Du Bois as Social Scientist and the Legacy of “The Exhibit of American Negroes”

Discusses Du Bois’s body of work and his frustrations with social science despite widespread attention.

VI. The Exhibition as a Whole: an Exciting Discovery

To close out the series I present a previously unknown chart from the series, and discuss the importance of understanding the sequence of the works.

This article originally appeared in Medium but in moving to NightingaleDVS.com, I edited the original text mostly to update some grammar and language substitutions, January 2023.

The post Style and Rich Detail: On Viewing an Original W.E.B. Du Bois Data Visualization (Part 4) appeared first on Nightingale.

“The Exhibit of American Negroes” at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris was created by activist and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, in collaboration with Booker T Washington, prominent black lawyer Thomas J. Calloway, the assistant librarian at the Library of Congress Daniel Murray, along with students from historically black college Atlanta University.

While Du Bois’ legacy is cemented in American history, his data visualizations remain relatively unknown. I’m passionate about Du Bois’ story and have beendiscussing it through the lens of a UX Designer working in data visualization. My hope is that these posts inspire more academics, designers, and data visualization specialists to explore this work further in order to place the work into the proper historical significance it deserves.

This is article 3 of a 6-part series that covers many aspects of Du Bois’s exhibition, and links to all articles are at the end. Be sure to check out the last one – there’s a big reveal!

The word “Negro” will appear frequently in this series. It’s not a word I take lightly. It is the term Du Bois references throughout this phase of his career and I think it’s best to honor and contextualize his use of language for this article.

Discovering How These Charts Were Made

As discussed in the previous chapter of this series, Du Bois began assembling the exhibit on December 28, 1899. The Paris Exposition began on Apr 15, 1900 and the travel would take at least 6 weeks by ship. Du Bois did not have very much time.

In his Autobiography (written at the age of 90) Du Bois briefly explains how he crafted the charts:

“I got a couple of my best students and put a series of facts into charts: the size and growth of the Negro American group; its division by age and sex; its distribution, education and occupations; its books and periodicals. We made a most interesting set of drawings, limned on pasteboard cards about a yard square and mounted on a number of moveable standards. The details of finishing these 50 or more charts, in colors, with accuracy, was terribly difficult with little money, limited time and not much encouragement.”

Beyond this quote, there is relatively little information about the creation of the actual charts but there are documents from the time that might help explain how this work was created.

The preface of “A Textbook on Ornamental Design” from 1901 instructs that it is “… [to] be used as a work of reference by the practical designer in the solution of the numerous problems that confront him in his everyday work.” Created for correspondence schools, this manual outlines many of the technical tricks of 19th-century draftsmanship for a general audience.

Illustrations from “A Textbook on Ornamental Design”, 1901, International Correspondence Schools

It begins with a description of how to build a sturdy drawing board, the basic use of a T-square, a drafting triangle, a compass, a divider (like a compass but with 2 steel points used for measuring distances) and then explicit directions on how to sharpen a pencil. The book then goes into inking, and as you can see from the illustration at the left, the hand lightly rests on a T-square which then guides the pen. The book is written in a style that provides basic explanation for the beginner but not a lot of actual instruction.

As we have already observed in Du Bois’ work, it is difficult to understand how expertly the charts are drafted using such rudimentary tools. The textbook helps us understand how Du Bois’ team drafts such perfect curvilinear lines when it covers what is now a near-lost-art: the use of the French Curve: “It is usually difficult to draw a smooth, continuous curve…by always fitting the curve to at least three points, and, when moving it to a new position, by setting it so that it will coincide with part of the line already drawn.”

The most exciting aspect of this particular book are the sections dedicated to hand-drawn lettering and its importance. “In fact, generally speaking, more time is required to make well-executed letters than to make well-executed drawings of objects. We earnestly request the student to practice lettering, and not to think that that part of the work is of no importance.” The manual gives some directions on several styles of letterforms, but I was shocked by the similarity of the style of block lettering to what we find in Du Bois’ work.

The careful drafting of the letterforms was likely developed into a strict set of measurements that thestudents penciled in with a ruler then fill in with ink.

Below we see details from two of Du Bois’ charts. Of all the works in the original lot, “Family Budgets” is actually a supplemental page of budget numbers that were part of “The Georgia Negro” series. For some reason, it is included twice: the first a partially damaged draft in pencil, and then the second, finished document in ink. Below you can see the same text from both documents:

The above shows both the block and ‘hairline’ text in pencil and ink. As you can see, Du Bois’ team must have set up a system to account for each letter’s measurements (x-height, cap-height, ascenders, etc) for both of the typeface styles in order to make the work more standardized and easier to draft for multiple students. Additionally, the team only used all-capital letters for all the charts and opted to remove any curves in the letterforms. As demonstrated in the “G” in “Budgets” above, each curve is reduced to a series of angles.

Considering Du Bois and his team were under such strict time constraints, luxuries like printing were clearly out of the question. The work would need to be hand painted watercolor on thick card stock, and it’s likely that Du Bois chose to use watercolors by George C. Osborne.

Based in Philadelphia — where Du Bois also lived until a year before he began this work — Osborne was one of the few 19th-century American makers of artists paint. Many artists of the time believed the especially vivid paint colors by Osborne were equal or better to any made in Europe.

The limited palette in the image above can be seen directly in Du Bois’ color choices; defining a spare, crisp and elegant style that relies heavily on saturated primary colors. I point this out specifically because Du Bois’ use of color likely figures into what is the biggest misconception about this body of work: that it was a precursor to modernism.

The (Understandable) Mistake of Modernism

While the data visualizations of W.E.B. Du Bois are certainly under-recognized, they have been reported on over the past few years. Great articles have appeared in Hyperallergic, Brainpickings, The Public Domain Review, and on the Smithsonian’s blog. While the coverage of this work has been highly considered, I think the general representation of the work might not be entirely accurate.

In 2016 Allison Meier published a detailed article in Hyperallergic, where she understandably writes:

While Meier correctly elaborates on the idea by putting it into context in the 19th century,the sentence above set in motion a ripple echoed in many of the subsequent articles — that somehow Du Bois’ work could be connected to modernism. >While the promise of the statement is exciting, it is not very likely.

Statistical Chart Making in 1900

The rise of the sciences in the 19th centurywas palpable. Technological inventions (the steam engine, electric motor, light bulb, photograph, and telegraph) were regularly introduced. New theories in mathematics, physics, and medicine were popularized, and then the world was turned on its head by Charles Darwin. Each of these inventions was communicated and documented using some sort of visualization. What is the periodic table of elements if not a chart?

Michael Friendly, in his 2006 book The Golden Age of Statistical Graphics, introduces his fantastic research on the history of data visualization: “Statistical graphics and data visualization have long histories,  but their modern forms began only in the early 1800s. Between roughly 1850 and 1900, an explosive growth occurred in both the general use of graphic methods and the range of topics to which they were applied. Innovations were prodigious and some of themost exquisite graphics ever produced appeared, resulting in what may be called the “Golden Age of Statistical Graphics.”

As mentioned in part 2 of this series, Du Bois wanted his work to be “outstanding [in a] way which would bring my work to notice by the thinking world.” An incredibly astute academic, Du Bois had studied many sociological texts including the work of Henry Gannett, which was referenced in “The Philadelphia Negro” the year before the Paris Exhibition. So it is obvious that Du Bois was familiar with Gannett’s amazingStatistical Atlas of the United Statesfeaturing luxuriously illustrated maps and charts as well as sociological data he incorporated into his work.

Seeing as Du Bois was setting off on a career as an academic and social scientist and that “The Exhibit of American Negroes” was under a severe timeline, his priority was to craft beautiful charts which were as meaningful as possible with the modest tools at hand. Had the team been allotted enough funds and given the time, the charts might have been printed in color and would have likely looked like the work of Gannett.

Necessity being the mother of invention, Du Bois’s creative brilliance was instead put on display and the resulting handmade charts possess an artistic dimension that is missing from the more scientific work of the time. He likely chose basic, primary colors for their ability to easily imprint on his scientifically minded European audience. He stripped away any decoration in order to make the charts more effective and the precision of the charts conveyed scientific authenticity. While the works are remarkably beautiful, they were likely crafted for influence, not artistic merit.

While precursors to Modernism were present in the 19th century, the concept of modernism wasn’t established until the other ‘-isms’ had crystallized around Europe in the first years of the 20th century. France saw Cubism born in 1907, Die Brücke in Germany in 1906, Italian Futurism in 1909, Russian Constructivism in 1910, all eventually leading to the establishment of the Bauhaus in 1919.

It is with the Bauhaus and the Vienna Circle ;that art and design gained inspiration from science in bringing a more structured approach to the evidence of design. Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, Wassily Kandinsky, and many at the Bauhaus school stripped away the decoration from art and design to reveal a studied efficiency of form and color.

Unfortunately, most of the modernists were simply too young to have been directly inspired by the works at the Exposition. Picasso was 19 at the time, Gropius 17, Moholy-Nagy was only 5. Piet Mondrian was 28 but was living in The Netherlands. Kandinsky was 28 but had just traded a career in law to go to art school in Munich.

The fusion of science and art helped fuel the Bauhaus and Vienna Circle and certainly Du Bois was operating in a similar space two decades earlier — but as a sociologist. One can only imagine what might have happened if he and his team had found the right support at the Paris Exposition. Had the impact of The Exhibit of American Negroes been an international touchstone instead of a mere ‘success’ Du Bois might have continued to craft statistical charts and the line between this work and what was to come in art and design might have been possible. But that was not the case.

Design & Innovation

What is abundantly clear was that Du Bois was a visionary with a cause; a searing brilliance that could not be diminished, with the drive to impress his plight to a global audience. This work really stands by itself; unique in approach, execution, and historical relevance.

Many of the more unique charts are from “The Georgia Negro” series. Let’s take a look at a few of his most innovative works which also explore African-American socioeconomic growth and land value.

This is one of the most unique charts of Du Bois invention. Elijah Meeks writes: “I call it a Du Bois Spiral. It’s aesthetically compelling in the way it encodes urban to rural demographics….Du Bois knows you cannot precisely compare the lengths of those diagonals and spirals, and so he writes the number to go along with them. It provides the exact number of African Americans living in the various parts of Georgia as well as a more striking summary: the almost absurd ratio of red to any other color.”

Another way of looking at the ‘Du Bois spiral’ above is to envision it as a stacked bar chart on an extremely long scale. Since the single red section is so much larger, Du Bois wanted a way to set it off from the other categories. Since laying it out as a single bar was not visually pleasing, he gained inspiration from another technique that was also common at the time — the “snake.”

In some of Du Bois’s other bar charts such as the “Religion of American Negros” at left, Du Bois uses a “snake” to wrap the largest bar — this time, around itself. Du Bois combines this technique of winding the largest bar into a spiral with another completely unique solution of offsetting the categories as angles to highlight the smaller values.

Of course, the main point of the chart above is to quickly convey just how many African-Americans lived in rural Georgia than in the larger or smaller cities. The large, red spiral immediately leaves an impression; a visual beacon that draws the eye in a way that few charts could.

This one is a real knock-out. Not only do we see the 213.5% increase in acres of land owned, but Du Bois presents us the data in the shape of the state of Georgia itself. As the 25 red bars span the page, the rate of growth is not as impressive as the sense that Negro landowners comprise the entire state of Georgia itself.

A significant accomplishment and proof that African-Americans were prospering in Georgia,the theme of progress is central to the exhibit.Eugene F. Provenzo, in his fantastic book on the exhibit, elaborates: “Black Americans had been isolated as a social group as a result of “color and color prejudice.” They represented a group, who because of “the peculiar environment, the action and reaction of social forces are seen and can be measured with more than usual ease.” By studying the experience of Blacks, Du Bois believed that he could address questions such as “what is human progress and how is it emphasized?”

Providing the data just wasn’t enough, Du Bois needed to show the emerging independence of what he called “a small nation of people.” What better portrait could be drawn?

One of the more surprising charts in the series, the above pictogram;displays the growth of African-American land value as a series of growing bags of money.By showing the millions of dollars owned, it shifts the perception away from poverty and places the African-American landholder in the realm of tangible financial wealth.

The use of pictograms was not common in newspapers at the time but they were used in scientific texts. The cover of the Scientific American at left shows three groups of pictographs in its November, 1899 edition— the month before Du Bois started his work on the exhibition.

Interestingly enough, Du Bois’ work comes two decades before the work of Otto Neurath. An economist and sociologist by trade, Neurath was a co-founder of the Vienna Circle in 1907 and became a highly influential exhibition designer. Neurath eventually developed a visual language for communication that he called the ‘ISOTYPE’ — which is the foundation for many types of contemporary infographics. His mission was to use wordless graphics to illustrate relationships and explain complex ideas to the general public, an aim not dissimilar from Du Bois at the Paris Exhibition.

Another chart in the same sequence on land value and ownership from “The Georgia Negro”, the above chart is another experiment in curvilinear charting. With the success of the ‘Du Bois spiral’ above, Du Bois uses the same concept of ‘snaking’ a traditional bar chart around itself to display an astounding 6673.2% overall growth in Negro home valuables.

To the left, I’ve represented the above Du Bois’ data as a standard vertical bar chart. Represented this way, one can see the overall growth but can also notice the individual trends. Du Bois again opts for the more flashy version, impressing his audience with his draftsmanship and overall impression of meteoric growth.

While visually exciting, this experiment in wrapping bars into a spiral is ultimately not effective in visualizing the data for accuracy. The arbitrary use of a categorical color sequence, especially with the too-light (faded?)1895 category, confuses the interpretation, leaving the 1899 red line to overwhelm the chart and exaggerate its impact.

Also of note is the damage to the work because of the fragility of the materials. Huge chunks of the cardboard are missing, prompting the Library of Congress to put all of the original work in deep storage citing “originals are too fragile to be served.” — but I’ll speak more about that in chapter four.

Initially, I thought the above chart was a Bullseye chart, but those normally show correlations between approximate values. After mulling it over for a while I think this experiment was probably a stacked pie chart. Six years (1875, 1880, 1885, 1990, 1895, and 1899) are depicted by circular areas representing the taxable value of Negro property. As each expands from a black core they are labeled by graphic ‘stalagmites’ showing the 149% increase over the roughly 25 year period.

I’d argue that the above is not a very good data visualization. Since the largest value — the outermost red circle — is depicted as a thin “line” instead of the largest area, it does not read as the largest category. The color selection weakens the message as the black center commands the most attention for the smallest number, and the “clear” section for 1895 reads as empty. The labels literally point to the smallest value, giving the impression that $5,393,885 is the most important number on the page.

Then again, maybe the impression Du Bois was going for wasn’t so wrong after all. By setting a baseline of more than $5 million, Du Bois provides the official financial view of a subset of Georgia citizens. Like the ‘money bags’ chart above, the swirl of multi-million dollar figures on this chart repositions the conceptual understanding of African-American value from what was presumed to be ‘nothing’ to substantial sums of money — even at its minimum.

As a result, I think it’s best to see the above chart as a work of data art. It is surprising, bizarre, challenging and most of all visually exciting. A graphic puzzle designed to lure a curious audience and challenge perceptions.

No rest for the weary

Five months ago when I started this project, I had no idea how far I would get involved in it. I’ve been encouraged by so many people and feel that my work is adding something new to a conversation that I hope is just beginning. When I posted my first Medium article on Du Bois in mid-July, I set off on a 4-part series. But as the research continues I keep learning more and now will have to extend it to 6 parts.

This is partially because I was granted a very special exception by the Library of Congress to visit (only) one of the charts in person — which I did last week. It was very exciting and I need to discuss my findings as well as more of Du Bois’ design innovations in another article to be released soon.

Then, after discussing the legacy of this work, I will also publish another piece that outlines all the charts in order plus discusses another extremely exciting discovery that I’ve made. But I don’t want to spoil any surprises… haha

The six-part series:

W. E. B. Du Bois’ staggering Data Visualizations are as powerful today as they were in 1900 

An introduction to the 1900 Paris Exposition, and context for a few charts on history and population growth.

II. Data Journalism and the Scientific Study of “The Negro Problem”

Places this body of work within Du Bois’ larger sociological focus and continues the exploration of many of the charts from the exposition with a focus on education, literacy, and occupation.

III. Exploring the Craft and Design of W.E.B. Du Bois’ Data Visualizations

A detailed examination of how Du Bois drafted his charts, a consideration of this work as a precursor to modernism, and a discussion of his more artistic charts on land ownership and value.

IV. Style and Rich Detail: On Viewing an Original Du Bois Chart

Discoveries on viewing an original chart and further exploration of Du Bois’ more innovative designs dealing with occupation, business, and mortality.

V. Du Bois as Social Scientist and the Legacy of “The Exhibit of American Negroes”

Discusses Du Bois’s body of work and his frustrations with social science despite widespread attention.

VI. The Exhibition as a Whole: an Exciting Discovery

To close out the series I present a previously unknown chart from the series, and discuss the importance of understanding the sequence of the works.

This article originally appeared in Medium but in moving to NightingaleDVS.com, I edited the original text mostly to update some grammar and language substitutions, January 2023.

The post Exploring the Craft and Design of W.E.B. Du Bois’ Data Visualizations (Part 3) appeared first on Nightingale.

While Du Bois’ legacy is cemented in American history, his data visualizations remain relatively unknown. I’m passionate about Du Bois’ story and have been discussing it via a series of articles through the lens of a UX Designer working in data visualization. My hope is that these posts inspire more academics, designers, and data visualization specialists to explore this work further in order to place the work into the proper historical significance it deserves.

This six-part series will cover many aspects of Du Bois’s exhibition, and links to all articles are at the end of each part. Be sure to check out the last one – there’s a big reveal!

Note: The word “Negro” will appear frequently in this series. It’s not a word I take lightly. It is the term Du Bois references throughout this phase of his career and I think it’s best to honor and contextualize his use of language for this article.

The Exhibit of American Negroes

“The Exhibit of American Negroes” at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris was created by activist and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, in collaboration with educator and social leader Booker T Washington, prominent black lawyer Thomas J. Callowayand students from historically black college Atlanta University.

In his remarkable 1968 Autobiography, Du Bois at the age of 90 recounts a lecture from a lifetime earlier in 1897. “The American Negro deserves study for the great end of advancing the cause of science in general. No such opportunity to watch and measure the history and development of a great race of men ever presented itself to the scholars of a modern nation. If they miss this opportunity — if they do the work in a slipshod, unsystematic manner — if they dally with the truth to humor the whims of the day, they do far more than hurt the good name of scientific truth the world over, they voluntarily decrease human knowledge…”

Du Bois describes the exhibition as “Thirty-two charts, 500 photographs, and numerous maps and plans form the basis of this exhibit. The charts are in two sets, one illustrating conditions in the entire United States and the other conditions in the typical State of Georgia”.The data visualizations in “The Exhibit of American Negroes” is therefore split into 2 sections: “A Series of Statistical Charts Illustrating the Condition of the Descendants of Former African Slaves Now in Residence in the United States of America” which focuses on the national view of the data, and a companion work done the same year called “The Georgia Negro”.

In the article “The American Negro at Paris” he writes: “It was a good idea to supplement these very general figures with a minute social study in a typical Southern State. It would hardly be suggested, in the light of recent history, that conditions in the State of Georgia are such as to give a rose-colored picture of the Negro; and yet Georgia, having the largest Negro population, is an excellent field of study.”

Du Bois continues in his Autobiography: “I wanted to set down its aim and method in some outstanding way which would bring my work to the thinking world. The great World’s Fair at Paris was being planned and I thought I might put my findings into plans, charts, and figures, so one might see what we were trying to accomplish.”

The resulting exhibition was more than just a scientific report. It was a targeted attempt to sway the world’s elite to acknowledge African Americans in an effort to influence cultural change in the USA from abroad. The charts in the exhibition are arranged to tell a story with data that presents a complex picture of a people, their struggle, and their perseverance despite more than a century of enslavement.

This is where I’d like to begin.

The above chart is a masterwork of data journalism. It’s hard to look at the chart above and not feel like you’ve been kicked in the gut. The mountainous black area punctuated by the word(s) SLAVES sits immovable under a green ribbon that opens to the right of the chart.

The story it tells is simple: for 76 years no less than 86% of all African Americans in the USA were enslaved. But like most charts, the subtleties might be easy to miss. The Emancipation Proclamation was signed on Jan 1, 1863, yet it takes an additional 7 years(and a Civil War) for the remaining 6,675,000 enslaved people to find their freedom.

The above is a breakout chart focusing just on ‘The Georgia Negro”. If one can visualize this chart rotated 90 degrees, this serves as a “double click” on the preceding chart above. It shows the percentage of free African Americans only in the state of Georgia, which at its greatest point was only 1.7% over a 73-year period.

Let’s look at the 1860 census to get some sense of scale. Of the total population of 1,057,286 people in Georgia, 462,198 were enslaved — 44% of the entire population.

Remember, the audience for the exposition were the elite leaders in science and business from Europe and the western world. Slavery in America was still very fresh in everyone’s mind. Du Bois knew a logical argument presented in scientific terms would provoke conversation and the brutally graphic truth of each of these charts would be impossible to deny.

Du Bois writes “… [the] exhibit which, more than most others in the building, is sociological in the larger sense  of the term — that is, is an attempt to give, in as systematic and compact a form as possible, the history and present condition of a large group of human beings.”  Notice the emphasis on the term ‘human beings’ consistently linked with ‘American Negro’. By acknowledging enslavement as a foundation for African Americans, he also establishes a baseline by which to show how far this large group of human beings has progressed.

In the charts below Du Bois focuses on population growth:

By reducing each chart to its essence, Du Bois adds successive arguments to the larger message. The above chart shows a fairly steady 68% — 88% population growth over a 140-year period.

As early as 1807 an Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves was promoted by President Thomas Jefferson which sought to block the flow of slaves into the southern states. Then, in 1820, slave trading became a capital offense, and as promising as that sounds, only 74 cases were raised, few captains were convicted and only one miserable bastard was actually executed.

The chart above is proof that the measures taken to end slaving in the mid-1800s were a failure. Du Bois understood that his cultured audience knew the events and politics more than the raw data he provides — the data itself was an incrimination.

The above chart shows the explosion of the overall US population from 1830 to 1890 with only a marginal rate of increase for the African American population in general. Despite a huge boom in European immigration, few African Americans immigrated to the US during this time. Natural population growth and a decrease in the mortality rate after the 1865 passing of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery were the likely causes of the increase.

That said, the overall size of the African American population was still massive, which Du Bois brilliantly compares against the entire populations of several European countries below.

In “The American Negro at Paris” Du Bois says “At a glance one can see the successive steps by which the 220,000 Negroes of 1750 had increased to 7,500,000 in 1890; their distribution throughout the different States a comparison of the size of the Negro population with European countries bringing out the striking fact that there are nearly half as many Negroes in the United States as Spaniards in Spain.”

By visualizing African American population growth as a small nation growing inside of the American silhouette, Du Bois elegantly crafts a complex argument. As the silhouette of the country grows, the African American population also grows, not at a faster rate but as a distinctly different entity.

This is not a line or bar chart to compare numbers. Du Bois’ visualizes the data in terms of distinct nations. When viewed alongside the preceding image showing a fully African American-populated United States in comparison to European countries, Du Bois clearly implies the existence of a separate Negro nation/state.

One of my favorites, the above chart not only shows the fluidity of race as applied to the term ‘Negro’ but also slyly asserts a sizable portion of the White population had ‘Negro blood’.

By crafting a dispassionate argument focused on the numbers Du Bois makes an argument an African American would be prevented from articulating verbally. The massive black area is a sleight of hand to distract from the not-so-subtle accusation on the right side of the chart.

Another “double click” into the Georgia demographic, a single stacked-bar chart puts the emphasis on the values of black and brown to create an 84% block. The blood-red “40%”, is a corporeal smear only semi-visible in the center block.

But like the preceding chart, the grouping of the dark values points away from the uncomfortable data showing that 56% majority of African Americans were of some mixed blood.

Despite all odds, the exhibit was extremely popular and was awarded two grand prizes, several gold and silver medals, and 2 honorable mentions.

The main Exposition Report also specifically mentions The Exhibit of American Negroes: “It is impossible to do justice to this exhibit in a few lines of descriptive matter. The material presented was not only of high scientific value, but was shown in the most graphic way. There was no better example at the Exposition of the appreciation of the Exposition idea that exhibits must be made attractive and interesting.” (volume 2, p.408–9)

The noted African American weekly newspaper The Appeal in October of 1900 said: “This is the first time in the history of exposition abroad that the Afro-American has ever taken so important and successful a part…proof that all classes of [the American] population are prosperous, progressive, and valuable citizens.”

Unfortunately, reporting of the exhibit and its success were largely ignored in America by the white Press. However, many ‘persons of eminence and character’ did recognize the effort including Frank Taussing of Harvard who wrote “in my judgment no better work is being done in the country, and no better opportunity is afforded for financial support on the part of those who wish to further the understanding of the Negro problem.”

This last statement eventually became part of the problem for Du Bois, and the uplifting change he sought did not manifest in his lifetime. A mix of politics, prejudice, raw emotion, and lack of financial support undermined Du Bois’s scientific work — which I cover in part 5 of this series. The next chapter, however, will continue looking at the data visualizations themselves and will cover more of the remaining charts focusing on education and occupation.

The six-part series:

W. E. B. Du Bois’ staggering Data Visualizations are as powerful today as they were in 1900 (this article)

An introduction to the 1900 Paris Exposition, and context for a few charts on history and population growth.

II. Data Journalism and the Scientific Study of “The Negro Problem”

Places this body of work within Du Bois’ larger sociological focus and continues the exploration of many of the charts from the exposition with a focus on education, literacy, and occupation.

III. Exploring the Craft and Design of W.E.B. Du Bois’ Data Visualizations

A detailed examination of how Du Bois drafted his charts, a consideration of this work as a precursor to modernism, and a discussion of his more artistic charts on land ownership and value.

IV. Style and Rich Detail: On Viewing an Original Du Bois Chart

Discoveries on viewing an original chart and further exploration of Du Bois’ more innovative designs dealing with occupation, business, and mortality.

V. Du Bois as Social Scientist and the Legacy of “The Exhibit of American Negroes”

Discusses Du Bois’s body of work and his frustrations with social science despite widespread attention.

VI. The Exhibition as a Whole: an Exciting Discovery

To close out the series I present a previously unknown chart from the series, and discuss the importance of understanding the sequence of the works.

This article originally appeared in Medium but in moving to NightingaleDVS.com, I edited the original text mostly to update some grammar and language substitutions, January 2023.

The post W. E. B. Du Bois’ staggering Data Visualizations are as powerful today as they were in 1900 (Part 1) appeared first on Nightingale.