What was W.E.B. Du Bois trying to communicate through his data visualizations at the 1900 Paris Exposition?

A Slow Reveal Graph Lesson

The 1900 Paris Exposition

The Exposition universelle internationale de 1900, or 1900 Paris Exposition, was a world’s fair held in Paris, France between April 15 and November 12, 1900. It was intended to highlight accomplishments over the past century and to encourage people to look forward to what was to come in the 20th century. With participation by 40 countries, the fair was visited by nearly 50 million people and highlighted many technological innovations, as well as art nouveau.

One building at the fair was devoted to the “social economy,” and the U.S. section of the building featured an exhibit devoted to the history and “present conditions” of African Americans.

https://www.nga.gov/features/slideshows/Exposition-Universelle-de-1900.html#slide_2

W.E.B. Du Bois and the Paris Exposition

The Exposition des Negres d’ Amerique was organized by Thomas Junius Calloway, editor of the Colored American newspaper in Washington, D.C. Calloway reached out to scholar, writer, and civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois, his former classmate and friend from Fisk University, to contribute a social study about African American life to the exhibit.

Thomas Junius Calloway

W.E.B. Du Bois

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:American_Negro_Exhibit_at_the_Exposition_Universelle,_Paris,_1900.jpg

The Du Bois Exhibit

The exhibit included 200 books written by African Americans, as well as 500 photographs highlighting business enterprises, social life, and education of African Americans. With the images, Du Bois intended to diminish racist caricatures of the day and demonstrate the there was no so-called “Negro type.”

https://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?st=grid&co=anedub

Within the display there were also 63 charts, graphs, and maps, visualizing data mostly from the United States Census, Atlanta University reports, and various government agencies such as the U.S. Bureau of Labor. The data visualizations were divided into two parts. The first part was a case study of Black populations in Georgia, titled The Georgia Negro: A Social Study. The second was more national and global in scope, and was titled A Series of Statistical Charts Illustrating the Condition of the Descendants of Former African Slaves Now in Residence in the United States of America. Although the image to the left was the first plate for The Georgia Negro, the image positions Georgia within the national and global scope of the second study.

https://www.loc.gov/item/2013650420/

Setting the context

The first several data visualizations in the collection provide basic information about Blacks in the United States and Georgia. The map on the left (plate 2) provides detail at a larger scale than the previous map, a purposeful technique on the part of Du Bois and his team. While the previous map shows the global slave trade, this map “zooms in” to show the population of Black people living in the United States at the time, including in Georgia, which is among the most populated.

https://www.loc.gov/item/2013650421/

Types of visualizations in the collection

In addition to maps, the collection includes conventional looking data visualizations like these bar graphs. The one on the left provides more details about the population of Georgia relative to other states, and the one on the right provides information about changes in Georgia’s Black population over time.

https://www.loc.gov/item/2013650423/

https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppmsca.33865/

Types of visualizations in the collection

However, many of the data visualizations in the collection were far from conventional. The editors of the book, Visualizing Black America, argue that Du Bois’ work combined visual art with social science and offered “alternative visions of how social scientific data might be made more accessible to the populations and people from whom such data is collected.” The movement that these data visualizations convey hint at an effort to tell a story about Blacks in America.

https://www.loc.gov/item/2013650430/

https://www.loc.gov/item/2013650431/

What was Du Bois trying to communicate through his data visualizations at the 1900 Paris Exposition?

Plate 27; part of The Georgia Negro

https://www.loc.gov/item/2005676812/

Plate 47, Part of A Series of Statistical Charts Illustrating the Condition of the Descendants of Former African Slaves Now in Residence in the United States of America.

https://www.loc.gov/item/2014645352/

Plate 56, Part of A Series of Statistical Charts Illustrating the Condition of the Descendants of Former African Slaves Now in Residence in the United States of America.

https://www.loc.gov/item/2014645362/

Relevant 8th-Grade Standards

C3 Framework

D2.His.4.6-8. Analyze multiple factors that influenced the perspectives of people during different historical eras.

D2.His.6.6-8. Analyze how people’s perspectives influenced what information is available in the historical sources they created.

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Michigan K-12 Standards for Social Studies

P1.1 Use appropriate strategies to read and interpret basic social science tables, graphs, graphics, maps, and texts.

P1.2 Interpret primary and secondary source documents for point of view, context, bias, and frame of reference or perspective.

P2.2 Evaluate data presented in social science tables, graphs, graphics, maps, and texts.

8 – U6.1.1 America at Century’s End – compare and contrast the United States in 1800 with the United States in 1898, focusing on similarities and differences in:

• territory.
• population.
• systems of transportation.
• governmental policies promoting economic development.
• economic change.
• the treatment of African-Americans.
• the policies toward Indigenous Peoples.

Relevant High School Standards

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Michigan K-12 Standards for Social Studies

P1.1 Use appropriate strategies to read and analyze social science tables, graphs, graphics, maps, and texts.

P1.2 Interpret primary and secondary source documents for point of view, context, bias, and frame of reference or perspective.

6.1.4 Growth and Change – explain the social, political, economic, and cultural shifts taking place in the United States at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, by:

• describing the developing systems of transportation (canals and railroads, including the Transcontinental Railroad), and their impact on the economy and society.
• describing governmental policies promoting economic development.
• evaluating the treatment of African Americans, including the rise of segregation in the South as endorsed by the Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, and describing the response of African-Americans to this inequality.
• describing the policies toward Indigenous Peoples, including removal, reservations, the Dawes Act of 1887, and the response of Indigenous Peoples to these policies.

C3 Framework

D2.His.4.9-12. Analyze complex and interacting factors that influenced the perspectives of people during different historical eras.

D2.His.6.9-12. Analyze the ways in which the perspectives of those writing history shaped the history that they produced.

Slow Reveal Graph Credits

Author:

Dr. Tamara Shreiner, Associate Professor of History, Grand Valley State University

With Technical Assistance from:

Dr. Bradford Dykes, Assistant Professor of Statistics, Grand Valley State University

Eleanor Zimmerman, Undergraduate Student, Grand Valley State University