25 January 2020| New Scientist | 31Du Bois visualised his
community in a compact
and systematic formDon’t miss
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CONTEMPORAINemerging information
superhighway... to avoid our
continuing characterisation,
lamented by [W. E. B.] Du Bois, as
an ‘afterthought of modernity’.”
That mention of Du Bois
is apposite: this influential
African American activist
and intellectual had started a
movement in the early 1900s
to fight racial segregation. Just
as the members of McIlwain’s
vanguard are little known
despite their innovative use of
communications technology, so
Du Bois’s use of infographics tends
to be omitted from accounts of his
work to end segregation.
As co-founder of the National
Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP), Du
Bois is celebrated for his profound
essays and books, including the
seminal The Souls of Black Folk,
and is considered one of the most
influential activists for racial
justice of the 20th century.
But alongside his famous
writings, Du Bois produced an
astounding body of infographics
to challenge pseudoscientific
racism, making visual arguments
every bit as powerful as those in
his books. The infographics are the
subject of an exhibition, W. E. B. Du
Bois: Charting black lives, at
London’s House of Illustration.
This displays, for the first time in
the UK, 63 infographics that Du
Bois presented at the 1900 Paris
Exposition, a world fair.
Du Bois’s charts, graphs and
maps, the result of collaboration
with African American students
he taught at his sociology lab at
Atlanta University in Georgia,
are beautiful. Visually, they are
certainly striking. And then thereis what they represent: a radical
and stark approach to refuting
racism, using facts and statistics
to counter white supremacy and
challenge and debunk the era’s
prevailing racist stereotypes.
Du Bois wanted to prove, to
an international audience, the
essential equality of African
American people. By presenting
his own research on the
achievements of African
Americans in the short time
since the emancipation of slaves,
Du Bois demonstrated that blackculture had flourished even
within the extreme constraints
of violently enforced racial
segregation across the southern
states of the US.
The infographics shown at
the Paris Exposition presented
statistics on issues such as crime,
literacy and affluence in Georgia –
at the time the US state with the
highest African American
population. And rather than let
us fall into the complacency of
thinking that race science no
longer exists, the exhibition also
features original artwork by
Guardian journalist Mona Chalabi.
This demonstrates the enduring
relevance of Du Bois’s data
visualisation methods and the
racial inequalities he fought
against by updating four of
the 1900 infographics with
21st-century data.
Both the exhibition and
McIlwain’s book are utterly
compelling demonstrations of
the contributions black people
have made, and struggle to make
still, to modern culture.
The work Du Bois began in 1900
with his data visualisations has
lasted into the internet age, and
the web has become a key venue
for conversations about why black
lives matter. ❚“ Du Bois produced
infographics that
challenged the
pseudoscience
used by racists”