W.E.B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America ed. by Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert (review)

On October 4, 1899, lawyer and educator Thomas J. Calloway penned a letter to over one hundred prominent black citizens across the United States, enlisting their support in advocating for a "well selected and prepared exhibit" to be shown at the 1900 Exposition Universelle, which was scheduled to open in Paris in several months' time. It would take several weeks for the letters of support to arrive, and several more weeks to obtain a funding commitment from President William McKinley. But time was already running short, so Calloway turned to W. E. B. Du Bois, a Fisk University classmate, for help in assembling the books, photographs, charts, and other artifacts that would come to constitute the American Negro Exhibit. The exhibit opened on April 14, 1900 and ran for six months. It was seen by many of the more than fifty million people who attended the Paris Exposition, as the event is more commonly known today.

Indeed, the Paris Exposition of 1900 has long been a subject of inquiry for Du Bois scholars, who have paid particular attention to the several hundred photographs that Du Bois assembled for the American Negro Exhibit. Deborah Willis, in Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present (Norton, 2002) and Shawn Michelle Smith, in Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Duke UP, 2004), are among those who have shown how the photo-graphs "intervene in turn-of-the-century 'race science' by offering competing visual evidence" (Smith 2). In A Small Nation of People: W.E.B. Du Bois and African American Portraits of Progress (Amistad, 2003), Linda Barrett Osborne observes how viewers have extolled the images for how they "declare their beauty and humanity." But until recently, the complementary set of nearly one hundred data visualizations that Du Bois, with the help of his students at Atlanta University, also designed, printed, and displayed as part of the exhibit have received far less attention.

The visualizations created for the Paris Exposition are as timeless as the photographs, and they are also timely, as confirmed in Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert's W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America. In their illuminating introduction, Battle-Baptiste and Rusert connect Du Bois's designs to "other genealogies of black design and data visualization, from the centrality of visual design and format in the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts-era publishing, to the role of abstraction and conceptual aesthetics in black visual art in the twentieth-and twenty-first centuries" (13). They posit the charts as offering a "look back to a history of data visualization in the nineteenth century deeply connected to the institution of slavery, and the struggle against it, while looking forward to the forms of data collection and representation that would become central to representations and surveys of Harlem in the twentieth century" (13). The seventy-two full-color images reproduce the complete set of visualizations from the exhibit, offering students and scholars of both history and design a resource as valuable as it is visually compelling. Arranged in the order in which they were first presented in Paris, readers can now consider the unfolding of the visual argument that Du Bois himself sought to make to exhibition visitors over a century ago.

Prior to the publication of this volume, those interested in viewing the images were required to consult the website of the Library of Congress, which released a full set of digitized images in early 2014. Among those who took note were reporters for online venues Slate and Quartz, and Smithsonian magazine, thus collectively prompting a flurry of attention on social media—a public audience reconvened in digital space. But to see the visualizations reproduced in print is to experience their vivid colors and striking designs anew. The images are divided...