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

"Black America in Technicolor" is what may come to mind as one studies the vividly colored and creatively designed maps, bar graphs, pie charts, and other shapes that W. E. B. Du Bois and his collaborators used to represent Black America at the Exposition Universelle in Paris at the opening of the twentieth century, now assembled and published for the first time by Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert in W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America. So accustomed are we to viewing social scientific data in black and white that we can forget that the originals, in some cases, were vibrantly rendered in the full spectrum of colors. But as the editors and contributors—Aldon Morris, Mabel O. Wilson, and Silas Munro—make clear in their short but effective contextual essays and commentaries, the choice of hues was only one part of the Du Bois team's strategy of data representation. No less important to its members were the configuration and layout of the numerical and statistical information, fully cognizant of the fact that to challenge hardened perceptions, like racial ones, the researcher must appeal to the senses as much to the intellect. Hence, their use of a variety of geometric shapes, angles, planes, symbols, lettering, and fonts in their "infographics." The results are exceedingly striking visual representations of data that one has to literally see to appreciate, especially those that Du Bois's team constructed to convey Black migrations and measures of social progress in literacy, landownership, and school enrollment. Our contemporary visual renderings of data look drab and flatly unimaginative in comparison. A firm believer in the independent power of empirical data Du Bois may well have been, but he also understood, like any Parisian boutiquier, that there is power in presentation.

The volume contains reproductions of all sixty-three "data visualizations" that were part of the American Negro Exhibit, and are divided into the categories that Du Bois's "design team" chose: The Georgia Negro: A Social Study and A Series of Statistical Charts Illustrating the Condition of the Descendants of Former African Slaves Now in Residence in the United States of America. Accompanying each plate are informative and suggestive remarks by Munro, describing how the Du Bois team's visual innovations anticipate later artistic movements. As the editors and contributors note, the aim of the Du Bois team was to present Black America at the state, national, and international levels, so as to move exhibit attendees to locate Black America in global history and processes, including their particular experience of racial enslavement.

Also included in the volume is a reproduction of a photo of the exhibit area of the American Negro Exhibit, which shows the framed and mounted infographics along the back and side walls, as well as those in double-sided wing frames. The photo also reveals the other "eclectic set of objects, images, and texts" that Du Bois's team assembled in the exhibit area,

including framed photographic portraits of prominent African American leaders and politicians; tools, harnesses, and other agricultural products from black industrial schools; a bronze statuette of Frederick Douglass; and an on-site collection of over two hundred and fifty publications authored by African Americans and compiled by Daniel Alexander Payne Murray.

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The photo, along with the editors' inventory of the archive that the Du Bois team used to represent Black America, allow the reader to imagine how white European and North American passers-by, on-lookers, and the curious received that information and what they later related to others about it.

We have no way of knowing if the committee that awarded Du Bois a gold medal for coordinating the American Negro Exhibit at the Exposition Universelle did so because its members were genuinely convinced of the central points of the exhibit's designers: that Black American...