W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America [Hardcover]

The colorful charts, graphs, and maps presented at the 1900 Paris Exposition by famed sociologist and black rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois offered a view into the lives of black Americans, conveying a literal and figurative representation of the color line. From advances in education to the lingering effects of slavery, these prophetic infographics—beautiful in design and powerful in content— make visible a wide spectrum of black experience. W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits collects the complete set of graphics in full color for the first time, making their insights and innovations available to a contemporary imagination. As Maria Popova wrote, these data portraits shaped how Du Bois himself thought about sociology, informing the ideas with which he set the world ablaze three years later in The Souls of Black Folk. Whitney Battle-Baptiste is the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Center at University of Massachusetts Amherst and an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology. She is the author ofBlack Feminist Archaeology.

Britt Rusert is an assistant professor in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst and author ofFugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture. W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits is an exquisitely designed, highly informative, and eminently teachable study-a testament to Du Bois's seemingly boundless innovation, not only as a theorist of race but as a visual architect and data artist. Battle-Baptiste and Rusert have given us a gift in this volume: a feast for the eyes, a feast for the intellect.
- Leigh Raiford, University of California, Berkeley, author of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle You can't know where you're going if you don't know where you come from. W.E.B. Du Bois's Data Portraits offers a comprehensive view of issues Black Americans have faced, frolsĒ