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

"as visually arresting as it is informative."—The Boston Globe

"Du Bois's bold colors and geometric shapes were decades ahead of modernist graphic design in America.”—Fast Company's Co.Design

The first complete publication of W.E.B. Du Bois's colorful charts, graphs, and maps presented at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Famed sociologist, writer, and black rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois exhibited a series of groundbreaking data visualizations at the 1900 Paris Exposition, offering a view into the lives of black Americans. His prophetic infographics convey a literal and figurative representation of what he famously referred to as "the color line," collected here in full color for the first time.

A landmark collection for social and graphic design history. Beautiful in design and powerful in content, these data portraits make visible a wide spectrum of black experience. From advances in education to the lingering effects of slavery, their insights and innovations remain informative and provocative to today's contemporary audience. Far ahead of their time, they also shaped, as Maria Popova wrote, 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."

An essential companion to W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk.

Includes contributions from Aldon Morris, Silas Munro, and Mabel O. Wilson.