This post by Jason Forrest, Data Visualization Designer at McKinsey & Company, is part of Tableau’s #VisualizeDiversity series celebrating Black History Month. For further reading, check out this post from earlier this month with Tableau Foundation’s newest partners, PolicyLink, on their work with the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color (ABMoC), a grassroots network of over 200 organizations and community leaders across nine states.

W.E.B. Du Bois is predominantly known as a scholar, activist, and author, but he was also a data visualization innovator. Born in 1868, Du Bois was the first African-American to receive a doctorate from Harvard, then studied and traveled in Europe before returning to the United States to focus on a career in the social sciences. Desperate to help the plight of the African-American population, Du Bois set out to collect the compelling evidence needed for cultural change, but quickly realized that something more than reporting statistical data was needed to change a lifetime of cultural prejudice.

David Levering Lewis, in his excellent Pulitzer-prize winning Du Bois biography, explains: “More than any other American Sociologist during the decade after 1898, Du Bois undertook for a time the working out of an authentic objectivity in social science. [He] strove to avoid apriorism, to generalize cautiously, only after questionnaires, census records, government archives, cross-cultural data…had been digested.”



Left: W.E.B. Du Bois in Paris, 1900. Right: “The Exhibit of American Negroes” at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris.

In 1900, Du Bois had the opportunity to design and curate “The Exhibit of American Negroes” for the Exposition Universelle in Paris. He writes in his autobiography: “I wanted to set down its aim and method in some outstanding way, which would bring my work to the thinking world. The great World’s Fair at Paris was being planned and I thought I might put my findings into plans, charts and figures, so one might see what we were trying to accomplish.”

Du Bois’s visualizations for the Paris Exposition were innovative in two ways. First, his systematic approach to building a data-driven argument is powerful in its comprehension and scope and second, he took a unique approach with the graphical methods he used in his visualizations.