At the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris—a global trade fair which welcomed the new century—visitors enjoyed attractions like a giant kaleidoscope in the “Palace of Optics” and exotic marine life in a 2,368 foot aquarium. One booth, designed by historian, sociologist, and prominent civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois, was a collection of hand-drawn infographics illustrating data related to black life in post-Civil War America. Du Bois expressed this information in a series of colorful charts —today we’d call them data visualizations—that illustrated everything from household incomes to the number of existing black-owned newspapers. In a new exhibit at London’s House of Illustration, all 63 graphics created by DuBois (and a team of students from his sociology laboratory at the historically black college Atlanta University, now known as Clark Atlanta University) are on display—a first for the United Kingdom, and a reflection of the relevance of Du Bois’s work in the present day.

W. E. B. Du Bois: Charting Black Lives celebrates DuBois’s innovative approach to advocacy. The creatively designed graphs and charts used bold colors and nontraditional formatting to draw attention to the harrowing statistics of America’s institutional racism and inequality and how these systems affected black citizens.

“The exposition was essentially a celebration of French imperialism, and included displays of ‘living villages’ where black people were shown derogatively as trophies of the empire,” says Katie McCurrach, co-curator of the exhibit, over email. “Du Bois’s display of scientific data was a direct challenge to this degrading presentation, and was a completely new approach to refuting racism, using statistical data to (as Du Bois described it) ‘give, in as systematic and compact a form as possible, the history and present condition of a large group of human beings.'”

These charts, which were a radical statement at the dawn of the 20th century, demonstrate DuBois’s awareness of his international audience, and how striking visuals would make the achievements of black Americans, despite society’s race-based limitations, plain.

“Interestingly, there seems to be the repetition of the colors red, black and green—these colors later became those of the Pan-African flag, an emblem of black pride and liberation,” McCurrach says. “Du Bois became known as the father of modern Pan-Africanism, a movement advocating for solidarity between those of African descent worldwide.”

The early Pan-Africanist’s charts also use a curious spiral to display data, as opposed to the more traditional bar shape; this was not a conventional way of expressing information, but likely was DuBois’s answer to cramming crucial figures—too large for one page—into the constraints of the page’s borders.

“We were keen to show the full set of 63 charts, as they work together in series to build up an argument—without the full set we might have lost the complex picture of black lives in the U.S.A. that Du Bois had carefully put together,” McCurrach says. She and her collaborator, co-curator Paul Goodwin of the University of the Arts, London, looked at photographs of the original exhibit, which revealed DuBois’s use of flip frames, which displayed his data visualizations like posters. They adopted the same design scheme to honor the sociologist’s original choices, and to ensure that the large 56-by-72-foot reproduced prints would fit in the House of Illustration’s gallery space.