W.E.B. Du Bois, Data Scientist: Motivation
“The world was thinking wrong about race, because it did not know. The ultimate evil was stupidity. The cure for it was knowledge based on scientific investigation.”
So said W.E.B. Du Bois, the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard and co-founder of the NAACP. Du Bois was a social scientist, artist, historian, philosopher, journalist, novelist, poet…
And data scientist.
It’s his role as a data scientist that I’d like to explore in this series of four posts.
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Du Bois was born in Haiti six years after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1868. He grew up peacefully in Massachusetts. The only African American student at Great Barrington High School, Du Bois was brilliant and popular. He graduated class valedictorian. Then Harvard.
He slowly started to realize he was different from other people. “I realized that some folks, a few, even several, actually considered my brown skin a misfortune,” he wrote. “Once or twice I became painfully aware that some human beings even thought it a crime.”
Du Bois was hired by the University of Pennsylvania in 1895 and moved to Philadelphia to conduct his research. He published his groundbreaking book, “The Philadelphia Negro,” which was one of the earliest examples of sociology as a statistically based social science.
Du Bois was selected to lead a team that created The Exhibit of American Negroes for the World’s Fair in Paris in 1900. The exhibit featured over 60 graphs, charts, and statistical graphics about the African-American population. The work is historically significant and, from a data science and visualization point of view, revolutionary.
I’ll explore this work in the next several posts, starting with the visualizations that set the context for the exhibit.
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Great visualizations make you think. When I first saw this chart I thought it screamed “progress!” But Du Bois was using it to describe that although the Emancipation Proclamation had “ended” slavery 37 years prior, cultural change was far from over.
The focus of the Paris exhibit is Georgia, which had the highest percentage of slaves per capita of any state. Note the STAR on the map—the bullseye of racism in 1900. Also notice, “The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line.” This quote is often cited today.
Du Bois uses this chart to explain to the world that the African American population in the United States rivals the population of Spain, Australia, Norway, Sweden, Belgium, and Switzerland.
Here, Du Bois shows the African American population as a proportion of the overall population in the United States. His work reveals the detail of this hidden country within a country, with data that compares these two populations almost 40 years after the end of slavery.
Thanks to Jason Forrest, director of interactive data visualization for McKinsey and Company, whose in-depth series on W.E.B. Du Bois on Nightingale helped inspire these posts.
