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The first African-American to earn a doctorate, he was appointed professor of Sociology at Atlanta University in 1897. In this same year, he published in The Atlantic his first general appeal, “The Strivings of Negro People.” Connecting his singular person with the many African-Americans, he spoke to his own experience of being marked “black” in a world bifurcated by the racism of “white.”

Not color, the roots of the division were “slavery …, the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice.” Not color, but “being a problem is a strange experience, – peculiar even for one who has never been anything else … like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.”

Racism created for Du Bois, sociologist and activist, “a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One feels his two-ness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”⁴¹⁰

In 1900, du Bois was invited to design and present his Exhibit of American Negroes in the Pavilion of Social Economy at the Universal Exposition in Paris. For this, he created a beautiful series of tableaux of a kind that might today be called infographics, transposing the data that he had captured in tabular form in his sociological research,⁴¹¹ into visual form.

Here, the reality of Negro life was complicated by all manner of lines, and not just the “color line.” In accompanying photographs, the exhibition depicted African-Americans in the multidimensionality of their strivings. In a connection that could not be accidental for someone so knowledgeable about imaging, Du Bois had his picture taken by Paul Nadar, son of one of the greats of photography, Félix Nadar. The father was still alive and working with his son in their Paris studio.^§MS2.2.2c

“I have stepped within the Veil,” said Du Bois three years later in his Souls of Black People, “raising it that you may view faintly its deeper recesses,” and so revealing “the strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of the Twentieth Century.”⁴¹² Strange meant more complicated than a single dividing line, and this is what he showed visually in the tableaux he had made for the Universal Exposition.

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⁴¹⁰ W.E.B. Du Bois, 1897, “Strivings of the Negro People,” The Atlantic (August).

⁴¹¹ W.E.B. Du Bois, 1906, The Health and Physique of the Negro American: Report of a Social Study Made under the Direction of Atlanta University, Atlanta, GA: Atlanta University Press.

⁴¹² W.E.B. Du Bois, 1903, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches, Chicago, IL: A.A. McClurg & Co, pp. viii, vii.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 155–156. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

W.E.B. Du Bois’ “Exhibit of American Negroes” §AS1.4.6b