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This talk will tell the story of W. E. B. Du Bois's entry onto the international stage with his participation in the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, France. Traumatic events in his own life the year before had convinced Du Bois that he could no longer remain a 'calm, cool, and detached scientist' in the face of social injustice and racial violence. The exhibit which he curated for the Paris Exposition demonstrated for the first time his new-found commitment to public intellectual leadership.

Du Bois and his students from Atlanta University presented the data which they had collected in a unique visual style, creating a series of arrestingly colorful charts, graphs, and maps. The deliberately modernism of these data visualizations not only drew in the viewer but also challenged the prevailing racist attitudes of the era which categorized non-white populations as backward and doomed to second class citizenship. The data on display presented a story of Black success in the generation which had passed since the abolition of American slavery, and the way it was presented situated Black Americans at the heart of modernity.

Du Bois's data visualizations were a sensation in 1900, winning awards and gaining international acclaim, and they remain a potent symbol of Du Bois's brilliance as a public intellectual. This talk will explore how they set the tone for what Du Bois's career became in the 20th Century, and what they can still teach us about the ways he approached both scholarship and activism.

Bio

Adam Holmes is the Assistant Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he has worked since 2018. The UMass Amherst library, also named for Du Bois, is the home of the W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, a vast collection of correspondence, photographs, manuscripts and other materials from Du Bois's long life. The Center exists as a space for the activation of this collection and for the interpretation of Du Bois's work and thought more broadly. Through lectures, concerts, panels, reading groups and more the Center maintains an active calendar of weekly events both in-person and online. It also supports groundbreaking scholarship through its summer fellowship program.

Adam's academic background encompasses History as well as American Studies. He obtained a degree in the former from The University of Manchester and in the latter from King’s College London. Before arriving at Umass, Adam spent several years working for the National Literacy Trust in the United Kingdom, running programs aimed at improving the lives of citizens in the country's most underserved communities. His own research on Du Bois focuses on Du Bois's lifelong efforts to resist and correct distortions of American history, particularly those related to slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.