Library of Congress

A transatlantic call for liberation

TitleDistribution of the Negro Race, from The Georgia Negro
CreatorW.E.B. Du Bois
Year1900
Dimensions71 × 56 cm
LocationLibrary of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
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The first plate of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Georgia Negro: A Social Study proclaims that “The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line.” When Du Bois wrote those words the twentieth century was just beginning, yet he realized the importance of making anti-racist struggle a prominent cause for the new century.

Du Bois's study The Georgia Negro was one of two sociological studies that Du Bois created, with the assistance of students and alumni from Atlanta University, for the American Negro Exhibit at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900. The purpose of the study was to highlight the accomplishments and improvements made by African American individuals and communities. Du Bois’s message of African American progress stood in contrast to many of the other exhibitions at the Paris Exposition which celebrated imperial exploitation justified by racist ideology ().

This particular map, the first plate of The Georgia Negro study, situates Georgia within the broader context of the transatlantic slave trade. With this map, Du Bois made a powerful connection between the experiences of black Georgians and the descendants of enslaved Africans across the globe. It draws a very different global geography of Africa's relationship to the world than the one that was maintained by most imperial, racist maps, which portrayed Africa as the potential site for white exploitation.

Bibliography

Battle-Baptiste and Rusert ed. 2018
Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert, ed. W.E.B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America, The Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, (Princeton Architectural Press, 2018).