In the course of its work, the American Negro Exhibit of the Paris Exposition prepared for the use of its compilers a series of charts, maps, and other devices… to present to the world their social and economic condition.W.E.B. Du Bois — introductory note, Paris Exposition
In the course of its work, the Radical Imagination Du Bois Reappraisal prepared for the use of its visitors a series of charts, maps, and other devices… to present to the world what 126 years changed and what 126 years didn't.The reappraisal's companion note — Juneteenth 2026
The plates below are previews drafted for conversation. The production volume — The Du Bois Reappraisal, Volume I — sources every figure to a primary citation. No number that cannot be cited will appear.
Du Bois counted roughly 2,000 Negro collegians at any one time in 1900. The 2010 enrolled population peaked near three million — a thousandfold increase — before retracting nearly 700,000 by 2020.
From Brown to the present — every Court decision laid against the educational figure it was meant to alter. Where the law moved, where it did not, where the numbers moved on their own.
The Black-to-White per-household wealth ratio went from 0.263 in 1989 to 0.220 in 2025. The absolute gap more than doubled — from $468K to $1.20M, in real 2022 dollars. The series moves away from parity, not toward it.
The reappraisal ships through Juneteenth 2026. Each remaining plate carries the same condition: every figure cited to a primary source, every retraction visible in the visual grammar, every gap in the data named on the page.
Each plate uses the color discipline Du Bois set in 1900 — vermillion, gold, ink, cream — and the same insistence that the data be drawn plainly. The toolchain is open-source, set by Anthony Starks for the #DuBoisChallenge community: dubois-data-portraits, decksh, deck.
Whitney Battle-Baptiste's W.E.B. Du Bois's Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America (Princeton Architectural Press, 2018) is the lineage being claimed. The book's cover sits inside Radical Imagination's installations as the foundational AR image-tracking marker — the physical anchor for everything that comes after.
The reappraisal ships open. MIT-licensed. Forkable. Contributable.