Sociologist and image-maker · Ghana
W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) was an American sociologist, historian and civil-rights leader, a founder of the NAACP and one of the most influential Black thinkers of the twentieth century. He is on this site for two reasons: his pioneering use of photography in the Exhibit of American Negroes at the 1900 Paris Exposition, and his last years in Ghana, where he became a citizen and died in 1963.
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Du Bois is known above all for his writing and activism — The Souls of Black Folk (1903), his decades at the head of the civil-rights movement, and his role in Pan-Africanism. Wikidata lists him as a photographer, and he did not take photographs professionally. But he understood earlier than almost anyone what photographs could argue.
For the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, Du Bois and Thomas J. Calloway assembled the Exhibit of American Negroes: hundreds of photographs of Black Americans — portraits of students, professionals and families, homes, schools and businesses — shown with hand-drawn charts of Black life in Georgia. The count varies by source, from about 360 to about 500 images, and the display, in the Palace of Social Economy, drew on the collection of the historian Daniel Murray. Many of the photographs were made by Black photographers such as Thomas E. Askew of Atlanta, whose portrait of the schoolteacher Mamie Westmorland comes from the Murray collection. Against the caricatures of the time, the exhibit presented Black Americans as they saw themselves. Sources disagree on whether the medal it won in Paris went to the exhibit or to Du Bois as compiler. The Library of Congress holds about 220 mounted photographs reportedly shown there, and Du Bois's four albums of "Types" and "Negro Life".
In 1961, at ninety-three, Du Bois moved to Ghana at the invitation of President Kwame Nkrumah to work on an Encyclopedia Africana. He became a Ghanaian citizen and died in Accra on 27 August 1963, the eve of the March on Washington. His home there is now a memorial centre.
How to look at the exhibit: do not read the pictures one at a time. Du Bois put portraits beside statistics and charts, so each person in a photograph stands for a fact about education, work or property; the argument is in the pairing. That reading is this site's own.
Where to see the work
The Library of Congress catalogue shows the albums and mounted photographs online; the Portland Art Museum's Color Line exhibition took the exhibit as its subject, and The Root and the Library's blogs have published picture essays. See our lists of Ghanaian photographers and African photographers.
