Reading Assignment - Visualizing Black America: Qingyu Cai
Du Bois gave a visual history lesson on the Atlantic slave trade through the drawings that he and his team prepared for the exhibition. The designs are unique and important in the sense of social justice. Below are the three plates I have chosen in his collections: Distribution of Negroes in the United States, Negro Population of Georgia by Counties, and Value of Land Owned by Georgia Negroes. In the Distribution of Negroes in the United States, the author combines numbers with geography by using various colors with obvious contrast to illustrate the distribution of the population density. And the same method applied to the Negro Population Drawing to indicate different numbers of the population in various counties and how they were distributed across Georgia. Both are pretty clean and simple, and color is the only feature emphasized in these two drawings to indicate the population distribution in a geographical form. The Value of Land Owned by Georgia Negroes drawing uses only one color. Instead, by visualizing the number of values, which are represented by money bags, through various sizes, the drawing vividly conveys the information of value increase.