In 1893, Ida B. Wells published a pamphlet titled “The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition.” The expo, which lasted for six months, was held in Chicago and was meant to chart the trajectory of the Americas in the four hundred years since Columbus had arrived. Though a handful of African-Americans had individual exhibits at the fair, there was none specifically dedicated to the history or the accomplishments of African-Americans as a people. Wells secured contributions for the pamphlet from Frederick Douglass, the educator and journalist Irvine Garland Penn, and the lawyer and activist Ferdinand Lee Barnett. Together with Wells, they wrote about the ways in which black life could enrich the fair’s official version of American history, which, as Wells noted in the pamphlet’s introduction, had rendered invisible the contributions of black people to the American might that the fair was intended to celebrate. “The wealth created by their industry has afforded to the white people of this country the leisure essential to their great progress in education, art, science, industry and invention,” she wrote. Wells and Douglass distributed the pamphlet at the fair’s popular Haitian Pavilion, and, eventually, the expo’s organizers held a “Negro Day.” Wells declined to participate.

Seven years later, another World’s Fair was held, in Paris. This time, the African-American lawyer Thomas Calloway worked with the expo’s American delegation, and he invited W. E. B. Du Bois to oversee an exhibition on black life. Du Bois was teaching sociology at Atlanta University, which later became Clark Atlanta University; in four months, he and his curatorial team put together a multimedia presentation that testified to the eclecticism and resilience of their community. They conceived the exhibit as a sort of cabinet of curiosities, full of juxtapositions and visual echoes, in which you could wander and drift, zeroing in on whatever caught your eye: a small statue of Frederick Douglass; a bibliography of African-American writings, containing fourteen hundred titles; four bound volumes of more than three hundred and fifty patents secured by African-American inventors. All of these items orbited an argument about the capacity of African-Americans to withstand, and fight, injustice, with pride, dignity, and joy.

“Black Lives 1900: W. E. B. Du Bois at the Paris Exposition,” a new book edited by Julian Rothenstein and out in November, from Redstone Press, reprints selections from more than three hundred and fifty photographs and around thirty statistical graphics that Du Bois and his curators assembled for what was called the “Exhibition of American Negroes.” Like Wells, who had used photography to force Americans into confronting the horrors of lynching, Du Bois understood the role that visual culture could play in anti-racist organizing. For the “Exhibition of American Negroes,” he wanted images that conveyed the everyday integrity of black life: a sewing class at Howard University, a corner in the home of African-American teachers, decorated with a flag, a bookshelf, and two rifles. There are photos of baseball teams, soldiers, farmers, shopkeepers, people working in laboratories. The pictures are deliberately ordinary, even banal.

The most arresting visuals in the exhibition were handmade charts and graphics that illustrated the evolution of black life since emancipation. They featured facts and figures about population growth and political participation, educational attainment and financial clout. A line depicting the urban and rural populations of Georgia in 1890 breaks into a sudden spiral, resembling an elegant snake. Simple bar graphs are presented askew. There’s a surprising amount of open space, as though viewers are being asked to fill in the history and context that hasn’t been spelled out for them. The color schemes—predominantly red, green, yellow, and blue, with the occasional pink or purple—convey a kind of playful optimism.

Du Bois described the materials that he had selected as “an honest straightforward exhibit of a small nation of people, picturing their life and development without apology or gloss, and above all made by themselves.” He added, “In a way, this marks an era in the history of the Negroes of America.” The exhibition won awards in Paris, and it then toured the United States, where Americans were beginning to regard the decades since the Civil War as a discrete epoch.

Du Bois’s charts and graphics return to the public consciousness every few years, in part because there’s something so unexpected about them. Just last year, the W. E. B. Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Princeton Architectural Press published “W.E.B. Du Bois’ Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America.” As the design scholar Jason Forrest has argued, in a series of essays on the data visualizations’ craft and design, one of the reasons for their enduring appeal is the contemporary viewer’s surprise that they look so modern. It’s easy to assume that Du Bois and his team aspired to make art; the graphics suggest the front page of USA Today, if it were reimagined by the Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich. But the informational graphics that Du Bois and his team crafted followed early-twentieth-century approaches to visualizing data. The results display resourcefulness, creativity, and a commitment to communicating their truths clearly and directly.

In “Black Lives 1900,” Rothenstein seeks to emphasize the relevance of Du Bois’s work through juxtaposition: materials from the original exhibition are interspersed with excerpts from Du Bois’s own writings and more recent remarks from writers including Maya Angelou and Ta-Nehisi Coates. These interstitial selections seem intended to conjure a continuum of black voices, or perhaps to argue that the insurmountable prejudices of Du Bois’s day linger in the present. The connections can feel heavy-handed; the book is best when it leaves room for the reader to reflect on what Du Bois and his spectators might have seen or thought in their own time.

Thirty-five years after the Paris Exposition, Du Bois published “Black Reconstruction in America.” In it, he imagines what might have been had the ruling class not exploited the racial divisions between poor whites and former slaves after the Civil War. Sifting through the Paris materials, one can find the seeds for this later project. The missed opportunity of Reconstruction, Du Bois argues, was that these two dispossessed groups had failed to recognize their common plight. Something else was possible. For a spell, black life had flourished, and he had the evidence: a portrait of a young woman grinning to herself, and radiant charts that indicated a growing slice of the pie.