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Icons of Data

The spiral that tells a bigger story

In 1900, W. E. B. Du Bois and his colleagues used a striking red spiral to challenge what people thought they knew about Black life in Georgia. What the shape reveals — and hides.

12 October 2026 3 minute read
Icons of Data · Edition 05

Some numbers are so much bigger than the others that the chart becomes a bit awkward.

W. E. B. Du Bois had a solution.

He curled the biggest one into a spiral.

One very long red line

At the Paris Exposition in 1900, Du Bois and his collaborators from Atlanta University presented hand-drawn graphics about Black life in the United States.

They were showing an international audience something that racist stereotypes and national celebrations tended to ignore: evidence about real people, their circumstances and their achievements.

It was part of a much larger display of charts, photographs and books. The point wasn’t to turn people into statistics, but to challenge what other people claimed to know about them. Data had a rather important job to do.

One chart was titled City and Rural Population. 1890.

It compared where Black Georgians lived.

A green line, two shorter coloured turns, and then an enormous red coil.

The rural population takes up most of the drawing, just as it took up most of the total.

It’s not exactly a bar chart.

But it’s certainly not shy.

Original circa-1900 hand-drawn population infographic for Black Georgians in 1890. Three shorter coloured line segments represent city-size groups, while a long, tightly wound red spiral represents the much larger country-and-villages population. Printed figures surround the marks.
The Georgia Negro: City and Rural Population. 1890, attributed to W. E. B. Du Bois, created c. 1900 for the Paris Exposition. Digital reproduction: Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-33873. The Library reports no known restrictions on publication for this item; that is an item-level rights advisory, not an independent licence guarantee. Original JPEG reproduced without crop or editorial recolouring; exact historical title and data year preserved.

Unwind the argument

The coil represents the people the original calls those living in “the country and villages”.

The census recorded 858,815 Black residents of Georgia in 1890. The chart’s largest printed group is 734,952 in rural areas and villages — roughly 86% of that statewide total.

Modern bars could make that comparison easier to judge.

In Du Bois’s original, though, the spiral commands the page. The drawing’s sheer scale does part of the storytelling.

Modern horizontal bar comparison on a zero-based scale of Black Georgia residents in 1890: red country and villages 734,952, green cities over 10,000 78,139, yellow cities 2,500 to 5,000 37,699, and blue cities 5,000 to 10,000 8,025. The first group accounts for 85.6 per cent of the total 858,815.
The spiral, unwound: the four original population categories, now in descending order and measured from the same zero baseline. These are counts of people, not percentages; the 85.6% annotation is a calculation from 734,952 ÷ 858,815. Green, yellow, blue and red echo the historical plate's category colours without claiming an exact pigment match. Source: Du Bois's original Library of Congress image, independently cross-checked with Yale National Initiative and the 1890 U.S. Census total.

And that’s a choice worth noticing.

What the spiral hides

A line that turns and curls isn’t straightforward to measure against a straight one.

The colours help separate categories, and the printed numbers carry essential precision. Without those labels, the geometry alone is difficult to compare.

There’s another catch. The categories reflect 1890 definitions of cities and villages, not today’s idea of an urban neighbourhood. And a single census year is a snapshot, not evidence of why people moved.

Four-panel explanatory diagram: a long red line coils into a compact spiral; four coloured lines echo the original population groups; a prominently printed count of 734,952 shows how the figure supplies precision that shape cannot; and a final panel explains that the 1890 city-size definitions are historical and one year cannot establish migration trends.
Decode the Icon: how a long mark can fit on a page, how colour separates categories, why numeric labels still matter and what the census boundaries mean. The small spiral is a schematic illustration, not a measured recreation of the historic drawing or evidence of precise line-length proportionality.

TLDR

Du Bois’s team turned demographic figures into a striking argument that deserved attention.

The spiral made the imbalance impossible to miss.

The numbers made it possible to check.

One isn’t quite enough without the other.

Explore more Icons of Data →

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