(bluesy retro music) (horse hooves thuds) - [Narrator 1] W.E.B.

Du Bois returned to Europe less than a decade after his retreat from Berlin to take part in the World's Fair.

(crowd chattering) - This was a time where different societies interact and see the best of the best of what folks were inventing, and creating, and producing.

- [Narrator 2] An extraordinary event that took place over six months that drew nearly 50 million people.

- Du Bois curates and assembles these albums of Black American life.

This beautiful exhibition of African American progress from the Emancipation Proclamation, until that moment in 1900, it was a counter narrative and a disruption of how African Americans were portrayed in the media at that time.

- Then it also directly upsets, throws on its head all of this photographic evidence that eugenics White supremacists were using to prove African American and Blacks innate inferiority.

- [Narrator 3] Du Bois understood very clearly how important it was for Black people to have control of the narratives that were being written about us at that time.

(bluesy retro music) - [Narrator 4] He takes publicly available census data and creates these beautiful visual displays of charts and graphs showing Black land ownership from 1865 to 1900; Black population statistics, black educational attainment.

He understood the power of aesthetics.

- "It was an immediate success.

"The American press, White and Colored, "was full of commendation.

"And in the end, the exhibit received a grand prize, "and I as its author a gold medal."