In 1900, W. E. B. Du Bois helped assemble an exhibition in Paris that asked visitors to look at Black American life through evidence. Charts showed education, work, property and the changes since emancipation. Photographs showed people whose faces and clothes contradicted racist caricature. Twenty years later, his story “The Comet” removed nearly everyone from New York and left a Black bank messenger to discover what might happen when the social order vanished with them. One project examined the present through measurements; the other used catastrophe to test whether the future would become more just.
The two projects have different purposes and should not be made into one undifferentiated work. Yet together they show how Du Bois used form to dispute the limits placed on Black life. A chart can make visible change that prejudice refuses to acknowledge. A speculative story can stage a break with familiar rules and then ask why those rules return. The National Museum of African American History and Culture calls Du Bois a proto-Afrofuturist in its account of the Paris graphics, and the Smithsonian's account of early speculative writing identifies “The Comet” as an early example. The term came much later. His work gives it a history without requiring him to have claimed the name.
Du Bois was a sociologist, writer, editor and activist born in 1868. The breadth of his career can make any single work look like an illustration of a preexisting public reputation. The Paris charts and “The Comet” deserve a more exact reading. Both depend on decisions about what an audience is allowed to see, and both make the viewer or reader confront how supposedly natural racial divisions are maintained.
Figures for the world to see
The 1900 Paris Exposition presented technological and cultural achievements to international audiences. Du Bois and collaborators used that forum to represent African American life at a time when racist pseudoscience still claimed authority. The Library of Congress describes his organization of 363 photographs into albums and explains the purpose of the display: empirical evidence could challenge claims that Black people were inherently inferior. Portraits of varied individuals undermined the idea of a single racial “type.” The exhibition used the fair's own language of progress to argue over who counted as evidence of it.
Du Bois's hand-drawn charts did another kind of work. A Library of Congress account identifies subjects including property, education, income, population and occupations. These are categories through which governments and institutions have long judged communities. Du Bois put them to an opposing purpose. Rather than treating Black Americans as a deficit to be explained, he documented work, learning and economic achievement in the years after emancipation.
The visual form matters. A number printed in a paragraph asks a reader to hold it in memory. A diagram places relationships on one surface, making comparison faster and harder to avoid. The Library's record for a chart of occupations and income identifies work and pay by sex as well as income by family. Such a chart is not a timeless portrait of an entire people. It describes categories and a particular period, using the available data and assumptions of its makers. Its force comes from rendering a historical claim visible enough to argue with.
The exhibit was collaborative. The Library of Congress's later account names Du Bois alongside Thomas Calloway and Daniel A. P. Murray in the larger undertaking. Murray's bibliographic work and the photographs assembled by others were not decorative supplements to a lone author's charts. Together the materials gave visitors several routes through evidence: faces, books, numbers, maps and diagrams. Du Bois's role was substantial, but an accurate account preserves the work of the people and institutions around him.
It also preserves the display's limits. A fair staged for an international audience is not a neutral place of recognition. Visitors moved through national exhibitions shaped by imperial power and unequal access to public speech. Du Bois used that setting to put a counterargument in front of them. The graphics did not abolish racism because a viewer had seen a statistic. They made the refusal to recognize Black achievement more difficult to disguise as ignorance.
The future in these charts is an inference, not an illustrated destination. They show a society changing after slavery and challenge an audience to imagine what Black Americans could do with fuller rights and resources. This is one reason the museum's “proto-Afrofuturist” description is productive when kept precise. The charts use measurement to open possibility. They do not depict rockets or claim that statistical progress alone will deliver liberation.
A city emptied by the sky
“The Comet,” published in Du Bois's 1920 book Darkwater, makes a different kind of argument. Its full text is available through CUNY's edition. The story begins with Jim, a Black messenger at a New York bank, already treated as socially invisible. His employer sends him into a dangerous lower vault to retrieve records. That assignment saves his life when a comet's deadly gas crosses the city. The disaster creates a savage irony: the institution values its records enough to send Jim below ground, yet values him so little that the risk seems acceptable.
The vault is a carefully chosen place to survive. It contains the bank's old books and hidden gold, symbols of what the institution protects. Jim emerges into a city where the people who used and controlled those assets have died. His first understanding of the catastrophe comes not from a scientist but from bodies in the bank and a newspaper warning on the street. Du Bois makes knowledge arrive in fragments. Jim must build a picture of what happened while he is frightened, hungry and alone.
This opening ties the speculative event to ordinary racial order. Before the comet, Jim's work is recognized only when someone needs a task done. After it, he enters spaces from which he would have been excluded. He eats food from a hotel and remembers that he would not have been served there the day before. The end of the world changes access in an instant, but that change depends on almost everyone else being dead. Du Bois refuses the comforting idea that personal merit alone can overcome a system designed to deny it.
The empty streets are not presented as pure freedom. The sight of dead children, workers and wealthy residents is terrible. Jim fears that if anyone finds him beside the bank's money and corpses, he could be blamed. This thought comes before he fully grasps the city's silence. Even a disaster vast enough to kill the bank's directors cannot immediately erase his knowledge of how racial accusation works. He carries the old social world in his expectations.
Jim searches for other survivors and finds a wealthy white woman, Julia, alive because she had been in a dark room developing photographs of the comet. The plot gives each survivor a technical enclosure: he was in a vault; she was in a photographic darkroom. Their survival is neither a reward for virtue nor a sign that they were destined to found a new humanity. It comes from the particular spaces they occupied when the gas arrived. That contingency keeps the story from becoming a simple tale of chosen people.
Two routes across New York
When Jim and Julia meet, they first respond to the fact that another person is alive. Only then do they register racial difference. Du Bois describes the moment as a brief suspension of habits, followed by recognition of the distance their society has constructed between them. Julia has scarcely imagined a man like Jim as someone who might rescue her. Jim knows how little regard she would have given him before the catastrophe. Their meeting is therefore neither innocent nor hopeless. The event changes their dependence on each other, while memory keeps the old hierarchy near.
Jim insists on going to Harlem before helping Julia search for her father. The choice interrupts any reading in which the white woman's family automatically becomes the center of the story. He has people of his own to seek, and the trip carries him through a neighborhood whose dead are described with intimacy. When he returns, he says that he has lost everyone. The loss is not a general symbol of humanity. It is his particular family and community, and the story gives it time before the pair resume their search.
The city becomes a map of inequality after death. Jim and Julia drive through streets that had separated them by class and race, and the infrastructure of modern New York remains all around them. Cars, elevators, telephones, cables and rockets offer possible ways to search or signal. Yet the machines cannot decide how the survivors will treat each other. The same technological city that seems capable of connecting distant people had maintained profound social distance between two residents standing near one another.
Their attempt to use a telephone exchange makes that tension visible. Julia calls into a silent network. Its apparatus still exists, but the people who would answer have vanished. Later, a cable office offers another route toward the wider world. The story lingers over these systems because the crisis is not only whether a signal can be sent. It is whether the human relations behind a signal can be rebuilt. Technology without an answering community is a structure full of absence.
Jim's presence unsettles Julia even after he has helped her. She briefly flees from him, then returns when the empty streets prove more frightening. The scene refuses an easy sequence in which dependence instantly cures prejudice. She may need his care and skill while still carrying fantasies of danger about a Black man. Du Bois lets the contradiction remain on the page. A future relation cannot be declared into existence by one moment of shared peril.
The roof and the interruption
On a rooftop after nightfall, Jim and Julia begin to imagine a life beyond their former social positions. The city below is dark, its familiar order suspended. Jim's mind reaches toward lost histories of Black sovereignty, and Julia thinks about their possible role in a world that might have to begin again. The scene approaches a founding myth, but its language is unstable. They see one another through grand symbols even as actual grief, race and class remain close.
Du Bois then breaks the possibility with a car horn. Julia's father and fiancé have survived outside New York, and rescuers arrive. The sound is almost comic in its abruptness. It punctures the roof's elevated language and restores the ordinary world in one harsh cue. The fiancé sees Jim and immediately suspects him of harming Julia. Her father offers money and the possibility of a job, as if Jim's survival and rescue can be settled through patronage. Other voices in the crowd turn toward lynching. What looked like a cosmic reset lasted only until familiar authority returned.
The ending does not give Jim the consoling prize of Julia's admiration. She thanks him but turns away. He stands with the money her father gave him and a baby's cap he found in Harlem. Then his wife appears carrying their dead child. The scene redirects the emotional center from a near-romance between two symbolic survivors to Jim's continuing family and its loss. The child cannot be replaced by an abstract promise about a new human race. Nor can Jim's wife be erased from the story because the rooftop briefly suggested another possibility.
This ending is one of Du Bois's most exact choices. A weaker catastrophe tale might let the comet destroy prejudice and leave the survivors to build an ideal community. Here the false ending arrives first, on the roof, and the real ending tests it. The social order survives enough to reassert violence, hierarchy and indifference. Yet Jim's reunion with his wife also refuses total despair. His family has not vanished, though its grief is immense. The future remains open, but it will have to be made in the company of history rather than outside it.
Evidence and invention
The Paris exhibition and “The Comet” use different kinds of proof. A chart asks the viewer to accept that a recorded condition can be measured and compared. A speculative story asks the reader to imagine a condition that never occurred and observe how people respond. Neither form is self-sufficient. Data can be ignored or misused; fiction can simplify lives into symbols. Du Bois took both risks because the dominant picture of Black life was already a fiction supported by institutional power.
His work at Paris confronted that false picture with photographs and graphics. In “The Comet,” he took away nearly every institution of the city and watched which assumptions remained inside his characters. The difference is instructive. The chart works by placing facts before the viewer; the story works by removing the familiar world around its people. Both make the reader ask why a more just arrangement is difficult to see, even when evidence or catastrophe has created an opening.
There is a direct line of inquiry here for later Afrofuturist work, but no need to claim that Du Bois invented the movement by himself. The museum's retrospective category acknowledges a lineage while preserving historical distance. Du Bois wrote in the early twentieth century, amid Jim Crow, imperial exhibition culture and the rise of modern mass media. His particular inventions belong to those circumstances. They also remain sharp for readers who ask how public facts can change policy, or how a future imagined after disaster might reproduce the very inequalities it promised to escape.
Krull's Stockholm editorial with creatives connected to the Democratic Republic of the Congo asks who has power to picture a future through speculative fashion imagery. Du Bois's answer takes two forms: make Black achievement visible in the present, and make the reader feel the fragility of a future that changes only the scenery. In Paris, he gave an international public evidence it could no longer honestly claim not to see. In “The Comet,” he gave readers a city so empty that its racial rules should have died, then showed how quickly people brought them back.
The charts remain artifacts of argument, and the story remains a work of art. Neither offers a finished future. Their value lies in the pressure they place on the present. A number can challenge the claim that nothing has changed. A catastrophe can reveal how much has not. Du Bois understood that freedom would require more than new circumstances. It would require people to change what they were prepared to recognize in one another.