More than a century after W.E.B. Du Bois presented photographs and data charts documenting Black American life at the 1900 Paris Exposition, his vision has found a new home in Atlanta’s West End, at the African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta, known as ADAMA.
“W.E.B. Du Bois Revisited: Reimagining Du Bois’ Exhibit of American Negroes” pairs historical photographs taken by Atlanta photographer Thomas E. Askew with contemporary portraits and updated data visualizations. The exhibit, which first debuted at Clark Atlanta University in February, is now on view at ADAMA for approximately two weeks.
The project began as part of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s annual Black History Month series. According to Miller, it was Suggs, a veteran reporter at the AJC, who reached out to her to handle the photography after Donastorg pitched the concept.
“We’re never going to have a story that says Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize or Rosa Parks sat on the back of the bus,” Suggs said. “We’re going to have stories about the talented tenth, about double consciousness, about small things that you probably never heard of or heard glimpses of and didn’t know.”
The idea came from Mirtha Donastorg, a business reporter at the AJC. Donastorg said she had been reading Du Bois’ work and was struck by how little attention had been paid to its Atlanta-specific content.
“About half of those charts and photographs focused on Atlanta and Georgia, and there had never been an exploration or revisiting of the Atlanta data and charts,” Donastorg said. “I wanted to see what these look like with contemporary data, what it looks like with a contemporary look at Atlanta.”
The work on the project began in December of 2025. All of the historical photographs from Du Bois’ original 1900 Paris exhibit were taken by Askew, a local Black photographer from Atlanta. Most subjects in those images remain unidentified.
“If you look at the cut line, it will say a man, or a boy, a Black boy,” Suggs said. “No names are attached. We don’t know if they’re doctors, we don’t know if they’re lawyers, we don’t know if they’re pharmacists. But we do know they represented a certain aspect of Black beauty, and that’s what we wanted to recreate.”
Miller said choosing contemporary subjects was a blend of intention and instinct. Some pairings, including Clark Atlanta University President George T. French alongside a portrait of Du Bois himself, were planned from the start. Others took shape only after she had shot her subjects and then searched the Library of Congress archives for historical counterparts.
“For a lot of the reference photos, a lot of them didn’t have names, so we just kind of paired up based on how we felt like they connected within contemporary subjects,” Miller said.
She said the goal was to represent the full range of contemporary Atlanta.
“I just kind of wanted to find people that represent contemporary Atlanta, and that’s from doctors to scholars, entrepreneurs, artists,” Miller said. “Kind of finding different people that reflect the people Du Bois wanted to share in the past and what contemporary Atlanta looks like right now.”
Photo by Noah Washington/The Atlanta Voice
The land on which ADAMA sits formally belonged to Clark College, one of two historic institutions, alongside Atlanta University, that merged in 1988 to form Clark Atlanta University. It was at Atlanta University where W.E.B. Du Bois spent more than two decades as a faculty member in the history and economics departments, conducting research on Black American life and popularizing the concept of the ‘talented tenth.’
For Pecou, that layered history makes the Pittsburgh neighborhood more than just a convenient address. It is, he says, a kind of sacred ground, a place where Black intellectual life, Black commerce, and Black community have long intersected, and where ADAMA’s presence feels less like a new arrival than a continuation.
“To be able to bring this exhibition here, to be able to tell this story, to expose this community to this history, many folks in this neighborhood may not even realize that history and that connection,” Pecou said. “I felt like it was an important and really powerful message.”
Pecou is also among the contemporary subjects featured in the exhibit, photographed alongside an unnamed historical portrait from Askew’s collection. He said his only regret is that the run is short.
“My only regret is that the exhibition won’t be longer,” Pecou said. “It’s kind of a pop-up thing. We had a space, and we were able to accommodate.”
Miller said she hopes visitors leave with a sense of both distance traveled and connection across time.
“I want them to think about the past and the present,” she said. “We’ve done so much in just these 126 years, despite so much. I want them to kind of look back and reflect on what the people before us did to set us up for now, and to think about themselves in the present.”
Suggs said that the connection between eras revealed itself most powerfully when the team saw the old and new photographs side by side for the first time.
“We never set out to match any of these photographs with people,” he said. “But when Natrice took all the photographs, and we sat down and looked at them, we were like, oh my God. It just kind of shows you how Black people are almost timeless. We all still kind of have these similarities. And I think that this shows the connection that we’re all always going to be connected.”
