The first time I saw the charts W.E.B. Du Bois made for the 1900 Paris Exposition, I assumed they were modern. Spiral graphs. Color-coded population maps. Crisp area charts in red, green, and yellow that look like something a designer would post on Dribbble next week. They sit in the Library of Congress under “The Exhibit of American Negroes,” and they look so contemporary that “Bauhaus before Bauhaus” has become the standard internet caption.
Then I read the small print. Du Bois drew them by hand. He was 32 years old. He had four months. He had a team of three: himself, Thomas Junius Calloway, and his Atlanta University students. And what they pulled together was 60-plus visualizations – a wall of evidence that stopped visitors in their tracks.
That image – a young sociologist turning rigorous note-taking into public-facing art under impossible deadlines – is what makes Du Bois worth studying for anyone trying to think clearly on the page. He is not in the journaling canon the way Leonardo or Franklin or Edison are. He should be. The first Black person to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard, a founding member of the NAACP, editor of Crisis, author of 21 books across a 60-year career – and all of it was scaffolded by notebooks that treated daily life as data and data as argument.
This is the part I want to share: how he worked on the page.
Key takeaway: Du Bois used his notebooks for three things at once – to collect evidence, to think visually before he wrote prose, and to defend his time. The custom calendar he kept on his desk and the 60 hand-drawn charts he sent to Paris are the same habit pointed at different scales. Here are 9 lessons I am stealing from him into my own pages.
1. He treated his notes as data, not as a diary
Most journaling advice nudges you toward feelings. Du Bois nudged the opposite direction. He treated a notebook page as a row in a future dataset.
The Philadelphia Negro (1899) is the founding document of American urban sociology. It was also a notebook. To gather the data, Du Bois walked the Seventh Ward of Philadelphia door to door for over a year. He logged occupations, household sizes, ages, places of birth, and counts of people in each room. He did not delegate the fieldwork: historians who have studied the survey are specific that Du Bois personally visited and interviewed roughly 5,000 residents himself rather than sending canvassers to do it for him.
Five thousand entries. One man. Every page a row.
I tried a small version of this for a week. Instead of writing “good day” or “tired today,” I logged numbers. Hours slept, cups of coffee, count of times I checked my phone, minutes of focused writing, books touched. By the third day I could see things the prose version had been hiding from me for a year. The feelings I had been journaling about were downstream of the numbers I had not been counting. It’s a pattern the research on journaling keeps turning up too: naming something concretely changes how you process it.
If you have been keeping a journal that reads like weather reports – sunny, then rain – try a week of counts. Concrete observations. Names, dates, numbers. See what shifts.
2. He drew charts in his notebooks before he wrote prose
One of the data visualizations Du Bois assembled before presenting his findings to a wider public. Source: UMass Amherst Du Bois Papers (MS 312).
Du Bois’s Harvard dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in the United States of America, 1638-1871 (1896), is dense with statutes and dates. It is also, chapter after chapter, a book that keeps stopping its own argument to lay out a table first – tallies of ships, cargoes, and legislation, organized before a single paragraph explains what they mean.
That habit – reach for the table before you reach for the sentence – is what I have come to think of as the central Du Bois move. He treated charts and tables as thinking tools, not publication tools. The data went onto the page first, while he was still figuring out what he believed. The paragraph came after.
I saw a parallel in Leonardo da Vinci’s observational notebooks, where pages alternate between sketches and prose with no apparent hierarchy. The drawing is not an illustration of an idea Leonardo already had. The drawing is the idea, mid-formation. Du Bois worked the same way two centuries later, with a different visual vocabulary – bar charts, timelines, area charts – but the same instinct: shape first, sentence second.
If something you are writing about feels tangled, do not try to write your way out. Try to draw it. A timeline, a Venn diagram, a quick bar chart on graph paper. You will find out fast where the missing data is.
3. His 60+ Paris Exposition charts were a counter-archive
Consider Du Bois’s timeline of the Jim Crow era. Source: UMass Amherst Du Bois Papers (MS 312).
The 1900 Paris Exposition was a world’s fair with an ugly subtext. Most “ethnographic” exhibits of the era trafficked in pseudoscientific racism. Du Bois and Calloway used their corner of it – “The Exhibit of American Negroes” – as a counter-argument. They built a visual archive of Black achievement, literacy, business ownership, and migration since emancipation, told entirely in data.
Sixty-plus hand-drawn charts. Four months of work. A bronze medal. And now digitized by the Library of Congress so any of us can scroll through them today.
What I think about, every time I scroll those plates, is how much of Einstein’s notebook practice was private and how much of Du Bois’s was the opposite. Einstein scribbled equations to think alone. Du Bois drew charts to argue in public. The notebook can hold both functions. It can be a place to think, and it can be the source file for the most public version of your work.
The charts are sometimes called “Bauhaus before Bauhaus” because their flat color blocks and geometric layouts anticipate the design movement that wouldn’t formally begin until 1919. That is true and worth saying. The fuller truth is they were political. Du Bois used notebooks to argue with the prevailing story of his era – and his evidence was so cleanly drawn that even the people who showed up to see propaganda walked out persuaded.
4. “Belief is not science”: his rule for what entered his notes
The undated note, in Du Bois’s own hand, where he set down his rule that belief is not science. Source: UMass Amherst Du Bois Papers (MS 312).
Somewhere around 1920, Du Bois jotted a three-word working principle in a notebook now held at UMass Amherst:
Belief is not science…
- W.E.B. Du Bois, undated note c. 1920. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312), Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries
It is a one-line filter. Belief goes in one column. Observation goes in another. Conjecture is fine, but it is labeled.
I have started using this as a literal section header in my own journal. Top of the page: Belief is not science. Below it, two columns – one of the simplest ways I know to structure a journal page. Left side: what I think is true. Right side: what I have actually counted, seen, measured, or heard from a primary source. The left column is usually three times longer than the right. That is the point. The page makes it obvious where I have been assuming.
Try it for a single decision you are turning over this week. Big or small – hiring, moving, ending a project, picking a school. Write the belief column first. Then make yourself fill the observation column. If the observation column is empty, you are not making a reasoned choice. You are voting your mood.
5. He designed his own calendar – a single page for his whole life
One of Du Bois’s single-sheet planning calendars, a document that tries to hold a day, a week, and his running priorities all at once. Source: UMass Amherst Du Bois Papers (MS 312).
This is the artifact that pulled me into the rabbit hole. Du Bois was, by every biographical account, a fastidious planner of his own time, and the archive backs it up. Scattered through the W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312) at UMass Amherst are his own schedules and timelines – single sheets that try to hold a day, a week, and a running list of what mattered most all at once, the kind of document you build when you refuse to trust your memory with your own priorities.
A single sheet. One view. Day, week, month, and the year’s main project, all where you can see them at the same time.
This is one of the most actionable things in Du Bois’s archive. Benjamin Franklin’s famous daily schedule – “Rise, wash, and address Powerful Goodness” at 5 a.m., the four-hour work blocks, the evening review – is the closest cousin I know of. Franklin’s was a moral schedule. Du Bois’s was a project schedule. Both fit on a single page and forced their author to keep the day, the week, and the year visible at the same time.
A small aside: if you want a printable one-sheet version of this kind of layout, browse our free journal templates, or I’ll send you my 6-Step Guide to Getting Started with Journaling – it includes a Du Bois-inspired weekly template I have been using all year.
6. His 25th-birthday “Program” shows the habit was already there at 25
The single most charming entry in the Du Bois archive is the program he drew up for his 25th birthday. He was alone in Berlin, fresh off his Harvard Ph.D., continuing sociology studies abroad. Most 25-year-olds would have written a sad letter home. Du Bois wrote himself an itinerary.
The festivities began the night before with music, letter writing, and what he labeled, with the kind of seriousness that becomes funny on the page:
Sacrifice to the Zeitgeist
[mercy-god-work]
- W.E.B. Du Bois, “Program for the celebration of my twenty-fifth birth day,” Berlin, 1893 (W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, MS 312, UMass Amherst)
The actual birthday began at 7 a.m. with breakfast and reflections on parents / home. From 9:30 to 11 a.m., “A Wander.” His birthday supper was Greek wine, cocoa, kuchen, and oranges. On the back of the page, after the fact, he reports in a deadpan postscript:
This program was very pleasurably carried out…
The reason I love this so much is that it is not a productivity artifact. It is a 25-year-old planning his own day on paper because nobody else was going to plan it for him, and the habit of doing so is already fully formed. You can see, in this single sheet, the same person who would draw the 60 Paris Exposition charts seven years later and the one-sheet calendars he would keep on his desk for the next 60.
Planning your own time on the page is a habit you can start at any age, in any room, with the materials you have. A spiral notebook and a pen are enough. Du Bois had less than that.
7. He protected rest as deliberately as he protected work
Most productivity content built around historical figures lands on a “grind harder” frame. Du Bois breaks the frame.
He went to bed by 10 p.m. He read before sleep. He woke with the sun. He used the same one-sheet calendar that planned his teaching, his Crisis editorials, and his book drafts to also block out stretches of rest and time away from work.
It is worth pausing on this. Edison was famously contemptuous of sleep – “I have never taken a nap” was practically a brag – and his notebooks fill 3,500 volumes partly because he steamrolled his own circadian rhythm. Du Bois ran a 60-year career across activism, scholarship, editing, and teaching and arrived at the opposite conclusion. The notebook was a tool to defend rest, not just to fill more hours.
If you want a one-week experiment: pick a bedtime, write it at the top of your calendar in pen, and treat it like a meeting with someone who outranks you. See if your work the next day looks any different. Du Bois bet his career on the idea that it would. The 21 books are the receipt.
8. His notebooks were research infrastructure for a 60-year career
One of Du Bois’s hand-drawn charts, tracking the shift in Black employment across farming, service, manufacturing, and trade from the 1890s to the 1930s. Source: UMass Amherst Du Bois Papers (MS 312).
It is tempting to read the chart-making and the calendar-keeping as charming sidelights. They were not. They were the operating system underneath the work – the same role a good work journal plays for anyone running a long project.
Twenty-one books. The Atlanta University Studies. The Philadelphia Negro. The Souls of Black Folk. Black Reconstruction. Darkwater. The Niagara Movement. The NAACP. 25 years editing Crisis. The Pan-African Congresses. A second Ph.D.-level project on Africa in his eighties. Du Bois died on August 27, 1963, at age 95, in Accra, Ghana. The next afternoon, hundreds of thousands of people gathered on the National Mall for the March on Washington. As Roy Wilkins told the crowd:
Regardless of the fact that in his later years Dr. Du Bois chose another path, it is incontrovertible that at the dawn of the twentieth century his was the voice that was calling to you to gather here today in this cause.
- Roy Wilkins, remarks at the March on Washington, August 28, 1963, quoted in Charles Euchner, Nobody Turn Me Around: A People’s History of the 1963 March on Washington (Beacon Press, 2010)
This is the line I think every reader interested in journaling for social-justice work should sit with. The crowd that came to hear Martin Luther King Jr. speak about the dream stood on infrastructure Du Bois had built across six decades, much of it inside notebooks. Wilkins’s phrasing is unsparing: his was the voice that was calling to you to gather here today. When we think about the lineage of civil-rights journaling – King’s marginalia in his sermons, the meticulous diaries kept by movement organizers, the field notes of SNCC volunteers – Du Bois sits at the head of the table. The page was where the strategy was assembled.
The notebooks were not a side hobby. They were the scaffolding. They held the data that became the books that became the arguments that became the movement.
9. What I would steal from Du Bois this week
If this article cost you 12 minutes, here are four things I am taking into my own journal this week, and would suggest you try too:
- A one-sheet calendar. One page. Day, week, month, year. Write the one task you most want this year to be remembered for at the top, where you can see it every morning.
- A “Belief is not science” header. On a fresh page, write that phrase. Underneath, two columns: belief and observation. Use it for one decision this week.
- One hand-drawn chart of something you have been guessing about. Sleep hours, focused writing time, conversations with your kids, money in versus money out. Pick one metric you actually care about and chart it on the page for seven days. Numbers, not feelings.
- A defended bedtime. Write it at the top of tomorrow’s page in pen.
None of this requires software, a subscription, or anyone’s permission. Du Bois did it with a Berlin boardinghouse desk and a stack of paper in 1893. You can do it with the same.
If you want one more piece in your inbox – each one on a different journaling hero – the newsletter is where I send these next. And if you want the wider tour, the journals of successful people I have been collecting sits at the hub of it all.
Sources
- W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.
- W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (University of Pennsylvania, 1899).
- W. E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in the United States of America. 1638-1871 (Harvard, 1896).
- Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert, eds., W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America (Princeton Architectural Press, 2018).
- Aldon Morris, The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (University of California Press, 2015).
- “The Exhibit of American Negroes” plates, 1900 Paris Exposition, Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division.
- Charles Euchner, Nobody Turn Me Around: A People’s History of the 1963 March on Washington (Beacon Press, 2010).
- Comparable hero studies on this site: Bruce Lee’s many journals and our full collection of famous people’s journals. See also notebooks of the civil rights movement for Douglass, King, Lorde, and Du Bois read together.
Featured image: Inside “The Exhibit of American Negroes” at the 1900 Paris Exposition, the room where Du Bois’s hand-drawn charts and data won a grand prize. Source: Library of Congress.
