At Du Bois exhibit, CAU’s president stands face to face with history
As the president of one of the nation’s most prominent Black colleges, George T. French Jr. is rarely at a loss for words.
But last Friday, in the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, he stood silently before a framed portrait. His likeness had been placed beside that of W.E.B. Du Bois, the renowned scholar who once walked the campus when it was known as Atlanta University.
The two faces, separated by more than a century, rested side by side on an easel in Trevor Arnett Hall.
French could not speak. He pressed his lips together, blinked hard, raised a hand to his mouth, then covered his eyes. For a moment, he stood there, overcome — not as a university president, but as a man embracing the lineage.
“I was truly overwhelmed with emotion and deep reverence as the vision of reimagining W.E.B. Du Bois’ legacy through my own journey was unveiled,” French said later. “This moment was more than personal admiration. It was a profound tribute to the lasting influence of Du Bois’ work and philosophy on our pursuit of excellence and parity at Clark Atlanta University.”
The unveiling marked the opening of “W.E.B. Du Bois Revisited: Re-imagining Du Bois’ work from ‘The Exhibit of American Negroes,’” an exhibition inspired by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s re-creation of Du Bois’ 1900 Paris display.
The event coincided with the 100th anniversary of Black History Month and served as the culmination of the university’s observance, and the recognition of the AJC’s Black History Month Series.
Danille Taylor, director of the CAU Art Museum, said the exhibit will run through Friday and is free to the public.
In 1900, at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, Du Bois presented “The Exhibit of American Negroes.”
It was a display of photographs, hand-drawn charts and statistical graphics intended to dismantle prevailing myths about Black inferiority.
With sweeping reds, deep blues and geometric bands of green and black, his infographics translated sociology into visual argument. Alongside them were 500 photographs — many taken in Georgia by Atlanta photographer Thomas Askew — portraying teachers, craftsmen and preachers with clarity and composure.
Du Bois called it “an honest, straightforward exhibit” of a people’s life and development. At a time when Black Americans were cast as incapable of citizenship, he marshaled data and portraiture as evidence of intellect, industry and humanity.
The new exhibition continues the conversation with that original one. Following Du Bois’ lead, the AJC’s Mirtha Donastorg reimagined his charts using contemporary data.
Where Askew positioned his subjects in stiff collars and formal dress, AJC photographer Natrice Miller framed doctors, artists and students in modern Atlanta. The result is a century-spanning exchange about visibility and worth.
Physician Robert Rusher, one of the contemporary subjects photographed for the project, described the experience as both humbling and affirming.
“To look around the room and see myself, along with other participants in the project, really nourished my spirit,” Rusher said. “On some level, we represent the progress of those people in Thomas Askew’s images. And in an era that’s attempting to erase our history, the photographs and charts visually speak that we exist. I was humbled to have the honor be a part of something so big.”
That sense of continuity echoed throughout the room.
Kelly Cadet-Lyons stood next to her portrait. She was paired with a 19th-century image of a young Black woman. Cadet-Lyons marveled at the woman’s “essence and poise” and wondered “what she potentially faced and felt as a Black woman just hoping to be.”
Very few of the original images had names attached to them. The woman paired with Cadet-Lyons is simply labeled “Portrait of an African American woman.”
“Knowing my humanity was being valued and seen through this dissecting lens, (then) to have been asked to partake in the comparative study was unearthing to say the least,” Cadet-Lyons said. “Seeing myself alongside the other portraits reinforced my drive to live this life purposefully.”
The placement of the exhibit on the Clark Atlanta University campus was no coincidence. At the time he created the exhibit, Du Bois was teaching at Atlanta University.
He taught at the school from 1897 to 1910 and again from 1934 to 1944. It was also there that he wrote “The Souls of Black Folk” in 1903.
The exhibition opened inside the atrium of Trevor Arnett Hall, once Atlanta University’s Carnegie Library, where it shares space with Hale Woodruff’s “Art of the Negro” murals — painted between 1950 and 1951 — that trace the arc of African and diasporic history.
The murals tower above the portraits and charts, placing Du Bois’ argument within a broader chronicle of Black endurance and creativity.
After the unveiling, French pulled out a signed first edition of Du Bois’ “Black Folk, Then and Now,” the 1939 study that moved beyond “The Souls of Black Folk” to trace the slave trade and Black life in the modern world, arguing that Africa was not peripheral but central to human progress.
In it, Du Bois widened the frame he first sketched in Paris in 1900. Together, French said, the original exhibit and the book formed a sustained argument — first visual, then historical — insisting on the continuity of Black life.
The new exhibit at CAU, French said, carries that argument forward and extends Du Bois’ belief that Black existence belongs in full view.
“I hope this imagery continues to inspire future generations to embrace knowledge and justice with unwavering dedication,” French said.
French glanced again at his portrait beside Du Bois.
A century between them.
A legacy still unfolding.
About the Author
Ernie Suggs is an enterprise reporter covering race and culture for the AJC since 1997. A 1990 graduate of N.C. Central University and a 2009 Harvard University Nieman Fellow, he is also the former vice president of the National Association of Black Journalists. His obsession with Prince, Spike Lee movies, Hamilton and the New York Yankees is odd.