Acres of Land Owned by Negroes in Georgia (Plate 6)

Challenge #3

25 Jun 2025

Acres of Land Owned by Negroes in Georgia.

This plate shows a steady rise in Black land ownership over a 25 year period between 1874 and 1899. The total land ownership increases nearly threefold from 338,769 acres to over 1 million acres.

How it's made

The data comes from the Du Bois Data Portaits GitHub repo, which provides a CSV file with the historical data (year and land ownership in acres).

The chart is built using Svelte, D3.js, and SVG. Svelte is the framework for the reactive components, D3.js provides the data scaling and mathematical functions (e.g. max from d3-array), and SVG is for the actual graphics (in this case, the rect and text elements).

In this plate, I use a JavaScript file to load the data, then parse the data in the Chart component. Using D3’s scaleLinear functions from d3-scale, I map the years to the Y-axis and the land to the X-axis. Each row in the data becomes a horizontal bar by combining Svelte’s {#each} block with <rect> elements to create a rectangle for each data point. Using Svelte’s on:mouseover/on:focus directives, I designed the chart to highlight bars based on the user’s mouse and show the highlighted year’s land value.

To recreate the hand-drawn marker aesthetic, I used Claude to draft a set of SVG filters, and played around with them until they looked similar to the original.

How I want to make it better

While I think this has been my best recreation so far, there is still plenty to improve. Primarily: responsiveness. If you are looking at this on a phone, my apologies. I haven’t ventured into making these visuals mobile-friendly yet.

Other than responsiveness, I think the chart could benefit from more context. On highlighting each year, I could also highlight major events that might have affected land ownership of Black people in Georgia. Another small change might be to increase the highlighted year’s font weight on hover to improve readability.

If you have any suggestions, please share in the comments below.

Resources Used