Proportion of Freemen and Slaves (Plate 51)

Challenge #9

26 Jun 2025

This plate shows how few black people in America enjoyed freedom until 1870. In Du Bois’ work, this likely served as one of many rebuttals to the claims of black inferiority made through scientific racism that was prevalent at the time.

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 proportion free/enslaved).

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How I want to make it better

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

Resources Used

• Data Visualization with Svelte: Bar Chart Basics - Tutorial on creating bar charts with Svelte and D3