W.E.B. Du Bois

1868–1963 · American sociologist, historian and civil rights leader

W.E.B. Du Bois was the first Black American to earn a Harvard doctorate, a founder of the NAACP, and — the detail that makes this misattribution so seductive — a pioneering quantitative sociologist. The Philadelphia Negro (1899) was built on door-to-door survey work, and his hand-drawn data charts for the 1900 Paris Exposition are now famous as early information design. A line about numbers becoming meanings fits him beautifully. It is still not his: it belongs to a man who ran a conglomerate.

Traced to source

1 quote we’ve traced

“When you have mastered numbers, you will no longer be reading numbers”

Disputed

Not actually W.E.B. Du Bois

Often misattributed to W.E.B. Du Bois

Famous lines widely pinned on W.E.B. Du Bois that we’ve traced to someone else.

“When you have mastered numbers, you will no longer be reading numbers”

actually Harold Geneen

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