★ Plate No. V · Volume I · The Du Bois Reappraisal ★

Every One of Them, 2024

Tous les professeurs titulaires noirs en informatique aux États-Unis — chacun d'eux
All Black Tenure-Track Computer Science Faculty at PhD-Granting Departments
This is not a sample. This is the whole population.
100 circles. 100 people. To show the remaining 5,900 at this same scale would require 59 more grids this size.

★ The Finding ★

100
In the entire United States, approximately one hundred Black scholars hold tenure-track positions in computer science at PhD-granting departments. You have just seen all of them. This is not a percentage or an abstraction — it is a number small enough to be a roll call. Du Bois counted two thousand Negro students in all the colleges of the nation in 1900. A hundred and twenty-four years later, the faculty who teach the discipline that shapes the world would not fill a single seminar room.

★ The Underlying Data ★

MeasureCountSource
Black tenure-track CS faculty~100CRA Taulbee Survey, 2023
All tenure-track CS faculty~6,000CRA Taulbee Survey, 2023
Black share~1.7%CRA Taulbee Survey, 2023
Black AI/ML faculty (subset)<50Black in AI estimate, R1 institutions

Method Note

This is not a chart. It is a counting. One hundred circles in a ten-by-ten grid — one for each Black tenure-track computer science professor at a PhD-granting department in the United States. The form is deliberately simple: when a number is small enough to draw every member on a single page, the visualization should honor that by showing every single one.

Du Bois understood the power of the specific count. His 1900 plates did not always reach for sophisticated visual forms — sometimes a number, placed plainly, was the most devastating rhetoric available. This plate follows that instinct. The grid does not aggregate. It does not abstract. It presents.

This is a preview plate for conversation, drafted April 2026. The figure of ~100 is an approximation from the CRA Taulbee Survey. The production plate will cite the exact count from the most recent published report and, where possible, name the institutions where these scholars serve.

★ This plate seeks its patron ★
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