Mabel O. Wilson

In Chicago, preservationists have launched an unusual effort to explore the radical history of the 1960s civil rights group through the city’s built environment.

W.E.B. Du Bois’s exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition offered him a chance to present the dramatic gains made by Black Americans since the end of slavery.

Museum visitors, as well as scholars of art, history, and African and Native American studies, discuss the sculpture’s intended and perceived meanings.

Like the museum behind it, the monument was designed in large part to train white people in a fundamentally racist way of seeing.