The Georgia Negro: A Social Study - Graph shows the number of African American children in public schools from 1860 to 1897 [LCCN2013650434]
The pattern
This still is filed under Data as proof.
Define
A chart, map, or count that is the argument, not an illustration next to the argument.
Mechanism
Sighted evidence. The reader is asked to believe their eyes: a bar, a share, a spread on a map.
Verdict
The claim is comparative or quantitative and the figure can be read without a caption doing the sell.
Why it works
Hanging the bars from a common top and letting them grow downward makes the eye travel with the growth instead of scanning up, and the labels ride down with them so number and length arrive together. The 1860 column is the whole trick: rather than draw a bar too small to see, Du Bois writes the year over 7 as a fraction and leaves the space empty, which is far more violent than a stub would be. Uneven year intervals are left uneven, which reads as reported fact rather than a smoothed curve.
Steal this when
Use this when your growth story starts at effectively zero and a proportional first bar would be invisible - set the baseline number as bare type in the empty slot and let the whitespace carry it. Also use it when your data points fall on irregular dates and faking an even axis would be a lie.