“W.E.B Du Bois: Rebel With a Cause” debuts on PBS on May 19. For most of his 95 years, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was considered the conscience of Black America. When Roy Wilkins announced his death from the podium at the 1963 March on Washington, it triggered a collective gasp of grief among the 250,000 gathered protesters. This is one of many scenes brought vividly to life in Rita Coburn’s “W.E.B Du Bois: Rebel With a Cause.” Coburn, whose previous films chronicled the lives of Marian Anderson and Maya Angelou, gets to the marrow of the man through his words. Narrated by Viola B. Davis, the documentary features electrifying readings of Du Bois’ work by the singer Common and actors Courtney B. Vance and Jeffrey Wright. Du Bois’ story begins with his birth in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to parents of African, French and Dutch ancestry. He spent his childhood in a neighborhood where free Black and white people lived alongside one another as neighbors. Largely sheltered from the brutalities of racial discrimination, he excelled in high school, studying Latin, Greek and religion on the way to becoming his graduating class’ valedictorian. To fund his secondary education, family, friends and neighbors donated funds for his tuition at Fisk University in Nashville, where he received his bachelor of arts degree in 1888. It was at Harvard, where he received a second bachelor’s and a doctorate in history, that Du Bois first encountered exclusion. Not only was he barred from living in the dorms with white students, but the university also required him to repeat his junior and senior years, because the famous institution doubted the rigor of his education at Fisk, a Black institution. In 1895, following the study of economics at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, Du Bois became the first Black person to earn a Harvard Ph.D. His doctoral thesis, “The Suppression of the Slave Trade,” was a critical examination of the compromises and missed opportunities that allowed the “peculiar institution” to survive as long as it did. Coburn … gets to the marrow of the man through his words. His academic career began when the University of Pennsylvania hired him to map and study Philadelphia’s mostly African American 7th Ward. The result was his pioneering 1899 sociological study, “The Philadelphia Negro,” which argued that the so-called “Negro problem” was really a creation of structural racism. He believed the answer to this problem required Black Philadelphians to build up their social and educational organizations, and white citizens to dismantle the institutions upholding racial discrimination in employment and housing.
Were his intellectual output limited only to his first two publications, Du Bois would still be a towering figure at the intersection of sociology, economics and race. But he would go on to publish dozens of books, spanning histories, novels, essays, philippics and autobiography. While producing a prodigious amount of scholarship, he also co-founded the NAACP, wrote for and edited its monthly magazine, The Crisis, and held public debates with everyone from Booker T. Washington — whose support of vocational education for Black people was at odds with Du Bois’ support of higher education — to bigots like Lothrop Stoddard , author of “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy” (1920) . It was during DuBois’ formative 13-year tenure as a sociology professor at Atlanta University that he wrote his most celebrated work, “The Souls of Black Folk” (1903). In 1897, Du Bois’ first year in Georgia (and the South generally), a Black farmworker named Sam Hose was shot and wounded by his employer after asking for time off to see his ailing mother. In self-defense, Hose killed his boss with an axe. But he was also jailed on spurious charges of raping his employer’s wife and child, charges that resulted in a gruesome public lynching and dismemberment. Du Bois was on his way to discuss the scandal with the editor of the Atlanta Constitution when he learned that Hose’s knuckles were being sold at a nearby grocery store.
Not long after, Du Bois’ firstborn, Burghardt, contracted diphtheria. To the horror of Du Bois and his wife, both born and raised in the North, the white doctors of Atlanta refused to treat their son. They lost their beloved boy. The author acknowledged that his faith in “knowledge as a solution wasn’t enough.” He had changed, he said, from “studying ‘the Negro Problem’ to communicating what Negros were suffering.” In the book’s forward, Du Bois declares, “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” And he proceeds to diagnose the “peculiar sensation” of the “double consciousness” experienced by his Black brethren. He described it as “that sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”
Few episodes of PBS’ American Masters series have been as laced with such empathy and incident, or aired at a more opportune moment. Indeed, its timing feels uncanny. Not a month before its airing, the Supreme Court further gutted the Voting Rights Act that Du Bois had spent so much of his life advocating for. As Southern statehouses begin rewinding the clock and depriving minority communities of representation, “W.E.B Du Bois: Rebel With a Cause” is a powerful reminder of what is at stake, and what it took to achieve what is now being taken away.
The post The Soul of W.E.B. Du Bois appeared first on Truthdig .