W.E.B. Du Bois, Reintroduced: Rebel With A Cause Brings a Giant of Black History Back to Life
By Javar Juarez | CUBN/New Progressive Journal | September 28, 2026
CHARLESTON, S.C. — Under the open sky at the International African American Museum last Thursday evening, an audience gathered for a film about a man born 158 years ago whose questions about race, democracy, education, power and the telling of Black history remain strikingly familiar.
For me, the experience was more than a history lesson. It took some time to fully process what I had seen and to arrive at this NPJ film feature, published ahead of the AfroSouth Film Festival, set for October 9–10 in Charleston, South Carolina.
As publisher of CUBN/New Progressive Journal, I walked away from the AfroSouth screening of W.E.B. Du Bois: Rebel With A Cause, narrated by Viola Davis, with a deeper understanding of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, not simply as one of the towering intellectual figures of Black America, but as a complicated human being whose 95-year life stretched from Reconstruction to the eve of the March on Washington.
The documentary asks its audience to walk that entire distance with him.
Writer and director Rita Coburn put it plainly before the screening.
She asked the audience to leave 2026 behind, return to 1868, the year Du Bois was born, and walk forward with him to 1963.
Her film attempts to excavate the truth of a life that became so consequential that the person himself can sometimes disappear behind the icon.
“What Du Bois represents for us is the power of the Black mind,” Coburn told the audience.
What followed was nearly two hours of American history told through the life of a man who spent much of his own trying to document it.
Born Into Reconstruction
Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868, the same year the newly ratified 14th Amendment established birthright citizenship and equal protection under the law.
His upbringing in a predominantly white Massachusetts community initially insulated him from many of the racial conditions confronting Black Americans elsewhere in the country, particularly in the American South. An exceptional student, Du Bois became valedictorian of his high school class.
Unable initially to afford Harvard, Du Bois attended Fisk University in Nashville.
That decision would change him.
At Fisk, Du Bois encountered something he had never experienced in Massachusetts: a large community of Black students, intellectuals and educators. He later described entering an entirely different world, one populated by Black people of different complexions, backgrounds and ambitions.
He eventually reached Harvard and later studied in Berlin, where another transformation occurred.
For perhaps the first time, Du Bois experienced life outside the peculiar racial boundaries of the United States.
“For the first time in my life, I was just a human being and not a particular kind of human being,” he recalled.
That international experience broadened his thinking. Race in America could no longer be understood in isolation from colonialism, economics and the struggles of people of color around the world.
He Used Data Before Data Was Fashionable
One of the documentary's most illuminating sections examines Du Bois not as an activist, but as a scientist.
After becoming the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard, Du Bois undertook a groundbreaking study of Philadelphia's Seventh Ward.
He moved into the community and went to work.
Du Bois conducted thousands of interviews, documenting employment, education, family structure, housing, mortality and other conditions affecting Black residents. He combined observation with demographic information and statistical analysis.
The significance of the work was enormous.
Instead of beginning with the assumption that poverty and social problems represented some defect within Black people themselves, Du Bois examined the conditions surrounding them.
His conclusion was concise: the Black community was a “symptom, not a cause.”
More than a century later, debates about structural racism, neighborhood investment, educational access and economic inequality continue to wrestle with many of the same questions.
Then Something Changed
Du Bois once believed knowledge itself could defeat racism.
Atlanta challenged that belief.
The 1899 lynching of Sam Hose became a defining moment in his life. The documentary recounts the horrifying violence inflicted upon Hose and describes Du Bois learning that parts of the murdered man's body were being publicly displayed.
Du Bois turned around rather than deliver a letter he had prepared for an Atlanta newspaper.
“One could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved,” he later wrote.
His faith in knowledge alone had been shaken.
Research would remain important.
But research without action was no longer enough.
Du Bois Understood the Power of the Press
For a journalist and publisher, this portion of the documentary hit especially hard.
Du Bois understood something fundamental: political power and economic power mattered, but so did the power to define a people.
When he became editor of The Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP, he insisted upon editorial independence.
“Nobody will dictate to me what I can say.”
The Crisis became far more than an organizational newsletter.
Its pages included journalism, photography, poetry, art and documentation of Black political, social and economic accomplishment. Copies moved throughout Black communities, including through Pullman porters who carried bundles from New York and distributed them around the country.
The documentary makes an extraordinary observation about the publication's cultural reach: in many Black homes, two publications stood above the others, the Bible and The Crisis.
Sitting there as a Black publisher in 2026, that history landed differently.
Du Bois understood that Black people needed not only to appear in media, but to possess the ability to tell their own stories, document their own lives and challenge narratives created about them.
He understood narrative as power.
Reconstruction Was Not the Failure America Was Taught
By the 1930s, Du Bois had turned his attention toward an American historical narrative that portrayed Reconstruction as a disastrous period caused by placing political power in the hands of formerly enslaved Black Americans.
He challenged it.
The documentary describes Reconstruction from 1866 to 1877 as America's first major experiment with interracial democracy.
More than 2,000 African Americans served as elected or appointed officials. Black political participation contributed to public education and other reforms benefiting communities beyond Black Americans themselves.
The collapse of Reconstruction and the racial backlash that followed would occupy Du Bois intellectually for decades.
He was not simply studying the past.
He was fighting over who would be permitted to define it.
The Film Does Not Turn Du Bois Into a Saint
Du Bois was brilliant.
He was also complicated.
The documentary examines his marriage, infidelity, strained family relationships and contradictions between some of his public principles and private behavior.
His own words can be startling.
“My wife and children were incidents of my main life work,” Du Bois once wrote. “My main life work was out in the world and not at home.”
The film also explores his increasingly left-wing politics, his interest in socialism, his complicated views of communism and his willingness to embrace ideas he believed might provide alternatives to racial oppression and economic exploitation.
One historian in the documentary acknowledges that Du Bois could be insufficiently critical of communism as it actually operated, while emphasizing that his overriding search was for systems he believed could liberate people.
Eventually, those politics carried a tremendous price.
During the Cold War, Du Bois came under intense government scrutiny for his peace activism. In 1951, at 83 years old, he was arrested, handcuffed and charged with failing to register as an agent of a foreign principal.
The case was ultimately thrown out, but the government revoked his passport, cutting him off from the international travel that had shaped so much of his intellectual and political life.
Standing beside him was his second wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois.
The documentary recounts how Shirley helped mount a public defense campaign, raising roughly $30,000 for his legal fight and mobilizing support as the government sought to prosecute one of the nation's most prominent Black intellectuals. Du Bois eventually regained his passport in 1958.
The contrast is striking. Du Bois had become one of America's most accomplished scholars, writers and intellectuals. In the final decades of his life, the country he had spent generations challenging to live up to its democratic ideals increasingly treated him as a political threat.
And Then There Was Ghana
In 1961, at 93 years old and having outlived both of his children, Du Bois left the United States for Accra, Ghana.
He had been invited by Ghana's first president, Kwame Nkrumah, a fellow Pan-Africanist, to continue work on the Encyclopedia Africana.
The contrast is difficult to miss.
A man who had been surveilled, prosecuted and restricted in the United States arrived in newly independent Ghana and was welcomed as one of the world's great intellectuals.
The documentary describes Nkrumah making resources available to him. Du Bois received a compound, a vehicle and driver. One participant described the welcome not simply as diplomatic treatment, but “royal treatment.”
There, near the end of his life, Du Bois was afforded something his own country had so often denied him:
Dignity.
He died in Accra on August 27, 1963.
One day later, hundreds of thousands of people assembled in Washington for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
News of his death moved through the crowd.
Du Bois received a state funeral in Ghana.
He had lived from Reconstruction to the modern Civil Rights Movement.
His life nearly connected the two.
The People Bringing Du Bois Back to the Screen
The evening was also about the filmmakers determined to introduce that life to another generation.
Executive producer B.K. Fulton told the audience that Black stories are too frequently presented through what he called a “prism of sorrows,” stories dominated by slavery, violence and tragedy.
He wanted audiences to see Black greatness too.
Fulton knows personally what that can do.
He recalled struggling academically as an engineering student at Virginia Tech before encountering a book about Black inventor Lewis Latimer. Learning Latimer's story changed his understanding of what was possible for himself. Fulton eventually went from academic probation to the dean's list and, years later, to Virginia Tech's governing board.
“That’s the power of stories,” Fulton told the Charleston audience.
For Coburn, the mission extends beyond making a documentary.
She told attendees that the team is raising money to expand the film's reach, including an awards campaign, additional screenings and an educational effort designed to introduce more people, particularly young people, to Du Bois.
The team is also pursuing a streaming agreement that could make the documentary more widely available beyond its PBS presence.
Coburn's argument is that Du Bois should not simply belong to historians.
His ideas should remain in circulation.
A Story That Isn't Finished
After the film, Coburn described making it as something beyond a professional undertaking.
“It was a spiritual process because Du Bois is still speaking,” she told the audience.
She said studying him changed the way she viewed herself, her faith and her place in the world.
Du Bois was not born knowing what he would become.
He encountered injustice. He studied it. He changed his thinking. He sometimes got things wrong. He fought with allies. He challenged institutions. He wrote. He researched. He published. He organized. He traveled. He loved. He failed. He endured.
And he kept working.
Nearly 63 years after his death, we are still reading that work, arguing with it, learning from it and discovering the man who produced it.
For those of us working in Black media, there is another lesson here.
Du Bois understood that documenting Black life was itself consequential work. If someone else controlled the record, someone else could decide what future generations would know about us.
Beneath the Charleston sky, a filmmaker, a group of producers, a museum and an audience continued the work of preserving that record.
And somewhere in the story of W.E.B. Du Bois is a charge for the rest of us:
Pick up the work that remains unfinished.
Javar Juarez is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Urban Broadcast Network (CUBN), an independent investigative news outlet based in Columbia, South Carolina, and a member of the South Carolina Press Association. He is also President of the Capital City Chapter of the A. Philip Randolph Institute.
