America Ignored His Data. So W.E.B. Du Bois Made It Beautiful
- Rita Coburn's new PBS documentary asks what happens when a nation refuses to look at itself.
- In 1900, Du Bois answered with design and defiance. We're still living in his answer.
The Radical Beauty of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data
As I listened to the Peabody-winning director speak about beginning W.E.B. Du Bois: Rebel With a Cause in one America and finishing it in another, I thought immediately of James Baldwin’s Another Country, a novel whose title alone names what this nation has always been for the people it refuses to fully claim. It is a reminder that for millions of Americans, the country advertised has never matched the country lived.
“When I started the film in 2022, the world was a different place than it is right now,” she told me. “So, I didn’t do it for the date. I did it because I felt called to do it.” The gravitational pull, she said, came partly through Maya Angelou, who had exposed how little Coburn knew about Du Bois. “If I didn’t know,” she reasoned, “there were a whole lot of people who did not.”
What she finished on the other side of that calling lands in 2026 as if it were 1906, the year a white mob tore through Atlanta and Du Bois armed himself in response. Du Bois spent his life insisting that the 14th and 15th Amendments were living obligations, promises the country never honored. Coburn paraphrases his confrontation with six presidents this way: “He tells them ‘This is your constitution. You’re not living up to it.'” Du Bois’s words remain just as prescient for our current administration. “We’re still there,” Coburn says. “To me it’s obvious that he’s still speaking.”
Translating Du Bois’s prophecy into cinema required nerve. Coburn hands his words to Viola Davis, Jeffrey Wright, Common, and Courtney B. Vance, four different narrators, four different Du Boises. “Everybody that picks up a book still has their [own] frame of reference. You can read it in the same room, and everybody sees something different as they read.”
Long before my conversation with Coburn, I encountered Black Lives 1900: W.E.B. Du Bois at the Paris Exposition at the Schomburg Library in Harlem and the exhibit Printing Black America: Du Bois’s Data Portraits in the 21st Century at Brooklyn’s Central Library. Both the book and the exhibit transform the raw data of Du Bois’s Atlanta University project into high-impact visuals. Through sharp typography and bold geometry, he made complex and controversial data impossible to ignore. “For his day he used color. He used the bell curve, which he learned in Berlin, because we didn’t have it yet in America,” Coburn says.
In 1899, two catastrophes broke Du Bois: the death of his infant son after the boy was denied medical care, and the lynching of Sam Hose with a barbarism never seen. Both losses helped inspire the now iconic The Souls of Black Folk. He also became a journalist because data alone wasn’t enough. He built The Crisis, one article every 10 days for 24 years, and communities gathered around it. “The person who could read would read and other people would listen. People had pride about that.”
Coburn drew a direct line from community action to Charles White, who famously said: “Paint is the only weapon I have with which to fight what I resent.” She turns White’s words into a charge for us: “What is the weapon that we can use to fight what we resent? You may have a podcast, you might have a television show, you might work in your church. These things are weapons.”
W.E.B. Du Bois: Rebel With a Cause is currently airing on PBS .
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