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
Some films arrive on time. Rita Coburn’s didn’t.
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 like an open wound. Du Bois spent his life insisting that the 14th and 15th amendments were living obligations, promises the country made and refused to keep. He confronted six presidents directly: “This is your constitution. You’re not living up to it.” Coburn’s answer to that history: “We’re still there. So to me it’s obvious that he’s still speaking.”
Translating that into cinema required nerve. Coburn hands Du Bois’s words to Viola Davis, Jeffrey Wright, Common, and Courtney B. Vance, and something happens that a single voice could never produce. “Everybody that picks up a book or a short story still has inside of themselves their frame of reference, and you can read it in the same room, and everybody is seeing something as they read.”
Long before my conversation with Coburn, that is what I saw, almost physically, when I found Black Lives 1900: W.E.B. Du Bois at the Paris Exposition at the New York Public Library’s Harlem Branch on West 124th Street and the exhibit Printing Black America: Du Bois’s Data Portraits in the 21st Century at the Brooklyn Public Library’s Central Library. The book and the exhibit archive the raw data of Du Bois’s Atlanta University project, yet the impact remains in his visual design. For Du Bois, beauty and design were how he fought. He understood that the data alone would be rationalized or discarded. Through sharp typography and bold geometry, he made complex sociological 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,” Coburn says.
In 1899, two catastrophes broke Du Bois in the same season: his infant son died, denied adequate medical care, and Sam Hose was lynched with a barbarism Du Bois could not scientifically explain away. “‘That broke him inside,’ Coburn told me. ‘He had to know. It was the knife of racism.'” The health disparity that killed his son is unresolved: “Black people are dying today because they can’t get fair and equitable treatment. That’s again why Du Bois is still speaking.”
Both losses happened in 1899. Then he wrote The Souls of Black Folk. “What he’s saying is: we have a soul,” Coburn told me. “We are not objects. We live, we love, we die, and you kill us for no good reason. So I’m going to write about it, I’m going to talk about it, I’m going to be about it.”
He 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.”
When he deployed art, he understood its function. Coburn drew a direct line to Charles White: “Paint is the only weapon I have with which to fight what I resent.” Then she aimed it at 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.”
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