New PBS Documentary Showcases W. E. B. Du Bois, a Major Voice in the Historic Struggle for Civil Rights and Racial Equality

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, May 19) PBS presented a stunning documentary called W. E. B. Du Bois: Rebel With a Cause as part of their American Masters series. (I’ve often wondered how they decide who’s an “American Experience” and who’s an “American Master.”) William Edward Burghardt Du Bois has long been a particular hero of mine. He was born in 1868, three years after the South at least technically lost the U.S. Civil War, in the relatively emancipated town of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Du Bois’s father was descended from a French Huguenot (Protestants who fled France during the religious wars of the Middle Ages and Renaissance) slaveowner, and his dad bailed on the family when William was 10. He always insisted on pronouncing his last name “Doo-BOYS” in the English fashion rather than the French “Du-BWAH,” and that caused a bizarre controversy when in the early 1960’s, just after Du Bois’s death, Richard Nixon denounced the W. E. B. Du Bois Clubs, a movement set up by the Communist Party U.S.A. to attract young African-Americans to the cause, as a Communist front organization. This did collateral damage to the Boys Clubs of America, who’d seen their donations nosedive because a lot of people thought Nixon had meant them. Nixon’s reaction was to blame Du Bois himself for the confusion and demand that the clubs use the “Du-BWAH” pronunciation of his name, whereupon the people running the clubs on behalf of the Communist Party dug up an interview with Du Bois himself in which he explained, “I am an American. My name is Doo-BOYS.” Du Bois was born and raised in Great Barrington in a community that was otherwise almost all white. His teachers recognized his intellectual ability and insisted him to study hard; he graduated from high school with honors and set his sights on getting into Harvard University. Unfortunately, his family didn’t have the financial means even to consider sending him to Harvard, but the congregation of the Congregational Church of Great Barrington, which the family attended, raised enough money to send him to the historically Black Fisk University in Nashville. There Du Bois was hit with the realities of institutionalized racism and Jim Crow segregation for the first time in his life. Like most Fisk students, he had to work his way through school, which he did by becoming a schoolteacher after his sophomore year. After he graduated from Fisk, he finally got into Harvard, but Harvard wouldn’t accept his course credits from Fisk, so he had to repeat two years as an undergraduate before he was admitted to Harvard’s graduate school.

He got a masters’ degree from Harvard and then sought a grant offered by former President Rutherford B. Hayes to study the new discipline of sociology at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Germany, where among other people he met pioneering sociologist Max Weber. Weber liked to cite Du Bois as a counter-example to people who insisted that Blacks were incapable of high intellectual achievement. Du Bois later recalled that in Germany “I found myself on the outside of the American world, looking in. With me were white folk – students, acquaintances, teachers – who viewed the scene with me. They did not always pause to regard me as a curiosity, or something sub-human; I was just a man of the somewhat privileged student rank, with whom they were glad to meet and talk over the world; particularly, the part of the world whence I came.” Du Bois had hoped to win his Ph.D. in Germany, but the university required that you live in the country for at least three years, and the stipend he’d received only lasted for two. He finally won his Ph.D. by returning to Harvard, and his was the first Ph.D. ever awarded by Harvard to a Black scholar. Du Bois got a teaching job at Wilberforce University in Ohio, where he met and married one of his students, Nina Gomer. After two years at Wilberforce, Du Bois received a grant to do a sociological study of the Black community of Philadelphia, particularly the Seventh Ward. He moved himself, Nina, and their young son Burkhardt into the roughest part of the Seventh Ward and conducted over 500 interviews for what became his first published book, The Philadelphia Negro (1899). Before the book was published, Du Bois had left Wilberforce and taken a teaching position at Atlanta University. There he coined the phrase “The Talented Tenth,” referring to the most intellectually gifted Black Americans whose demonstrated abilities would help lift the entire race out of bondage. In 1900 he went to London to attend the world’s first Pan-African Congress, despite the misgivings of the British government that the group was really intended to bring down the British Empire by encouraging its colonies in Africa to rebel and declare independence. He also went to Paris and organized an exhibit for the 1900 World’s Fair to commemorate the achievements of Black people worldwide. Du Bois returned to the U.S. at a time when the country’s most influential African-American was Booker T. Washington, who argued that Black Americans should accept segregation in exchange for vague promises of equality within it. Washington famously said, “In all purely social matters, we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hands in all things essential to mutual progress.”

During his years in Atlanta, Du Bois was hit hard by Jim Crow personally; his young son Burkhardt took ill and died at a time when all three Black doctors in Atlanta were out of town and no white doctor would care for him. He also was angered by the lynching of Sam Hose, a Black man who was hanged by a freelance mob in Atlanta in 1899. The lynchers not only took pride in what they’d done, they literally cut off pieces of Hose’s body and traded them amongst each other as souvenirs. Ironically, Du Bois spotted Hose’s knuckles on sale in a souvenir shop while walking through Atlanta with white journalist Joel Chandler Harris, then associate editor of the Atlanta Constitution and later internationally famous (and more recently reviled) as the author of the “Br’er Rabbit” stories based on folk tales he’d heard from Atlanta’s African-Americans. Du Bois’s growing activism led him to seek opportunities to write for the popular press, both white and Black. Despite difficulties in selling his pieces to Black outlets, most of which were sympathetic to Washington, Du Bois wrote a negative review of Washington’s memoir Up from Slavery in 1901 and published an entire book, The Souls of Black Folk, in 1903. The Souls of Black Folk was mostly a collection of essays, but it included one fictional story about “John,” a sympathetic African-American character who ends up the victim of a lynching. In 1905 Du Bois and others organized a meeting of Black activists at Niagara Falls, New York, and set up a group called the Niagara Movement. It didn’t last long, but in 1909 Du Bois was the only Black participant in a meeting to set up another organization for African-American civil rights, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which still exists. He was offered the presidency, which he turned down because he had decided that the real power of the organization lay in its ability to change public opinion of both whites and Blacks about racial issues. So he demanded and got the editorship of the NAACP’s publication, The Crisis, which he held for the next 14 years until the combination of the Great Depression and increasing encroachments on his editorial control by new NAACP leadership (notably its controversial new chair, Walter White, who got a lot of jokes made about his last name because he was so unusually light-skinned for an African-American a lot of people who saw him thought he was white) caused Du Bois to leave The Crisis in 1934.

According to this show’s writer/director, Rita Coburn, The Crisis became so popular among Black Americans that many of them who hadn’t known how to read before learned to read so they could read The Crisis. In the premier issue in November 1910, Du Bois wrote the mission statement, which said the publication’s purpose would be to "set forth those facts and arguments which show the danger of race prejudice, particularly as manifested today toward colored people." He called The Crisis "a record of the darker races,” and added, "It will first and foremost be a newspaper: it will record important happenings and movements in the world which bear on the great problem of inter-racial relations, and especially those which affect the Negro-American. Secondly, it will be a review of opinion and literature, recording briefly books, articles, and important expressions of opinion in the white and colored press on the race problem. Thirdly, it will publish a few short articles. Finally, its editorial page will stand for the rights of men, irrespective of color or race, for the highest ideals of American democracy, and for reasonable but earnest and persistent attempts to gain these rights and realize these ideals. The magazine will be the organ of no clique or party and will avoid personal rancor of all sorts. In the absence of proof to the contrary it will assume honesty of purpose on the part of all men, North and South, white and Black." The Crisis was on the scene, and frequently was the first publication outlet, for many of the authors who made up what became known as the “Harlem Renaissance” of the 1920’s. Along the way DuBois and his wife Nina had a second child, daughter Yolandé, who in the 1930’s began dating Black bandleader Jimmie Lunceford. But Du Bois didn’t think a bandleader was an appropriate husband for his daughter, so he forced her to marry the Black poet Countee Cullen. Unfortunately, Cullen was Gay, and instead of going on a honeymoon with the new Mrs. Cullen after the ceremony he went off on a vacation with the best man at the wedding. (This anecdote startled me because, while I’ve known about Lunceford for years and have collected all his records, I knew absolutely nothing about his private life.)

One important Du Bois story that wasn’t mentioned in this film was a debate in Chicago in March 1929 between Du Bois and a white supremacist author and publicist named Lothrop Stoddard on the topic, “Shall the Negro Be Encouraged to Seek Cultural Equality?” The story of this fascinating event was told by Ian Frazier in the August 26, 2019 The New Yorker (available online at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/26/when-w-e-b-du-bois-made-a-laughingstock-of-a-white-supremacist). Du Bois went on first and said, that contrary to the claims made by racist pseudo-scientists like Madison Grant (whose own racist books had provided most of the material for Stoddard’s), “the proofs of essential human equality of gift are overwhelming.” Du Bois said that the “Nordics,” the people Stoddard held out as the epitome of the white race, “have overrun the earth and brought not simply modern civilization and technique, but with it exploitation, slavery and degradation to the majority of men. … They have been responsible for more intermixture of races than any other people, ancient and modern, and they have inflicted this miscegenation on helpless unwilling slaves by force, fraud and insult; and this is the folk that today has the impudence to turn on the darker races, when they demand a share of civilization, and cry: ‘You shall not marry our daughters!’ The blunt, crude reply is: Who in Hell asked to marry your daughters?” Stoddard in turn quoted Booker T. Washington’s fingers-and-hands metaphor and said, “The more enlightened men of southern white America … are doing their best to see that separation shall not mean discrimination; that if the Negroes have separate schools, they shall be good schools; that if they have separate train accommodations, they shall have good accommodations.” At this point the published record of the debate by its organizers, the local magazine The Forum, contains the bracketed word, “[Laughter.]” The report of the debate in the Baltimore Afro-American explained that the laughter came from the Black people in the audience who knew full well that the accommodations offered Blacks under Jim Crow segregation were far from “equal” to those offered whites. The Afro-American reporter went on to explain, “When the laughter had subsided, Mr. Stoddard, in a manner of mixed humility and courage, claimed that he could not see the joke. This brought more gales of laughter.” The Forum’s publishers thought they had a potential gold mine in further Du Bois/Stoddard debates, but as Du Bois grimly predicted, Stoddard turned down their offer.

In 1935 Du Bois published what was quite possibly his most important book since The Souls of Black Folk: Black Reconstruction in America, his attempt to use his considerable skills as an historian and a sociologist to demolish the myth that the Reconstruction period from 1865 to 1877 had brought to power a lot of corrupt Black officials who were manipulated by white “scalawags” for their own nefarious ends. It was the ruling history of the era and Du Bois, who’d lived through and worked on the NAACP’s campaign against D. W. Griffith’s racist 1915 masterpiece The Birth of a Nation – a film which had used Griffith’s considerable talents as a movie director to dramatize the racist view of Reconstruction – was determined to reverse it once and for all. Alas, his view of Reconstruction wasn’t taken seriously until the 1960’s, when white historians like Erle McKitrick and Eric Foner (the latter of whom was interviewed for this film) adopted it. Though Du Bois – much to the discontent of fellow NAACP officials, most of whom had been white Quakers – urged African-Americans to support and participate in the U.S.’s involvement in both world wars, after the end of World War II he became strongly pacifist. Part of his change had come from his growing disillusionment with capitalism and his belief that socialism offered humanity the way forward. Part of it was influenced by the new woman in his life, author, composer, and journalist Shirley Graham, whom he’d started dating when he and Nina were separated and whom he married after Nina’s death in 1950. Graham was an active Communist and encouraged Du Bois to join the party. Part of it was also due to a bizarre prosecution Du Bois was subjected to by the U.S. government, which indicted him for having signed the Stockholm Peace Appeal and chaired the Peace Information Center (PIC), which was formed to lobby for the document. The government charged that the PIC was an unregistered lobbying organization for the Soviet Union, but Du Bois and his attorney, Left-wing former Republican New York Congressmember Vito Marcantonio, got the judge to dismiss the case.

In 1945 Du Bois had gone to Manchester, England for the fifth and final Pan-African Congress, where he'd met Kwame Nkrumah, who would become the first President of Ghana after the country achieved independence from British colonial rule in 1957. With the American political climate growing more hostile to Du Bois’s views, Nkrumah essentially offered him asylum in Ghana, and Du Bois accepted. He renounced his American citizenship and became a Ghanaian national (ironically Ghana and the neighboring Gold Coast had been the principal sources for Black slaves kidnapped and sent to America during the African slave trade), where he lived until he died at age 95 on August 27, 1963: the day before the National March on Washington. When his death was announced from the stage at the March on Washington, there was an audible sigh of sorrow from the massive crowd. Du Bois made more than his fair share of political mistakes: he supported Woodrow Wilson for President in 1912 (alienating most Black voters of the time; not many Blacks voted at all, but the few that did were usually Republicans at a time when the Republican party still acted like the “party of Lincoln”), then was shocked when the Virginia-born Wilson instituted outright segregation in federal employment. It’s also creepy, to say the least, to see the photos in this documentary showing Du Bois hobnobbing with such vicious Communist dictators as Stalin, Khrushchev, and Mao. But in general he was an admirable figure and he remains one of my personal heroes. I give PBS a lot of credit for showing this documentary now instead of waiting for next February to time it during so-called “Black History Month.” It’s also a radical statement at a time when Southern states, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s final evisceration of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, are hastening to redraw their Congressional and state legislative maps to drive the few remaining African-American representatives in those states out of power once and for all. The Voting Rights Act was often referred to as “the Second Reconstruction,” and while it took the white Southern establishment 61 years to destroy the Second Reconstruction when it only took them 12 to end the first one, the likely result of the schemes by Southern legislatures and the U.S. and Virginia Supreme Courts will be to keep the House of Representatives safely in Republican hands after the 2026 midterm elections despite the growing unpopularity of their and President Trump’s policies. Activism like Du Bois’s has never been needed since his time as much as it is now.