Jeffrey Wright has played a lot of big roles, but he says nothing tops his work on W.E.B. Du Bois: Rebel With A Cause, Rita Coburn’s PBS American Masters documentary, as first reported by AllHipHop.
“I do a lot of stuff, but I’m not prouder of any other piece that I’ve been a part of than this,” Wright told Deadline.
Who’s Involved
Wright performs readings of Du Bois’s own words in the film. Viola Davis narrates, and Common and Courtney B. Vance also voice Du Bois’s writing. The doc premiered on PBS in May, held an event in London in October and has screenings coming up in Los Angeles on November 12 and New York on November 19.
Coburn said she hopes the film “invites reflection and sparks dialogue, not only about who Du Bois was.”
The IAHHM Take
Du Bois was born in Massachusetts in 1868 and died in Ghana in 1963. In between, he wrote The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, a book that still shapes how we talk about Black identity in America. If you came up on conscious rap, a lot of those ideas reached you secondhand.
That’s why it hits that Common is part of this. Hip hop has always been a place where Black history gets passed down, and a film like this is the source material. Stories like this belong in the same conversation as our HBCU coverage: knowing where we come from.
Have you seen it yet? Tell us which Du Bois idea still hits hardest today.
Source: AllHipHop
