Jeffrey Wright Talks W.E.B. Du Bois Doc ‘Rebel With A Cause’

“I do a lot of stuff, but I’m not prouder of any other piece that I’ve been a part of than I am to have been a part of this,” Jeffrey Wright says of his participation in W.E.B. Du Bois: Rebel With A Cause, the latest documentary feature by Rita Coburn.

The Oscar-nominated was speaking following a screening of W.E.B. Du Bois: Rebel With A Cause alongside Coburn. The duo has been on a months-long theatrical roadshow tour, screening the title across the U.S. and internationally.

Directed, written, and produced by Coburn, W.E.B. Du Bois: Rebel With A Cause chronicles the extraordinary life and enduring legacy of Dr. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, the scholar, historian, sociologist, author, activist, and Pan-Africanist whose work helped shape modern civil rights thought.

Narrated by Viola Davis, the two-hour documentary explores Du Bois’ writing through dramatic readings by Common, Courtney B. Vance, and Wright. The readings are stitched together with rare archival footage, photographs, and historical documents.

“I was just blown away by the beauty of the film and the comprehensiveness of the arc she had managed,” Wright said of Coburn’s film.

“And that’s because I believe this is incredibly timely. And so central to the moment, even though it’s historical. I’ve been reading Du Bois lately in parallel to this film because I’ve realized that the more I read the news and pay attention to public discourse, the less I understand. There’s so much spectacle, theater, and smoke and mirrors. And so much propaganda that we’re all at a point where we don’t know what to trust. And it’s completely disorienting, to some extent, by design.”

Wright continued to say he’s spent much of the last few years trying to grasp onto things that give him “some certainty of understanding and perspective.”

“And the only way I’ve found to do that is to go back into the history,” he said.

Born in 1868, just five years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Du Bois lived through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, two World Wars, and the dawn of the modern Civil Rights Movement. Rebel With A Cause follows his journey from groundbreaking academic achievement (Du Bois was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard) to the founding of the NAACP, his international Pan-African work, and his death in Ghana in 1963, on the eve of the March on Washington.

The documentary features commentary from leading historians, scholars, and cultural voices, including Raymond Arsenault, Karida Brown, Eric Foner, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Nikole Hannah-Jones, David Levering Lewis, and Imani Perry.

Coburn’s previous documentaries include Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise and Marian Anderson: The Whole World in Her Hands. W.E.B. Du Bois: Rebel With A Cause screened on PBS in the U.S. in May ahead of the theatrical tour. Coburn has since screened the film in Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, London, and Cambridge, England, where she also gave a lecture on Du Bois at the University.

This November, the film will screen again in Los Angeles and New York. Dates can be found here. See a clip of Wright discussing his involvement with the film below.