New PBS Doc on the Legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois, an Intellectual Giant of His Era

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Well, next, we turn to the remarkable life of civil rights pioneer W.E.B. Du Bois, a scholar, journalist, and activist, famously the first black man to get a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895. He’s now the subject of a new documentary, “W.E.B. Du Bois: Rebel with a Cause.” Here’s a snippet from the trailer.

 

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

 

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I very early got the idea —

 

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: — that I was going to prove to the world that Negroes —

 

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: — were just like other people.

 

(END VIDEO CLIP)

 

GOLODRYGA: Michel Martin sits down with the film’s award-winning director Rita Coburn. They discuss Du Bois’ groundbreaking work and his legacy today.

MARTIN: Thanks Christiane. Rita Coburn, thank you so much for talking with us.

 

COBURN: Thank you for having me. This is an honor and it’s an honor to talk about WEB Du Bois.

 

MARTIN: Well such a seminal figure of political activism of the academy, of sociology, of so many disciplines as a patron of the arts. So just, just give us the, the, the short version. He was born in this small town in Western Massachusetts in 1868, after the Emancipation Proclamation, which ended slavery for what, like 3.5 million, you know, black men and women.

 

COBURN: Absolutely. 

 

MARTIN: But his family was never enslaved. So tell me that story. How did he end up there and what were they doing there and what was their life?

 

COBURN: So he was born in 1868, so that’s three years after the Emancipation Proclamation. However. Because he was in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, there had not been enslavement for several generations there. So his family was solidly placed there. And as a result of that, there – not to say that there wasn’t any racism – but whites and blacks had been living with one another for at least a century by that time.

What he did was, he was such a student that his mother in particular sewed into him that that was the hope. The hope was education.

So Du Bois had a prep school education, and education was far more classical in that time period and pretty much based on European education at the time. And what they found was, as much as they poured in, he was able to receive. And so I think his intellect – and the fact that he was not in the Jim Crow South – gave him that expanse. He became the valedictorian of his class. He just was exceptional.

 

MARTIN: He goes to Fisk for his undergraduate education. He then eventually does get to Harvard for his graduate studies. They make him what, start over again, even though he’s the top of his class at Fisk because what – they decided that a black school wasn’t, you know, at the same level? So how does he do at Harvard?

 

COBURN: So you are exactly right. He goes to Fisk and he loves Fisk. He finds himself as a person there, as a black person. He’s with other people that are like himself. And he hasn’t been in a group of educated blacks before. He also becomes very entrenched in the spirituals from the Fisk Jubilee singers. He feels something about and coins it the Sorrow Songs. And he really comes to his own at Fisk.

He wants still to go to Harvard, and by the time he’s able to get the money and to get to Harvard he is in undergrad and he likes Harvard, he loves the Massachusetts social group of blacks that he’s met. But he doesn’t really feel that much a part of them academically. It’s still a very racist place for him.

So he is able to petition to go to Berlin, which is where sociology is really starting to begin. And as he gets there, he’s able to find what he wants to do from a scientific perspective. And once he does that, unfortunately he’s not able to graduate there because his residency was for two years and it would be three years for him to get his PhD there. So he comes back to Harvard and that’s where he gets his PhD. 

 

MARTIN: But he’s the first – do I have this right – is he the first African American to get a PhD from Harvard?

 

COBURN: He is the first African American to get a PhD from Harvard.

 

MARTIN: He then took those techniques to Philadelphia, his first kind of job, I guess, after he finished his studies, where he was hired to do a study of the black population of Philadelphia. So would you just describe a little bit about why that was such a unique analysis at the time?

 

COBURN: Well, “The Philadelphia Negro” is cited as the first empirical study in sociology of a class and a group. And so he goes to the Seventh Ward and he decides he’s gonna live in the Seventh Ward. So he and Nina Gohmert, who’s, he’s married, his first job was actually at Wilber Forest. But although he was doing math and science, he wanted to do sociology. So when this study comes up, he goes. He’s not given a professorship. He’s just there to do the research and to do this study. And basically what Philadelphia is saying is that we are a border city, pretty much. We’re getting so many black people here, and these people are basically ruining our economy. They’re living in slum conditions. There, it must be something wrong with them. There’s something wrong with these people.

And he does the study and turns that on its head and says, it’s not them. It’s the way that they’re being treated in the society. If they have to walk these many miles to go to school, they’re not gonna be able to go to school. If black women can’t get jobs, then they’re not going to be able to help their families. So what you have is a system that is fighting against people as opposed to people that are fighting you. They are doing the best that they can. If they have to live in cramped housing, they’re going to come out in the summer and hang out on the street. If they can’t make money, they’re going to do things that they wouldn’t normally do if they had a fair chance. And he does that all with data charts and graphs. And at this point, he’s still bent on the science of the matter, that if I can show you scientifically what is wrong, you as a society, you as a community will accept us. And that doesn’t happen.

 

MARTIN: He moves from Philadelphia to Atlanta to become a professor at a university there. This is a seminal moment. He quickly gets a reality check about what it’s like to be a black man in the South. Will you tell us what it was?

 

COBURN: You know, when Du Bois goes into the deep South and goes into Atlanta, he’s at Atlanta University and that campus kind of sits on a hill away from some of the racism in the town, but it’s also an integrated university. Most of these universities at the time had a lot of whites that had gone to Dartmouth and Princeton, and they were teaching there, and they were teaching  alongside blacks.

And so he is in Atlanta, and at the same time, he doesn’t understand how bad the south really is until in 1899, Sam Hose is murdered, lynched in a brutal way. And this is his first reckoning with lynching. That’s not something that he’s seen, that’s not something he’s been a part of. And the horror of that moment – they burned Sam Hose’s body, they cut off his fingers and genitals – it’s a horrific moment for him. And it speaks to something that is happening in this country at that time. And he’s so appalled by it. He’s thinking, I’m gonna take a letter to the Atlanta Journal constitution and en route, he’s told that Sam Hose’s fingers and toes are in the window of the meat market. And at that point, he turns around and he decides scientific research is not going to work. I must now tell people what black people are suffering. And he decides that what he’s really going to do is become a journalist. That’s what he decides he’s going to do. He is going to eventually be a person who’s the editor of the Crisis magazine. He is going to begin to do studies, and he is going to write.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

 

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The title was extremely important. “The Crisis of the Color Line” was the crisis of America.

 

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Not only is he going to become a social activist, but he understands the power of the press.

 

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He insisted that I have all editorial privilege and power. Nobody will dictate to me what I can say.

 

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COBURN: And I think what is beautiful about this is that we had Frederick Douglass being the great orator, but you could only reach so many people at a time. We have to remember that it’s at this point in this country that print takes off, and it is the internet of that time period. 

 

MARTIN: Tell us about the “Souls of Black Folk.” This is the one piece that a lot of – of Du Bois is that I think a lot of people know. Tell us about where the idea for this book came from. And what’s the core of it, for people who aren’t familiar with it?

 

COBURN: So, in 1899, Sam Hose gets lynched. It changes him to a person who’s now going to fight for his people using words, using journalism, making sure people know what is happening. That’s 1899. 1900, he goes to Paris, to the Paris Exposition. He takes a group of photographs that shows that black people are living lives beyond digging their way out of Jim Crow. They’re living lives that have purpose, meaning. They have businesses. They’re studying the arts. He wants people to see a broader scope of black people. He comes back. During that same time period, his son Burkhart dies. He’s less than two years old, and he dies because no white doctors will treat him. So he’s seen Sam Hose die in 1899. He’s seen his son die. And at that point, he comes back and he sits down and he wants to write a book that tells people that ‘we are human beings, that we have souls, that we hurt, that we do art, that we have pleasures, that we’re people.’

So “The Souls of Black Folk” is part of the international and national letters of this country. It’s taught in universities and has been since its publication in 1903. 

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

 

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He opens up with this concept that has three parts. Double consciousness.

 

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It’s a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, the sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of

 

measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

 

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Two-ness.

 

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one

 

dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

 

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COBURN: And then he says, we live behind the veil. “I am blood and bone of those who live behind the veil.” At some point, will you let me out? Can I be free? 

 

MARTIN: Well, what’s so fascinating to me, though, is that I think people get this, hearing you describe it, how contemporary it remains. This idea of being at once your own person, but being the object of the gaze of the other and constantly being seen as the other. Like, these are thoughts that people are having today. It’s just…

 

COBURN: You know, as I worked on this documentary, there were times when I would read something that he wrote, and I would get right up from my desk and walk out the front door and walk around the block. I had no place to put it. And yet, what I couldn’t understand was, why is this still happening? When were we going to learn the lesson as a country to come together?

I think it’s very disconcerting that, what his work was — his work for the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendment, the idea that we needed the right to vote, and where are we now? We look at Memphis, we look at what’s happening right now, and we see that he’s still speaking, and we’re still dealing with a very difficult problem of being accepted fully in this society.

 

MARTIN: Um, two more things we have to sort of talk about: the fact that he had, he had beef with Booker T. Washington. I mean, this is something that I think some people may know about, that the two of them kind of represent different perspectives of the kind of the path forward that was ideal for black folks. Could you just as briefly as you can, just describe, just tell me about his beef with Booker T. Washington.

 

COBURN: WEB Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, it’s a story in which you have the up and coming and the current person that has kind of been grandfathered into the society.

Booker T. Washington was the most powerful black man in America during that time period. And what happens is, WEB Du Bois is a different sort. He didn’t grow up in slavery. Booker T. Washington was a slave until he was six years old. He had a very limited view of what we could possibly do, that maybe we could gain the rights to be good workers, and maybe we would find our way that way. WEB Du Bois said, no, we need the right to vote. We need women’s rights. We need to have an agency about ourselves. And so his sandpaper relationship with Booker T. Washington started with him respecting him, and then saying, ‘I’m sorry, I have to part company because this is what black people need at this point.’ That’s why I called him a rebel. He took on seven presidents. He took on Booker T. Washington. He took on Marcus Garvey. If he did not agree, he did not agree. And he did not agree with Booker T Washington saying we would be the workers of the South. He really felt that it was time to have the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendment realized.

 

MARTIN: His life, he came to a close in Accra in Ghana, because he had toward the end of his life, really, really did become discouraged, really did start to feel that black people would never be fully accepted in the United States, would never have a full sort of flourishing. And moved to Ghana and that’s where he died.

Of course, his passport was revoked at one point. I mean, he was kind of persona non grata in part because he became more and more attracted to the socialist movement and to the Communist Party because he felt that they were actually more embracing of full human rights.

But just before we let you go, just tell us about that. Like, why did he move to Ghana at the end of his life? 

 

COBURN: He looks at this world that he’s fought for inside of the US. Both of his children have now died. He’s 90 some years old, and he’s been arrested, handcuffed, and accused of not, of being against America, of being a communist. I think it’s a flick of the nose when he decides to join the Communist Party on the same day that he decides to take a flight to Ghana and Kwame Nkrumah is now building a country. And that idea of freedom for an African country from being colonized is very attractive to him. And they roll out the red carpet for him. They give him a wonderful home. 

 

MARTIN: Rita Coburn, thank you so much for talking with us.

 

COBURN: Thank you.