The soul of W.E.B. Du Bois

Whether it be through his pioneering and influential scholarship in a variety of disciplines or his public disputes with the most influential “race men” of various eras or his 1961 decision to thumb his nose at the United States, declare allegiance to the Communist Party, and live the remaining years of his life in exile, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois always knew how to grab the headlines. Born the same year that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified and dying on the eve of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Du Bois’s was a life fully lived.

In his magisterial work, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919, David Levering Lewis opens with a vivid description of the announcement of Du Bois’s death at the March on Washington. On that occasion, Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) stepped to the microphone and announced, “Regardless of the fact that in his later years Dr. Du Bois chose another path, it is incontrovertible that at the dawn of the twentieth century his was the voice calling you to gather here today in this cause.” Lewis continues, “The NAACP head asked for silence, and a moment almost cinematic in its poignancy passed over the marchers.” ¹ Lewis’s choice of words here reveals what he seeks to do throughout the biography: he wants to breathe life into Du Bois, animating him for the reader. While Lewis’s work is stunning in so many ways, in the end he is unable to accomplish in print what only the moving image can portray. In “W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices,” producer/director Louis Massiah delivers what Lewis could not. This is a stunning documentary.

Massiah has captured the essence of who Du Bois was. This alone is an impressive accomplishment because Du Bois was not someone who could easily be categorized. Du Bois is a rare figure in American intellectual and political life, not because he lived so long or experienced so much, but because he remained relevant all the while. A quick and easy accounting of Du Bois’s life might conclude that he was merely chameleonesque: a person who refashioned his mind and politics to suit an ever-changing environment. This kind of appraisal would be inaccurate and unfair. Du Bois did change his mind and politics more often than any other leader anyone could probably recall, but he always did so with a larger purpose in mind. His shifts were not fabricated to secure a better place for himself in the world, but to secure a better world.

Most likely, it is for this reason that Massiah elected to present Du Bois’s life to us in four parts. Of course, dividing a two-hour documentary into four sections makes sense from the viewers’ perspective—we can get Du Bois in small and manageable doses. But Massiah does not follow the simple path. Instead, we are treated to the sweep of Du Bois’s life in four parts and from four perspectives. Massiah assembled an impressive cast of narrators to tell the story. Wesley Brown, Thulani Davis, Toni Cade Bambara, and Amiri Baraka, all prominent African American writers, intellectuals, and activists, offer us their interpretations of who Du Bois was and what he meant to themselves, America, and the world. The subtitle of the film, then, is a wink and a nudge to the viewers. We will learn about this complicated and ever-evolving man from individual voices that when heard together unveil Du Bois despite the complexities that have kept so many scholars from understanding him well.

Massiah begins each of the four parts letting the narrators tell us what Du Bois meant to them in their public and private careers. This is a smart move because it draws the viewers in, convincing us that Du Bois...