The house lights hadn’t even come up. As the final frame of “W.E.B. Du Bois: Rebel With a Cause” faded to black, a single voice cut through the dark from somewhere in the crowd: “Vote!”
Not a whisper, not a suggestion — a command, thrown out like it was the only logical response to what everyone in the Martha’s Vineyard auditorium where the documentary was screened had just witnessed. The room answered with applause that didn’t feel like appreciation for a film. It felt like a room full of people bracing themselves, together, for what comes next.
“Because he witnessed Reconstruction, its fall, the rolling back of the Black codes, two world wars, Brown v. Board — Du Bois is a portal,” said Emory University sociologist Dr. Karida Brown. “By understanding his life, we learn all of this on repeat. There’s a playbook, and we get to learn it so we don’t start from scratch.”
That was the temperature Tuesday night as the talkback panel took the stage at the 24th Annual Martha’s Vineyard African-American Film Festival. What unfolded over the next hour made clear this was never just a documentary screening. It was a gathering — part history lesson, part group therapy, part call to arms — for an audience that understood the assignment: activate your consciousness in the fight for Black freedom. This wasn’t a film about a Black pioneer confined to the past. It was a survival guide for the turbulent times facing Black America right now.
What makes the PBS documentary resonate is its willingness to show Du Bois’ peaks, valleys and struggles — his willingness to be wrong at a time when too many leaders play it safe.
“Small things we consider failures build muscles for the rest of our lives. We don’t need to live in regret,” said Rita Coburn, the film’s director. “What I like about Du Bois was that he kept moving forward — he had a spirit of doing it anyway.”
The film reminds us that “Talented Tenth” or not, no Black person is above the personal tragedies of racial violence. Between the death of his 2-year-old son and the lynching of Sam Hose, Du Bois’ social consciousness was activated — and it’s hard to watch without examining our own.
“He wrote about the lynching from a righteous rage, but also as an intellectual, in an op-ed in the Atlanta Constitution,” Brown said. “Imagine passing a butcher shop with that man’s knuckles in the window — the sociology just doesn’t hit like it used to. He felt called to do something more. That’s when he became a true public intellectual and joined the NAACP.”
The NAACP he joined wasn’t yet the institution we know today — at its founding, it was not Black led. Stepping in to a leadership role meant DuBois had to confront who it truly served
“I didn’t know the NAACP was a white organization,” said actor Courtney B. Vance, who co-narrated the film. “They had to deal with a Black man who became the center of it because The Crisis was the meat and potatoes. There was no CNN. That’s how people found out what was happening in the Black community.”
Between ICE raids, voter suppression, gerrymandering and book bans, panelists in a discussion following the screening said it can feel like we’re reliving America’s dark ages — but this time with a roadmap.
“This is not new. In 1924, they deported 1.8 million Mexicans,” Vance said. “This man was trying to do the same thing we’re trying to do today, and he gave his life for it.”
Asked what she wants a 25-year-old to take from the film, Coburn told The Root: “I want you to understand how powerful you are. If you’re a person under attack, it’s only because of how powerful you are.”
That’s the inheritance this film hands us — not nostalgia, but instruction.
