Born free in 1868 in Great Barrington, Mass., William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, known as W.E.B. Du Bois, remains a towering figure in African-American history and now gets a 21st century re-examination.

PBS’s American Masters series on Tuesday salutes the ground-breaking leadership, inspiration and history of a spectacular life with “W.E.B. Du Bois: Rebel with a Cause.”

Narrated by Viola Davis, with dramatic readings of Du Bois’ words by Common, Courtney B. Vance and Jeffrey Wright, director Rita Coburn’s expansive documentary also boasts commentary from scholars, historians, artists and biographers.

Du Bois’ remarkable life began just five years after the Emancipation Proclamation and ended, 95 years later, on the eve of Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington.

“All of it is an opportunity for us to look at ourselves. His 95-year-life allows us to see who we are over time,” Vance, 66, said in a Zoom interview from LA. “And we’re not pretty. We’re absolutely awful.

“So his life is an opportunity for us to see who we are and hold the mirror up and see if that’s what we want to be.

“Is that, ‘America, the home of the free and the home of the brave’? Or is that just talk?”

Vance ranks as a Du Bois authority, having spent two months recording the Audible readings – over 75 hours — of both volumes of historian David Levering Lewis’ du Bois Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies. Lewis is the first author to win Pulitzer Prizes for biography for two successive volumes on the same subject.

What would Vance hope people take away after seeing “Rebel with a Cause”?

“All these things are just opportunities for discussion. Opportunities,” he said, “for people to go, ‘Wow. I had no idea.’ And to go dig deeper. Hopefully it drives them to go get the audio books.”

Vance recalled how, as they were recording over several months, he, along with the director and engineer, would just stop for 10-15 minutes and go, Can you believe that!

“We were in shock that this great man was human. He was a horrible father. But minutes after he did something horrible, you just go, ‘So bad’ and five minutes later, you will keep reading — and he does something that changed the landscape of the country.

“I mean, his life mission wasn’t his family. His life mission was his country and his people. And he never lost track of that.

“He tried everything he could to get white folks to bring Black people and people of color into the menu of the country. And eventually, he just said, ‘I’m out,’”

Du Bois spent his final years and died in Ghana. “So, what a life!” Vance concluded. “What a life, what a brilliant mind.”

American Masters’ “W.E.B.. Du Bois: Rebel with a Cause” airs (and streams) on PBS May 19

SOURCE: Boston Herald