Jeffrey Wright and Rita Coburn Take Their Du Bois Documentary on the Road
Jeffrey Wright and filmmaker Rita Coburn have spent months touring their documentary about W.E.B. Du Bois through cinemas across the United States and abroad. Deadline reported the tour on 5 November 2026, and Wright told the outlet he is not prouder of any other project he has been part of.
The film is called W.E.B. Du Bois: Rebel With A Cause. It runs two hours and follows Du Bois's life from his birth. Coburn wrote, directed and produced it. Viola Davis narrates, and Common, Courtney B. Vance and Wright give dramatic readings of Du Bois's writing, so his words are heard in the actors' voices as well as the narrator's.
Historians and writers provide commentary. They include Henry Louis Gates Jr., Eric Foner, Nikole Hannah-Jones and Imani Perry. Du Bois was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard. He died in Ghana in 1963, on the eve of the March on Washington.
The tour has stopped in Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, London and Cambridge, England. A London screening was scheduled for Sunday, 18 October 2026, according to a Deadline report. The film had already reached television audiences first. It premiered on PBS in the United States at 9 p.m. Eastern Time on 19 May 2026, as part of the American Masters series.
That order is worth noticing. A documentary that airs on public television in May and then travels to cinemas in the autumn follows a route that is becoming familiar. Television gives a film a wide first audience. A theatrical tour, meaning a run of screenings in cinemas and other venues, gives people a chance to see it on a big screen and sometimes in the company of others.
Coburn has made films about other major American figures. Her earlier documentaries include Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise and Marian Anderson: The Whole World in Her Hands. She is a Peabody Award winner, the American broadcasting prize, and she directed this film for the same public television strand.
For Wright, the project has a personal weight. He told Deadline he regards it as the work he is proudest of among everything he has taken part in. The tour continues to bring that work to audiences in person.
