JEFFREY WRIGHT TO JOIN DIRECTOR RITA COBURN FOR LONDON PREMIERE OF W.E.B. DU BOIS: REBEL WITH A CAUSE

Acclaimed documentary from Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Rita Coburn to screen at Charlotte Street Hotel, followed by a conversation with Coburn and Wright

LOS ANGELES, CA, UNITED STATES, October 14, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Continuing its momentum following its U.S. broadcast and screenings across the country, W.E.B. Du Bois: Rebel With A Cause will make its London premiere on Sunday, October 18, 2026, at the Charlotte Street Hotel in London.
The screening will be followed by a conversation with Peabody Award-winning director Rita Coburn and acclaimed actor Jeffrey Wright, who received an Academy Award nomination for his leading performance as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison in American Fiction. Wright is also one of the featured readers who brings the words of W.E.B. Du Bois to life in the documentary.

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Directed, written and produced by Coburn, W.E.B. Du Bois: Rebel With A Cause chronicles the extraordinary life and enduring legacy of Dr. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, the scholar, historian, sociologist, author, activist and Pan-Africanist whose work helped shape modern civil rights thought.

Narrated by Academy Award-winning actress Viola Davis, the two-hour documentary brings Du Bois’ writings vividly to life through dramatic readings by Common, Courtney B. Vance and Jeffrey Wright, weaving together rare archival footage, photographs, historical documents and contemporary scholarship. The Black female creatives highlight below have interesting backstories, particularly our EP Sandra Evers-Manly, related to the slain civil rights activist Medgar Evers. Our composer Kathryn Bostic. Our esteemed Black editor K.A. Miille has worked with such directors as Ken Burns and Alex Gibney and she collaborated with Rita Coburn includes the doc Marian Anderson, She’s Got The Whole World In Her Hands. She also cut Who Killed Malcolm X? which helped reopen the investigation into Malcom X’s murder.

Born in 1868, just five years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Du Bois lived through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, two World Wars and the dawn of the modern Civil Rights Movement. The documentary follows his journey from groundbreaking academic achievement and the founding of the NAACP to his international Pan-African work and his death in Ghana in 1963, on the eve of the March on Washington.

Drawing from Du Bois’ speeches, essays, books, correspondence and archival recordings, the film examines his enduring contributions to the struggle for racial and human equality. His landmark 1903 work, The Souls of Black Folk, famously identified “the problem of the color-line” as the defining problem of the twentieth century. More than a century later, the questions Du Bois raised about race, democracy, power and global citizenship continue to resonate.

The documentary features commentary from leading historians, scholars and cultural voices, including Raymond Arsenault, Karida Brown, Eric Foner, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Nikole Hannah-Jones, David Levering Lewis and Imani Perry, among others.

Coburn, whose previous documentaries on Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise and Marian Anderson: The Whole World In Her Hands earned widespread acclaim, has dedicated much of her filmmaking career to preserving and bringing new audiences to the stories of transformational Black figures.

“Storytelling is how we preserve truth,” said Coburn. “When we bring historical voices like Du Bois to life, we reconnect audiences with ideas that continue to shape our democracy and our world.”

Wright said of the film:
“I’m not prouder of any of work I have been a part of than I am proud of this.”

Rachel Aberly
RCW Media Productions
+1 310-795-0143

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