Quadraphonic echoes of history

History--as the collective memory of the past--can be treacherous ground. If we walk it in belief, as if we are treading the truth rather than searching for the many strands that yield a shifting outline of what once was, we'll shortly find ourselves in a dark wood, and not even realize it.

Filmmaker Louis Massiah (The Bombing of Osage Avenue and Cecil B. Moore), a recent recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, didn't plan on getting lost as he explored the life of W.E.B. Du Bois, the pre-eminent black intellectual-activist of the first century of Emancipation. Massiah entrusted his film, W.E.B. Du Bois--a Biography in Four Voices (airing this February on the Public Broadcasting Service), to four writers--Toni Cade Bambara, Amiri Baraka, Wesley Brown and Thulani Davis--each of whom wrote and narrated one of the film's four chronologically divided segments.

"As Thulani remarks at the beginning of the film," Massiah says, "everybody has their slightly different kind of reading of Du Bois. I wanted to have a structure that addressed that, so I came up with the notion of having four wonderful storytellers spin documentary short stories about Dr. Du Bois' life."

Varying readings, however, do not imply unmoored interpretations. "One of the lessons we learned from Du Bois," Massiah insists, "is the importance of empirical evidence--that you don't make decisions about why black people are a certain way based on notions. So, to be in the film, my first choice was to get witnesses, that is, people who were involved in the history, men and women who knew and worked with Dr. Du Bois--including people who may have opposed him, like some of the folks in the Garvey movement and some of the NAACP officials. I also wanted to work with historians--people who had spent 20, 30, 40, 50 years of their lives studying this history and Dr. Du Bois."

Thus Massiah's search for Du Bois entails more than four voices--there is a distinguished chorus of friends, activists and historians, among them Herbert Aptheker, John Henrik Clarke, Harold Cruse, Paula Giddings, David Levering Lewis and the subject's grant/daughter, Du Bois Williams. While speaking of Du Bois' achievements, they do not shy away from his complexities, his evolving opinions, his human capacity to be flawed or to feel loss. Aptheker, a longtime confidant, admits that Du Bois regretted having supported (over Monroe Trotter's opposition) the candidacy of Woodrow Wilson. Williams poignantly suggests that in The Souls of Black Folk, her grandfather's scholarship disguised the pain he felt at losing his infant son.

Visually, Massiah's film offers a sweeping, yet detailed scrapbook of black history--photographs, film footage and magazine and newspaper clippings abound, bringing immediacy to a life that spanned the passage of the 14th Amendment (1868) and the March on Washington (1963) and ignited movements from Africa to America, from Pan-Africanism to militant socialism. Even the background music creates effective transitions to the chapters of Du Bois' activism, contributing to the film's potency.

Though Massiah is drawn to the sight and the sound of history, it is its meaning that motivates the filmmaker: "I knew that I wanted a film that would look at Dr. Du Bois' life, but I also wanted a film that would allow us to look at the strategies and context and lessons. Four Voices is more than just a movie--it was an opportunity I feel that I was given, or I gave myself, to re-examine this history.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): W.E.B. Du Bois in Philadelphia, ca. 1896-97.

Louis Massiah.

Wesley Brown.

Toni Cade Bambara.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Thulani Davis.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Amiri Baraka.

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by Sharon Fitzgerald

Sharon Fitzgerald is a freelance writer in New York City. Her last article for American Visions, "Belafonte, the Lionhearted," appeared in the August/September 1996 issue.