“Will We Survive This Democracy?” | David Levering Lewis (Part 2)

🎙️ Episode 12

“Will We Survive This Democracy?” | David Levering Lewis (Part 2)

W.E.B. Du Bois was born in 1868 and died in 1963 on the eve of the March on Washington, passing the baton to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In this episode, we return to Du Bois not only as a historical figure, but as a living question for our present moment: How do we move forward from here?

In conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Levering Lewis, we explore how the struggles Du Bois documented, civil rights, democracy, citizenship, and dignity, echo powerfully in 2026.

This is not just history. It is an inheritance.

🔍 What You’ll Hear in This Episode

•  The final question W.E.B. Du Bois leaves us with: how do we move forward? 
•  Why this moment feels like a continuation of the civil rights struggle 
•  The connection between Du Bois’s ideas and today’s debates on democracy and voting rights 
•  Reflections on “double consciousness” and its modern meaning in Black life 
•  How historical cycles of exclusion and resistance continue to repeat 
•  Why historians matter in moments of political and cultural tension 
•  The urgency of documenting, protecting, and understanding Black history in real time 
•  The global context of democracy, power, and historical memory 

🧠 Key Themes

•  Civil rights then and now 
•  Democracy under pressure 
•  Historical memory vs. historical erasure 
•  Black intellectual tradition 
•  Citizenship, voting rights, and power 
•  The responsibility of historians 
•  Survival, resistance, and forward movement 

💬 A Defining Idea from This Episode

We may not recognize the moment we are in while we are in it, but history often reveals itself only when we are forced to act within it.

📣 Resources / Links

🎬 Share the film
 W.E.B. Du Bois: Rebel with a Cause premieres May 19, 2026
Watch the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kMsik6rDQM

📄 Transcript available here
 https://www.buzzsprout.com/2598323

📺 Watch here
 https://www.youtube.com/@ritacoburn9240

🎧 Listen here
 https://www.buzzsprout.com/2598323/episodes

🔗 Stay connected
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🎬 About the Series

Our Truth, Our History, Our Story (Our THS) explores the people, ideas, and cultural forces shaping Black history and storytelling today.

👥 Production Credits

Host: Rita Coburn
 Executive Producer: Andrew T. Carr
 Producers: Christine Coburn Whack, H. Lee Whack

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

W. E. B. Du Bois was born in 1868. He died in 1963 on the eve of the march on Washington, passing the baton to Martin Luther King. There's a question that's raised at the end of W. E. B. Du Bois's life in the documentary. Just by looking at this man who fought deeply for our civil rights and passed it forward, how shall we move forward? How do we go ahead from here? That question was in the 1960s. Right now, in 2026, we are faced with a very similar question. How serious is this moment? Who are we as individuals in this moment? Are we looking to the hills from which cometh our help? Are we looking within ourselves? What is happening in our society? Are we watching as well as praying? Are we active in our communities? Are we prepared for this moment to ensure that we and our children survive, thrive, welcome the future, and become an integral part of this society? So I asked the historian who did two Pulitzer Prize-winning volumes on W.E.B. Du Bois to talk to us about what he thinks the telltale signs will be. Will we be treated fairly, granted equal citizenship, have our voting rights restored? What does he believe are the answers to those questions? David Levering Lewis will be 90 years old in May, just a few days after this documentary premieres. He spent 15 years of his life writing those two Pulitzer Prize-winning books, massive books filled with research, history that cannot be taken away from us. David Levering Lewis can trace his own ancestry back to one of the largest slaveholders in Georgia. That is what this country has allowed. Yet David is here. He's writing, he's telling us what he knows. And I think that we need to listen and acknowledge our historians. This is your grandparents' civil rights movement all over again. This is our present-day civil rights movement, Memphis, voting rights all over again. When Du Bois talks about double consciousness, many today might call it code switching. When Du Bois speaks about the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, he's speaking about the right to citizenship, the right to vote, the right to full humanity. And yet in these past days, we have witnessed terrible blow dealt against voting rights from the highest courts in the land. So what do we do? How do we move forward? We know we must do more than simply call on others to help us. We have to help ourselves. And that is what David Levering Lewis tells us and says it with clarity and conviction. At nearly 90 years old, he's given extraordinary gifts to our understanding of history. And now we have the opportunity to hear from him directly. We have the opportunity to act in our families, in our professions. So we go forward and let's hear what he has to say as we look to the future. Thank you for all the work that you do, for all the books, for telling us it's important to document our own families, for looking at King, for looking at Du Bois, for encouraging us to read a deeper story and for your friendship. Throughout the documentary for W.E.B. Du Bois, the rereading and the reading and the research let me know how much I don't know. And so if we don't have historians like you giving us the food in order to grow, then I don't think we really uh have a chance at understanding our future even this present day. I wonder if do we have a chance?

SPEAKER_00 4:42

That's the fundamental and existential question. I belong to something called the Du Bois Forum. We have something like 40 academics. And I said uh last summer, uh when we all got together, I said, you know, we risk uh finding ourselves exactly in the same terrible uh spot as the Jews in 1930 in Germany. Uh it's so easy to victimize us for reasons of pigment, for reasons of uh of the the catalog's a long one. Uh and we are in danger. It would be so easy for us to be divided and to be oppressed, uh, to have our history trashed as currently it is being, uh, that we had a Stephen Miller prancing through Washington to say that it's a sump uh crime written and the rest of it, a president uh who uh has a uh TikTok that uh uh places a former president in the costume of apes with his wife. This is almost unthinkable, but how did the Jews think when quite suddenly the kind of Jim Crow laws that Hitler used in Germany assailed them when they could not intermarry, when they could not practice professions, when they indeed were uh victims who would soon be diminished in terms of their population. We have something very much like that facing us now. Uh the advantages to persecuting and prosecuting us are so obvious that even with a moment when the newspapers accommodate Jesse Jackson for his grandeur, his valor, when uh the obituary pages don't miss dying rappers and musicians and so on. And you say, well, well, it's not over, is it yet? Well, we don't know. And it's not going to be November, which is coming that makes that determination. We won't know when it's over until it's over. We won't know until we can remove these people and punish them, and punish them for their incivility, their unconstitutional behavior, their racism, and the many people who went along with them who hold their heads in shame. It's only when we can do that. And we have then to be smart about our collaboration. We've got to be smart about uh uh the alliance that is with everybody who is an outsider as well as everybody who doesn't realize that he or she is soon going to be an outsider, because the trajectory here is global. When Rubio speaks in Munich, standing next to Orban of Hungary, the worst dictator in the whole EU, a man who is a partner of Putin. When Rubio, our Secretary of State, maunders and says things that could give some people the idea that we're not going to do what we are going to do, which is we're going to destroy. We're going to destroy the world that came out of 1945. We're going to destroy a world in which the basics are constitutional law, the basics are the right of sovereignty, of sovereignty not to be invaded, not to have your lose your Greenland, not to have Cuba taken over, not to have Iran bombed to satisfy Netanyahu. When all those tentacles that are coming together so effectively in the next year or so coalesce.

SPEAKER_01 9:55

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