Berkshire Publishing Group is pleased to sponsor this website on W. E. B. Du Bois—a native of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the town in which Berkshire Publishing is located. In his 1968 autobiography, Du Bois mentioned sledding down Castle Hill—no doubt right past the house of Berkshire Publishing’s founders, Karen Christensen and David Levinson, which was built in 1868, the year Du Bois was born.

William Edward Du Bois (he added Burghardt later in life) was born in Great Barrington on 23 February 1868. About his birth he wrote:

I was born by a golden river and in the shadow of two great hills. My birthplace was Great Barrington, a little town in western Massachusetts in the valley of the Housatonic, flanked by the Berkshire Hills. Physically and socially our community belonged to the Dutch valley of the Hudson rather than to Puritan New England, and travel went south to New York often more easily than east to Boston. (Dusk of Dawn, 1940)

His mother, Mary Burghardt Du Bois, was a member of the large Burghardt family, who had arrived in the county in the 1700s,. Du Bois was born in a cottage his parents were renting from Jefferson and Minerva McKinley at the lower end of Church Street, adjacent to the Housatonic River. McKinley was a former slave who came to Great Barrington after the Civil War. He grew and sold vegetables, did odd jobs, and was known about town as an uneducated but insightful philosopher. Du Bois’s father left town when Du Bois was young, and Du Bois and his mother were poor. She worked as a housekeeper, but a stroke that she suffered when Du Bois was a boy limited her earning potential. From the age of about two to four, Du Bois lived with his mother at his maternal grandfather’s house on what is now Route 23. The Burghardt homestead made quite an impression on young Du Bois (who was known as Willie), and he remembered and wrote about his years there throughout his life. He and his mother moved several times, living mainly in the downtown area in rented rooms.

Du Bois attended the local grammar school and Great Barrington High School, graduating in 1884. He and his mother were also members of the First Congregational Church (the only black members at the time), and he attended Sunday School there. They also attended events at the new Clinton African Methodist Episcopal Zion Society. His own voluminous writings on his growing up in Great Barrington indicate that he had a happy childhood and adolescence. His major biographer, David Levering Lewis (1993) noted, “The importance of the Great Barrington Period, its imprint upon all that Willie Du Bois grew to be, was deep, and certainly singular.” Du Bois excelled in school, played with friends, was encouraged in his studies by well-off white families, held odd jobs, and when fifteen years old began writing columns for the Springfield Republican and the New York Globe. He was an acute and insightful observer and recorder of town life, and some of his descriptions of life in Great Barrington in the 1880s continue to ring true in 2006. In 1885 he left Great Barrington to attend Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, his expenses paid for by funds raised by area Congregational churches.

Although he never lived full-time in Great Barrington again, he maintained a lifelong relationship with the community. The good feelings he experienced as a boy never left him. He corresponded with family and friends, conducted genealogical research on the Burghardt family, and announcements appeared regularly in the weekly Berkshire Courier chronicling his academic accomplishments, appointments, and publications. He returned to town several times and in 1894 delivered a lecture at the Clinton A. M. E. Zion Church on his travels in Europe to raise funds for the church. He moved his wife, Nina Gomer Du Bois, to Great Barrington to give birth to their son Burghardt in 1898 and their daughter Yolande in 1900. Burghardt died in 1899 and was buried in Mahaiwe Cemetery in Great Barrington. Du Bois later arranged for Nina’s burial there in 1950 and his daughter Yolande’s in 1961. In TheSouls of Black Folk (1903) Du Bois wrote of his sense of loss after his son’s death: “Wife and child fled fast and faster than boat and steam-car, and yet Imust ever impatiently await them; away from the hard-voiced city, away from the flickering sea into my own Berkshire Hills that sit sadly guarding the gates of Massachusetts.”

In 1928 friends of Du Bois purchased the Burghardt homestead on Route 23 and made a gift of it to Du Bois. He drew up plans to renovate the house and turn it into a part-time residence and meeting center. Some work was done, but a shortage of funds and time meant the project was never completed. In 1954 Du Bois sold the property and the decaying house. After acquiring the property, Du Bois visited Great Barrington many times, often to visit his friends and NAACP colleagues James Weldon Johnson and Mary White Ovington. Johnson had a summer home in Great Barrington, and Ovington had one in neighboring Alford.

In 1930 he returned to speak at his high school reunion and in a letter beseeched the town to clean up the polluted Housatonic River. In Dusk of Dawn he noted the natural beauty of the town:

My town was shut in by its mountains and provincialism; but it was a beautiful place, a little New England town nestled shyly in its valleys with something of Dutch cleanliness and English reticence … The Housatonic yellowed by the paper mills, rolled slowly through its center; while Green River, clear and beautiful, joined it in the south. Main Street was lined with ancient elms; the hills held white pines and orchards and then faded up to magnificent rocks and caves which shut out the neighboring world.

In 1968 the Burghardt property was purchased by a private foundation, and in 1969 it was established as the W. E. B. Du Bois Memorial Park. The establishment of the park and the dedication ceremony were controversial events in Great Barrington; many organizations, including the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion, strongly objected because Du Bois, at the age of ninety-three, had joined the Communist Party and had left the United States for Ghana. In 1979 the park was dedicated as a National Historic Landmark. In 1987 the property was turned over to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst was charged with overseeing it. In 1983, 1984, and 1993 the university conducted archaeological digs at the site, under the direction of Robert Paynter, a professor of anthropology. Today the site is marked by a barely visible marker and is not accessible to the public. In 2006 a Friends of the Du Bois Homesite was formed in Great Barrington to develop the site.

Despite Du Bois’s international fame, he was largely ignored in Great Barrington until the 1990s. A notable exception was the testimonial to Du Bois in the 1961 town bicentennial book. The book noted, “It has long been a habit of his each fall to drive through Great Barrington, for he says no where in the world is such a beautiful fall as in his home town.” Nonetheless, in the face of public apathy or hostility, several local individuals did work to preserve Du Bois’s reputation and make their fellow citizens aware of his accomplishments and contributions. Perhaps the first was Ruth D. Jones, the daughter of Raleigh Dove, who served as pastor of the Clinton A. M. E. Zion Church. Jones came to Great Barrington in 1946. She played a central role in the establishment of the Du Bois Memorial Park in 1969; she was also instrumental in the establishment and growth of the Du Bois collection on African American history and life at Simon’s Rock College in Great Barrington, where she worked as a cataloguer. The college later instituted an annual Du Bois lecture. Working with Jones was Elaine Gunn, who lived in Great Barrington and taught at Bryant Elementary School. A third early local leader was Homer Meade III of Stockbridge, who introduced a black studies course at Monument Mountain Regional High School (located in Great Barrington) in 1971 and who organized the 1979 dedication ceremony when Du Bois Memorial Park became a National Historic Landmark. Gunn and Meade have also been key leaders in the revival of interest in Du Bois in the twenty-first century.

In 1994, the Great Barrington Historical Society erected markers at Du Bois’s birth site and the graves in Mahaiwe Cemetery. Nina’s grave is marked by a stone and Burghardt’s by a cross (he was originally buried in an unmarked grave). Yolande’s grave is not marked, as Du Bois evidently did not have time to arrange for a stone before leaving for Ghana that same year.

Recognition of Du Bois in Great Barrington has gained momentum in the twenty-first century. In 2001, the Clinton A. M. E. Zion Church, under the leadership of pastor Esther Dozier, became active in preserving Du Bois’s legacy. The church hosted a presentation by the students of Jubilee School of Philadelphia about Du Bois and initiated an annual Du Bois birthday celebration each February, with a guest speaker and reception.

There were a number of notable Du Bois–related events in 2002. Town historian Bernard Drew, a columnist with a long-standing interest in Du Bois, produced a walking-tour pamphlet of fifty Du Bois sites in town, and the Du Bois River Garden and Park was dedicated. The driving force behind the Du Bois River Garden and Park was Rachel Fletcher, the founder of the Great Barrington River Walk. That same year, Homer Meade led an effort to develop and teach a year-long curriculum on Du Bois at Berkshire Country Day School, a private school in the nearby town of Lenox, Massachusetts.

In 2003 members of the Railroad Street Youth Group painted a large mural commemorating Du Bois on the Carr Brothers Hardware wall facing the Taconic parking lot. The mural, which is not intended to last forever, depicts various images of Du Bois—as a scholar, educator, civil-rights activist, and pan-Africanist.

In July 2004 a fresh controversy arose over commemorating Du Bois when it was suggested that one of the two new schools being built in town be named after him. It was pointed out by proponents that Du Bois always spoke highly of his education in Great Barrington. Nonetheless, the school committee turned down the proposal, deciding against naming the schools after any individual. This was followed by another controversy over a proposal to place signs noting that Du Bois was born in Great Barrington on the roads entering town. The proposal was supported almost two to one in a nonbinding referendum and enacted by the selectmen; the signs were erected in early 2006. Finally, in the fall of 2006, Du Bois will receive much attention in a collection of articles, essays, and photos entitled African American Heritage in the Upper Housatonic Valley. The volume provides the first broad history of African American life in the region and much context in which to view Du Bois’s life and achievements.