W.e.B. Du bois |
More Than Massachusetts:
From Humble Beginnings in Great Barrington to Inspiring the World
From Humble Beginnings in Great Barrington to Inspiring the World
W.e.B. Du bois |
Birth & ChildhoodWhile in high school, Du Bois (left) attended meetings at Town Hall, which inspired his thoughts on democracy. He also reported in the Springfield Republican on the activities of the Clinton AME Zion Church sewing society. Upon graduation, the First Congregational Church raised money for Du Bois to attend Fisk University. At his high school reunion in July 1930, Du Bois warned his classmates about the need to clean up the Housatonic River, visible from the River Garden at the base of Church Street.
Civil Rights ActivismDu Bois edited the NAACP magazine The Crisis, and Johnson, who owned a summer home in Great Barrington, was the NAACP field secretary who led its national campaign against lynching.
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Familial TiesDu Bois had deep roots in Great Barrington, where his maternal family, the Burghardts, had lived since the early 1800s. Baby Burghardt was born in Great Barrington in 1897, and when he died in Atlanta in 1899, Du Bois brought his body back to be buried in Mahaiwe Cemetery because they “could not lay him in the ground there in Georgia, for the earth there [was] strangely red; so [they] bore him away to the northward.” Nina and their daughter Yolande are also buried there.
A Return to Great BarringtonDu Bois and his second wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois, surveying the foundations of his childhood house on South Egremont Road in Great Barrington. Du Bois had been given the home in 1928, but never had funds to renovate it into a summer retreat, and it was torn down soon after he sold it in 1954. Today, an interpretive trail about the life and legacy of Du Bois winds through the site.
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