Conflict and Consensus in Great
Barrington: remembering
W. E. B. Du Bois
by Robert Paynter and David Glassberg
Robert Paynter, an historical archaeologist, is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts,
Amherst (USA). Paynter’s research concerns archaeological approaches to the study of inequality, with
emphasis on the materiality of race, class, gender and State action in the creation of the modern world.
David Glassberg is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he teaches
public and environmental history. His publications include Sense of History: The Place of the Past in
American Life (University of Massachusetts Press, 2001).
T
he life and work of W.E.B. Du Bois are
commemorated in two places on earth.
One is in Accra, Ghana, where his life
ended and where the Republic of Ghana
has built an impressive burial site and research centre,
and the other is in the town of his birth, Great
Barrington, Massachusetts, where a group of citizens
has purchased his childhood home in order to create a
local memorial park. The two places could not
provide a stronger contrast with regard to government
respect and neglect. Rather than a large memorial
presence, the W.E. B. Du Bois Boyhood Homesite has
remained a place of struggle where some have sought
to erase Du Bois and his family from the New England
landscape and others have dreamed of a space
honouring Du Bois and his legacy of striving for social
justice. The nearly half-century conflict over the
recognition of Du Bois in his home town reveals much
about the political economy of heritage in the United
States of America.
Du Bois, born in 1868, died on the eve of the
1963 civil rights march on Washington, where the
250,000 people assembled were told that the voice
that had been calling them there since the start of the
century had died the previous night, in Accra. His 95
years were filled with accomplishments: the first
African American to obtain a PhD from Harvard,
author of numerous volumes of scholarly research,
fiction, plays and pageants, co-founder of the Niagara
Movement and the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), proponent
of Pan-Africanism and mentor to the continent’s first
political leaders (Du Bois, 1968; Lewis, 1993; Lewis,
2000).
Given his accomplishments, it is not
surprising that land has been set aside to
commemorate Du Bois’s life and, given the
courageous and critical nature of Du Bois’s life’s work,
it is not surprising that the homesite in the United
States of America has until very recently been a
poison-ivy-choked patch of woodland along a road
that did not even have a lay-by. Before 2008, all that
could be seen by anyone finding the homesite was an
obscured National Historic Landmark plaque and a
cellar hole.
Controversy over the dedication of the homesite
The homesite property first came into the hands of the
Burghardt family, the ‘B’ in W.E.B., possibly as early as
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HERITAGE FROM CONFLICT TO CONSENSUS
Du Bois, who lived at the homesite as a young
child between the ages of two and six, was given the
homesite as a gift in 1928 on his 60th birthday and
owned it until 1954 when the house, in extreme
disrepair, was torn down and the property folded into
the neighbour’s holdings. In essence, by the early
1960s Du Bois’s and his family’s presence had been
erased from the New England landscape (Paynter
et al., 2006; Paynter et al., 1994). Then in 1967,
Walter Wilson, a local White realtor, and Dr. Edmund
W. Gordon, a distinguished African American
psychologist, purchased the small Burghardt homesite
and an additional four or more acres with the
intention of creating a memorial park in honour of
Du Bois (Bass, 2009). They founded the Du Bois
Memorial Committee, consisting of national figures
and Great Barrington residents, and planned a
dedication ceremony at the homesite in October 1969,
moderated by actor Ossie Davis, with a keynote
address by prominent national civil rights figure
Julian Bond. The ceremony drew an international
audience – but also the attention of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and hostile reactions
from some local townspeople.
The opponents and the FBI were drawn to the
celebration because of Du Bois’s controversial political
activities, including his advocacy of civil rights for
African Americans, his support for nuclear
disarmament, his residency in Ghana and his joining
the Communist Party of the United States of America
at the age of 93. The opponents repeatedly took legal
action to block the dedication and issued at least 30
threats to blow up or destroy the memorial after its
completion (Turner, 1976). A local newspaper, the
Berkshire Courier, captured much of this spirit of
opposition when it advised people against violence,
but it did recommend vandalizing the memorial park
after the ceremony (Editor, 1969).
58
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ª David Glassberg
1795 and certainly by 1820. This very small property
of less than an acre was owned and occupied by
members of the Burghardt family, including Du Bois
himself, for about 150 years.
17
17. Interpretive sign erected in 2008 by commemorative boulder dedicated
in 1969 at the W. E. B. Du Bois Boyhood Homesite, Massachusetts (USA).
Racial attitudes also played a role in local
opposition to a Du Bois Memorial Park. African
Americans have always been a small minority of the
town’s population, between 2% and 3%. Mrs Elaine
Gunn, a retired teacher, resident of Great Barrington for
over fifty years, a member of the original 1969 Du Bois
Memorial Committee and current member of the
Friends of the Du Bois homesite, recalls that Blacks and
Whites in the 1940s and 1950s were cordial with one
another but did not cross the more covert racial barriers
in the community (Gunn 2006). Moreover, in an
interview with colleague Evelyn Jeffers, when asked
if controversy would have occurred in 1969 had Du Bois
not become a communist, Ms Gunn quickly replied
‘yes’ and opined that communism allowed Whites at
least to mask their prejudices in part behind Du Bois’s
supposed lack of patriotism (Paynter et al., 2006).
Despite the forces ranged against it, the Du
Bois Memorial Committee prevailed in 1969. On what
people remember as a glorious New England autumn
day, buses arrived with nearly 800 people and the
ceremony was held without a hitch (Fletcher, 2006).
They dedicated a boulder at the site and, for the next
Conflict and Consensus in Great Barrington: remembering W. E. B. Du Bois
Robert Paynter and David Glassberg
10 years, the memorial committee maintained the
homesite, building fences and planting trees. In 1979,
they secured National Historic Landmark status for
the homesite from the United States Department of
Interior. In 1983, the University of Massachusetts
launched early archaeological field excavations to
study the Black Burghardts’ demolished house and the
homesite. The University of Massachusetts had
concomitantly been fostering the Du Bois Legacy,
acquiring Du Bois’s papers, mounting a travelling
exhibition on Du Bois, and naming its main Library
after Du Bois. In 1987 Professor William Strickland
oversaw the University’s receipt of the homesite as a
gift from the Memorial Committee. As a result, for a
period in the 1970s it seemed that efforts to erase Du
Bois from the landscape had been reversed.
Then hard economic times accomplished
what local political opponents of the site could not.
Award of National Historic Landmark status in the
United States of America is not accompanied by State
or federal funding. When the University experienced a
funding crisis, there was no other source to which
proponents of the Du Bois homesite could turn. While
other historic sites throughout the United States of
America turned increasingly to private corporate
capital for support, Du Bois’s reputation as a social
activist and communist made this avenue all but
impossible (Glassberg 2008). Conditions at the
homesite began to deteriorate, as New England forest
succession filled in the open fields of the Memorial
Park.
Current memorialization attempts
In the mid-1990s, as there was no State support to
develop the homesite, a grass-roots movement arose
to establish Du Bois memorials elsewhere in Great
Barrington. In 1994, the Great Barrington Historical
Society erected signs at Du Bois’s birthplace and at his
family’s grave. Local historian Bernard Drew wrote a
new voluminous history of Great Barrington, in which
Du Bois was recognized as a prominent son of the
town. In the early 2000s the Clinton AME Zion
Church began celebrating Du Bois’s birthday with
speeches and music. A rain garden on the banks of the
Housatonic River was dedicated to Du Bois. A youth
project made a hip-hop style mural. Though the
school committee declined to name a new elementary
school after Du Bois in 2005, the town voted 2 to 1 to
erect signs announcing that Great Barrington was the
town where Du Bois was born.
Building on this momentum, Great Barrington
residents again turned their attention to the homesite,
joining forces with the University of Massachusetts in
2003 to launch another field season of archaeology at
the site. The Friends of the Du Bois Homesite was
soon formed to help the University to care for its
neglected property. In 2006 an African American
Heritage Trail, complete with a 220-page guide, made
the homesite an anchor site (Levinson 2006). In 2008,
with funding from the University, a modest parking
lot and interpretive trail to the boulder were opened
to the public. That same year, the University helped to
fund a year-long planning process, directed by
Michael Singer Studio, to determine how best to
interpret Du Bois at the homesite and throughout
Great Barrington. Participants in the planning
workshops included Catherine Turton from the
National Park Service National Historical Landmarks
Programme, Rex Ellis of the Smithsonian’s new
National Museum of African American History and
Culture and Lauri Klefos from the Berkshire Visitors
Bureau. Completed in July 2009, the ‘plan for heritage
conservation and interpretation’ calls for significant
improvements to the homesite facilities, including
interpreting archaeology at the site, a walking tour of
Du Bois’s Great Barrington and the establishment of a
new Du Bois Heritage and Interpretation Centre in
Great Barrington itself.
Although those interested in commemorating
Du Bois are in the ascendant today, there are still
others who wish to erase his memory. The signage by
the boulder has twice been torn out of the ground and
thrown into the woods. More significantly, owing to
yet another financial crisis, it is unlikely that the State
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HERITAGE FROM CONFLICT TO CONSENSUS
or the University will have funds to develop the site
further. In the United States of America, where private
capital is essential to developing heritage sites, it
remains to be seen whether Du Bois’s legacy of
challenging this very system will, as in the past, limit
funds for the project.
Paynter, R., Harlow, E., Jeffers, E., Diffley, J. and Loan, M. E. 2006. Erasing and
Commemorating Du Bois: The Politics of an Historic Landscape. Paper
presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association,
San Jose, CA.
Paynter, Robert, Hautaniemi, S. and Muller, N. 1994. The Landscapes of the
W. E. B. Du Bois Boyhood Homesite: An Agenda for an Archaeology of the
Color Line. S. Gregory and R. Sanjek (eds), Race, New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers
University Press, pp. 285–318.
Recent efforts have for the time being reversed
the neglect of Du Bois in Great Barrington. We now
face the challenge of finding the means to enable
Great Barrington to foster Du Bois’s vision of a more
just future, just as it did once long ago when Du Bois
drew inspiration from growing up in this town in the
Berkshires.1
Turner, Steve. 1976. Black Sheep of the Native Sons. Berkshire Week, p. 8.
NOTE
1. Many thanks to the Reverend Esther Dozier, David Du Bois, Mrs Elaine Gunn,
Wray Gunn, Rachel Fletcher, Bernard Drew, Jay Schafer, Bill Strickland,
Amilcar Shabazz, Robert Cox, Dolores Root, MaryEllen Loan, Whitney BattleBaptiste, Michael Singer, and especially Elizabeth Harlow, Evelyn Jeffers and
REFERENCES
John Diffley. Our work would not have been possible without their generosity,
intelligence, and commitment to Du Bois’s legacy.
Bass, Amy. 2009. Those About Him Remained Silent: The Battle Over W.E.B. Du
Bois. Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press.
Du Bois, W. E. B. 1968. The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on
Viewing My Life from the last Decade of Its First Century. New York, N.Y.:
International Publishers.
Editor. 1969. Keeping Cool. Berkshire Courier (Great Barrington, MA).
Fletcher, Rachel. 2006. W.E.B. Du Bois Memorial Committee. D. Levinson (ed.),
African American Heritage in the Upper Housatonic Valley, Great Barrington,
MA, Berkshire Publishing Group, pp. 37–39.
Glassberg, David. 2008. What’s ‘American’ about American Lieux de Mémoire?
H.-J. Grabbe and S. Schindler (eds), The Merits of Memory: Concepts, Contexts,
Debates, Heidelberg, Germany: Universitaetsverlag, pp. 63–77.
Gunn, Elaine S. 2006. Elaine Gunn’s Reflections: Life in the Invisible
Community. D. Levinson (ed), African American Heritage in the Upper
Housatonic Valley, Great Barrington, MA, Berkshire Publising Group,
pp. 150–156.
Levinson, David (ed.). 2006. African American Heritage in the Upper Housatonic
Valley. Great Barrington, MA, Berkshire Publishing Group.
Lewis, David Levering. 1993. W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919.
New York, Henry Holt.
Lewis, David Levering. 2000. W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the
American Century, 1919-1963. New York, Henry Holt.
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