Homegoing: Du Bois Legacy Honored In the Flesh

In 1975, Harvard developed a research institute in his name. This posthumous honor was preceded by the construction of an entire department at UMASS Amherst in 1970, also boasting the name of the formidable scholar and activist. But it wasn’t until this last decade that Willliam Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois has finally received the proper accolades of his beloved hometown. Born in Great Barrington, MA, just three years after the end of the Civil War, Du Bois — the first African American to receive a doctorate degree from Harvard, author of The Souls of Black Folk, founding member of the NAACP, and outspoken activist and supporter of racial equality — is arguably the town’s most famous (and controversial) native son. But all of that is in the past, according to Randy Weinstein, founder and director of the Du Bois Center at Great Barrington, which opened its doors to the public in 2005.

“Up until recently we were a conflicted community when it came to Du Bois,” he says, combing through the lines of an unpublished poem written by the scholar. “Now, 50 years after his death (in Ghana in 1963) he has become such a mainstay in our culture. He’s now part of the crowd of the great minds of the Berkshires: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edith Wharton, Herman Melville. The community has finally accepted him. He’s come full circle.”

Well, almost full circle. Du Bois left the States for Ghana in 1961 at the age of 93. He died two years later, disillusioned with his country’s race and class politics, and never to return to “the golden river” of his birthplace where his beloved daughter Yolande and son Burghardt (who died in infancy) are buried. But on Wednesday, February 27, the loose ends of Du Bois’s ‘original’ life will be, in many respects, tied up in a ceremony honoring the now beloved native son. Weinstein, along with author Scott Christianson, local historian Bernard Drew, and many other Du Bois supporters have put together a program — to be held at the First Congregational Church on Main Street, where the scholar used to worship as a boy — that includes a commemoration as well as the esteemed support of local educators, politicians, and students. Chief on the attendees list, however, is 56-year-old Arthur McFarlane II, the great-grandson of W.E.B. Du Bois, who is making his very first visit to the birthplace of the man he refers to simply as “Grandpa.”

“This is a pilgrimage for me,” he says. “I’m a New York City kid. The concept of bucolic quiet settings that Grandpa describes in his autobiography…it sounds like a sleepy place but then I think of all the people who loved him and cared about him and supported him in his education; It’s great to put a real live place together with his words. That is, after all, where his journey began.”

In fact, since the “rediscovery” of Du Bois’s connection to the town, Weinstein says that Great Barrington (including the Center, the Du Bois Homesite, and Mahaiwe Cemetery) has quickly become a destination for those wishing to honor the late activist at his roots. Every year, some 1,500 to 2,000 visitors — schoolchildren, tourists, college students, historians (some from as far away as China, Ghana, Israel, and even Russia) — descend on the Du Bois Center hoping to recapture the essence of a man who changed the landscape of race in this country.

Of course, there is more to Du Bois than meets the scholarly eye. That’s where “little” Arthur comes in. Admittedly, keeping his great grandfather’s legacy alive has been what some would call a blessing and a burden.

“It’s kind of weird in the sense that he chose me,” McFarlane says. “It was at his 90th birthday party at the Roosevelt Hotel, in a speech that he gave that’s when he essentially said, ‘You’re it, dude.’ It took me awhile to figure out what that looked like and to manage the weight of that role. It was a very difficult evolution. He did all of this stuff, and I kept beating myself up about my own recalcitrance compared to him. But I stepped out of that shadow. I’m me. I’m not Du Bois. My job is to do my best to keep the history straight, and to talk about my great-grandfather honestly and bring him forward as a person, not just a great man.”

MacFarlane, who is traveling quite a ways from his role as an evaluator for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, promises to bring “Grandpa” alive with a slide show of rare personal pictures of Du Bois and family, as well as anecdotes that were passed on from family members. Also on the hometown retrospective roster will be State Representative William “Smitty” Pignatelli and MCLA’s Francis Jones-Sneed, who will present McFarlane with a posthumous achievement award for Du Bois himself.

For Weinstein, McFarlane, and many of Du Bois’s supporters, this inevitable moment is a long time coming, but the journey has been an extraordinary lesson in history and humanity.

“General knowledge of Du Bois has doubled ten fold in the last few years,” Weinstein says. “And there are so many Du Boisian crusaders at the helm of all of this. And when you think of everything else that has happened around this time – the great Civil Rights march in D.C. That happened just hours after his death, the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln’s birthday, Black History Month – and with all the twists and turns of his life, his spirit still haunts this place. This is where his heart was.”