W.E.B. Du Bois is focus of Great Barrington history center
Adopting communism shouldn’t diminish contributions, supporter says
GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass.
Randy Weinstein doesn’t expect everyone in Great Barrington to feel exactly the same way he does about W.E.B. Du Bois.
That’s not the point of the Du Bois Center for American History that Weinstein opened in February on Route 7 in this Berkshires community, Du Bois’ hometown.
“I didn’t run around trying to convince everyone that Du Bois was a great man,” said Weinstein, a native of Norwalk, Conn., who moved to Great Barrington almost 40 years ago. “I don’t know that I agree with everything he said or wrote or some of the things he did. All I want people to realize is that he was a historical personage, a very significant one, who was born and raised here. That’s all I’m looking to acknowledge.”
Du Bois, a civil-rights activist, sociologist, educator, historian, editor and poet, was born in 1868, and was the first black man to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard. In 1961, at the age of 93, he renounced his U.S. citizenship, joined the Communist Party, and moved to Ghana with his second wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois. He died there two years later.
“I think when someone tries to better a group of people, then it’s a wonderful thing, and he did that in many ways,” said Weinstein. “He helped found the NAACP, he wrote over 20 books, books that were published by mainstream publishers. He was one of the first blacks to be successful in the “white” black market. I could go on and on. He was a very special man, but for years there was nothing in Great Barrington about him.”
EDUCATION CENTER
That changed in February when Weinstein, the owner of North Star Rare Books in Great Barrington, opened the Du Bois Center of American History. He rented the space next to his store at 684 S. Main St. and knocked out the adjoining wall, creating 2,500 square feet of space to accommodate Washington Carver, but as for his standing among black intellectuals he would be first, unquestionably.”
Union College history professor Erica Ball said that Du Bois’ ties to communism probably hurt his reputation with some Americans.
“During the climate of the Cold War, his work was not something that was remembered by folks outside the African-American community,” said Ball. “But when you consider the climate of race relations in America for most of the 20 th century when he was alive, and judge his decisions in that context, it shouldn’t detract from his work. He was an amazing, extraordinary man.”
Du Bois was often at odds with Booker T. Washington philosophically, and the two men had a falling out over the black man’s role in society.
“Washington thought that due to industrialization, the black man could play a vital role as a worker,” said Deidre Hill-Butler, an assistant professor of sociology at Union College. “Du Bois was more about shaking up the political and social order of the 19 th and 20 th centuries. He wanted people to ascribe to their own strategies about personal uplift. His writings are still very timely and relevant today.”
While some members of his hometown weren’t pleased with Du Bois’ actions, he always spoke of Great Barrington in glowing terms.
“He visited here in the 1930s and ’40s, and probably the ’50s, too,” said Weinstein. “He wrote letters to people in Great Barrington his whole life, and in all his autobiographical writings, there are three accounts of Great Barrington, all of them putting the town in the best of light.”
Du Bois buried his first wife and one of his children in the cemetery right behind Weinstein’s bookstore.
“People would come from all over the country to see his hometown, but there’d be nothing to show them – no monument, no memorial,” said Weinstein. “So people would direct them to my store and I would give a tour of the cemetery. That was it.”
Weinstein has changed all that, and he’s hopeful that everybody in Great Barrington will eventually warm up to a number of historical artifacts and more than 2,000 books related to the black American experience.
“I view this as an education center and with that in mind we’ve had four or five high school classes in here already,” said Weinstein, who charges no admission fee. “We’re getting local colleges involved and one of them is having the students build a Web site for us. It’s not just for graduate students finishing up their master’s. This place is tailormade for high school kids or community college students.”
Weinstein also made the center available as a home base for the Great Barrington Historical Society, which purchased a 72-inch television screen that sits in one corner of the Du Bois Center. A film and lecture series is expected to begin shortly at the facility, and Weinstein hopes to have some of the nation’s top scholars in attendance. Many of them, such as Du Bois biographer David Levering Louis of New York University, David Blight of Amherst, John Y. Simon of Northern Illinois and Duke University’s John Hope Franklin were at the center’s grand opening in February.
“I didn’t get the support I was hoping for from the community. So I decided to build from without, so to speak,” said Weinstein. “I got men like John Simon, David Blight and David Levering Louis to serve on my board of directors, and we got 500 people for the opening. Some very big names showed up, and I think that woke up the community a little bit.
the idea of honoring one of its most prominent citizens.
“He infuriated a lot of people in this town when he became a Communist,” said Weinstein. “Sure, he was flawed and so are the rest of us. He took some bad turns along the road, but when you look at any great man, they come to a position on great issues through trial and error. To simply ignore all the great things he did, all the good he accomplished, would be ridiculous.”
IMPORTANT FIGURE
Although some members of the Great Barrington community may harbor some resentment against Du Bois for his embrace of communism, his name (the W.E.B. stands for William Edward Burghardt) packs a powerful punch for academics who deal with the black American experience.
“Without a doubt, I would consider him the most important African-American of the whole last century,” said Allen B. Ballard, a history professor at the University at Albany. “He dominates everything. He doesn’t have the same fame in white America as Booker T. Washington or George
