Photo credit: Statue of W.E.B. Du Bois, Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Howard Lisnoff
Author’s note: Apologies, as I often return to the French pronunciation of “Du Bois” in this audio file.
A Native Son Returns Home
I lost touch with the movement to erect a statue in honor of W.E.B. Du Bois in his hometown of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. I worked on a committee that was primarily focused on plans for the celebration of the 150th anniversary of Du Bois’s birth, and erecting a series of banners on Main Street in Du Bois’s honor and beginning the work toward the statue that came to fruition yesterday, July 19, 2025. Years earlier, a series of markers noted that Great Barrington was the birthplace of Du Bois. The Du Bois statue is placed on an expansive and recently completed series of marble benches in front of the town’s Mason Library. Great Barrington is one of many hilltowns forming the foothills of the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts.
The committee to erect the statue seemed to be less heterogeneous than the original committee and was an official group sanctioned by the town.
The celebration of the unveiling of the Du Bois statue was attended by hundreds of people and had a range of speakers from local politicians, the former governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick, the major biographer of Du Bois, David Levering Lewis, and Du Bois’s great-grandson, Jeffrey Alan Peck, who unveiled the statue.
The program was long in the increasing afternoon heat of the day. Appropriately, the celebration of the unveiling of the Du Bois statue began with a brass section from the Boston Symphony Orchestra playing “Fanfare for the Common Man,” by Aaron Copland, and was followed by great jazz musicians and impeccable performances of soul music. Other selections of great music accompanied the celebration. When the unveiling was drawing to a close, a singer, who was quite excellent, sang “What the World Needs Now Is Love,” a selection that could not have been better chosen. The choice of “What’s Going On” closed the program.
Du Bois was a giant of the civil rights movement and a scholar in the field of sociology. Born after the Civil War, he championed not only the drive and battle for the civil rights of Black people and women’s rights, but also the rights of working people and an educational system as the backbone of the working class and society. His two major works, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and Black Reconstruction in America (1935), are unparalleled in their humanity. Of particular interest to me as a reader was the great sensitivity Du Bois showed when teaching children as part of his early college education. In his latter work, the discussion about how Reconstruction following the Civil War failed to properly educate Black people for the tasks required of them to take up meaningful roles in society was unparalleled. Jim Crow, slavery by another name, followed the failure of Reconstruction, and Du Bois was a fierce opponent of the horror that was the lynching of Black Americans as part of Jim Crow. Jim Crow was the sanctioned and most often violent enforcement of segregation and the separation of Black people from large segments of the nation. Du Bois did not only theorize the underpinnings of the fight for Black rights, but took up the position as head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and was editor of its major publication, the magazine The Crisis.
What I sensed missing from the celebration of Du Bois’s life at the unveiling of the statue in his honor was any discussion of the mass incarceration of Black people in what has been called the New Jim Crow. Also, not directly addressed were police killings of Black people that gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement. While speakers did address violence in general, those topics were not covered in any detail. Du Bois became a staunch opponent of both war and nuclear weapons proliferation. While a Black middle class has grown in the US, the presence of poverty in Black communities was not discussed as the current administration in Washington, D.C. cuts programs that emerged from the New Deal and Great Society that will harm Black people and many, many others with cuts to healthcare, food programs, housing, and education.
Du Bois’s birthplace, Great Barrington, might have been unrecognizable to him, as it is a Mecca for so-called upscale and second homes and a very trendy and cosmopolitan Main Street.
Absent locally over the past few years and at the unveiling was the opposition to honoring Du Bois from a small group of people who contended his espousal of political left beliefs made him unfit for the honors that the local community has bestowed on him. Nothing could be farther from the truth!
During my work on the committee to honor Du Bois’s 150th birthday, I wrote a commentary about a letter DuBois wrote to John Kennedy just before Kennedy was sworn into the office of the presidency (“The 150th Commemoration of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Birth and His Letter to John F. Kennedy”, CounterPunch, February 6, 2018). The letter was an appeal to the incoming president for an expansion of the federal government’s role in ensuring civil rights, but was never sent to Kennedy.
Listening to the speeches yesterday in the increasing heat of the day, a person naturally wonders the impossible idea of what would W.E.B. Du Bois think and say today? It’s not so much what would Du Bois say, but the certainty that in these dark days that challenge the humanity that Du Bois represented and fought for, he still would be fighting the good fight to enhance the humanity of all. Du Bois was a great voice and a great soul, and the newly unveiled statue in his honor will shine a light on his unflinching humanity.
From slavery, through Reconstruction, to Jim Crow and the unending battle for civil and human rights, to his scholarship, and his early recognition of the beauty and need for preservation of the Housatonic River that flows through Great Barrington, W.E.B. Du Bois saw it all and never moved away from his humanism and humanity. Now, the nearby site of his birthplace is maintained, and the site of the home in which he grew up has a commemoration marker just off of Main Street. In nearby Mahaiwe Cemetery, his first wife, son, and daughter are buried. With the beautiful statue of W.E.B. Du Bois in front of Mason Library, a native son has returned home.
Doing justice to Du Bois’s life would take volumes. The Niagara Movement, the idea of the talented tenth (The Talented Tenth, Du Bois, 1903), Du Bois’s transition from an elite view of Black leadership to one of an extension of his view of civil rights to a more egalitarian agenda, his time in Ghana, his battles with the government about his political beliefs, and his education and scholarship all stand in testimony to his greatness. Du Bois was a very complex person and lives on in contemporary views and battles for the rights of ordinary people and all people. As I wrote in my essay about Du Bois and Kennedy, if you listen closely among these hills, Du Bois voice is still present in a gentle summer breeze or winter wind.