Du Bois Memorial Park celebrated, 50 years later

Great Barrington’s W.E. B. Du Bois Legacy Committee plans an ambitious day of activities to commemorate the controversial dedication, a half-century ago, of Du Bois Memorial Park on Route 23. Now maintained by the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, as the Du Bois Boyhood Homesite, the property is open to visitors in warmer months for self-guided walking tours. The event will be Friday, Oct. 18.

Randy Weinstein, chair of the Legacy Committee, believes the town has increasingly come to embrace its most famous native son. In 1969, there was considerable discomfort.

Two years before, the late real estate broker Walter Wilson of East Chatham, N.Y., and psychology scholar Edmund Gordon of New York City had purchased the old Burghardt property in Great Barrington. It was where Du Bois’s ancestors had lived for several generations and where he and his mother, Mary Burghardt Du Bois, and a half-brother, Idelbert, lived for a few years.

 “One day Wilson called to say the boyhood home was for sale,” Gordon recalled to me a few years ago, “and without asking the price I said, ‘Let’s buy it.’”

Du Bois had died in 1963 in Ghana. The Burghardt house was gone. But the men knew the 5-acre, U-shaped parcel would make a fitting permanent memorial. 

An organizing committee met at Simon’s Rock Early College, according to the late Elaine Gunn. They recruited supporters including Norman Rockwell, William Gibson and Reinhold Neibuhr.

 The assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 sped efforts for a park dedication in October 1969. But murmurs arose from some in town. Du Bois was a radical. The FBI forwarded a heavily redacted copy of its Du Bois file — none of it indicating any criminal activity — to the town’s police department. The weekly Berkshire Courier voiced strong concern. 

The selectmen asked town counsel to quash the event. He responded that it was private property; the owners could hold an event if they wanted to. Great Barrington police borrowed weaponry from Hartford. The FBI stationed an agent with binoculars in the upper floor of a neighbor’s house. A surveillance airplane flew overhead.

Actor Ossie Davis hosted the program. (His son, Guy, a respected blues singer amd performer, will be at this one.)

Georgia legislator Julian Bond was guest speaker. (His father, Horace Mann Bond, was in the audience.)

A chorus sang.

No Black Panthers showed up.

There was no riot.

It was a peaceful, uplifting time.

“To a person, the Selectboard is on board,” Weinstein said of this month’s celebration, to be held Friday, Oct. 18. Great Barrington Airport will provide parking. Simon’s Rock and Greenagers will provide shuttles to the site.

 At the 1 p.m. gathering at the Homesite on Oct. 18, participants will read excerpts from speeches delivered 50 years ago. Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David Levering-Lewis will stand in for activist Esther Cooper Jackson, who with Du Bois and others founded the magazine Freedomways. Now 102, she was at the original event, as was Gordon, 98, who has another engagement at Columbia University and won’t be able to make it that day.

That same afternoon at Mason Library on Main Street starting at 3 p.m., a short film of the 1969 dedication will be shown, archaeological artifacts from the homesite will be exhibited and Dennis Powell of NAACP’s Berkshire chapter will speak.

At 5 p.m. at First Congregational Church: food, speakers and a panel discussion. Craig Harris, Wanda Houston and Davis will provide music at the first and third venues.

The events are free and open to the public.

An 8-minute video of the 1969 dedication may be viewed at https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b246-i001.

The writer, a member of the now-dormant Friends of the Du Bois Boyhood Homesite,  will read a special message from Professor Gordon.