Julian Bond’s visit remembered in Great Barrington

Social justice activist W.E.B. Du Bois departed the United States in 1961, at age 93, to accept an invitation from Ghana’s President Kwame Nkrumah to oversee work on an “Encyclopedia Africana” — long his dream. Du Bois would die in Akra two years later. He did not renounce his citizenship, as some have charged. He did not give up his love of his native town, Great Barrington, Mass. Du Bois had spent happy childhood years in the town. But in old age, increasingly political and increasingly frustrated, he did write a letter asking to join the American Communist Party. 

•  •  •

Du Bois was the 20th century’s foremost intellectual leader of the Civil Rights movement. He died on the eve of the historic March on Washington in 1963.

David Graham Du Bois in 2004 explained to me his adoptive father’s letter: “It was done for those who supported him and were concerned he was leaving the United States and was going to Ghana, as if he were giving up the struggle. That action was to say, ‘I’m still in the struggle and this will be proof to you.’ ”

That letter came back to haunt the two men who purchased Du Bois’ ancestors’ homestead on Egremont Plain in Great Barrington in 1967 with hopes of turning it into a park and lasting memorial. 

A native Texan and longtime NAACP member Walter Wilson of Chatham, N.Y., and educator Dr. Edmund Gordon of New York City bought the old Burghardt place before it could be marketed as two building lots. They organized a committee and recruited volunteers to clean up a former farm field.

They planned a dedication on Oct. 18, 1969. They invited a 29-year-old Georgia state legislator, Julian Bond, a rising star in the struggle for social justice, to be guest speaker. 

•  •  •

Elaine Gunn, an elementary teacher in Great Barrington, and her good friend the late Ruth Jones, a cataloguer at Simon’s Rock Early College, were members of the committee as was Frederick “Fritz” Lord, who worked for Wheeler & Taylor until his political leaning got him fired. Two Stockbridge men, playwright William Gibson and illustrator Norman Rockwell, gave their support to the park effort. 

“I think it was Walter’s idea to invite Julian Bond,” Gunn recalled after hearing of Bond’s death Aug. 15 at the age of 75. “There was a connection between Du Bois and Bond’s father, Dr. Horace Mann Bond.” 

The senior Bond was a social scientist and administrator at several historically Black colleges including Lincoln University and Atlanta University. 

“I heard Julian say Dr. Du Bois was at their home from time to time. There was a natural connection,” Gunn said.

“Ruth and I were delegated to pick up Julian Bond at Bradley Airport. We got there and he came in on a small commuter airplane. He had a bodyguard with him.” 

Gunn described Bond as a handsome young man who sported an Afro and seemed very self-assured, though, “He had little to say as we drove to Great Barrington,” she said, beyond pleasant chat.

The park dedication was planned for the afternoon. There had been months of uncertainty that the dedication would even happen. It was during the Vietnam War, and Du Bois’s late-in-life letter asking to join the American Communist Party enraged veterans and businesspeople and the local weekly newspaper. 

Town Counsel William Murtagh, however, advised that the group was well within its rights to dedicate the park. 

“As we came up Route 23, people were out beside the road, waving and yelling ‘No parking here, no parking here,” Gunn said.

As it turned out, contract farmer William “Bullet” Kline, who lived next door to the airport, saw opportunity. He opened his field to parking, $2 a car. 

“That helped an awful lot,” Gunn said. “People could park close and not have to walk far.”

•  •  •

Actor Ossie Davis emceed the ceremony, which came off without a hitch, without the Black Panthers, without any of the confrontation imagined by opponents. Town police had borrowed machine guns from Hartford and kept them in the Town Hall basement, just in case violence erupted. Ted Hitchcock said an FBI agent hid in his attic — his house was encircled by the U-shaped park — with binoculars trained on the proceedings. 

An estimated 800 people turned out.

With tension in the air, Gibson read Du Bois’s essay, “The House of the Black Burghardts.” 

Bond said, “I prefer to think of his [Du Bois’s] whole life, not just the last couple of years, dedicated as no man’s life perhaps has ever been to the abolishing of prejudice and injustice and of imperialism internationally.”

u u u

The park has become the only public place in the United States honoring Du Bois.

 “There was nothing left but a chimney half broken down and a cellar,” Gordon told me in 2006, when he and his wife, Susan, came to see how the park had progressed. “We found a sketch of the original house and we aspired to restore it. We were not able to do that but we were able to have it designated as a National Historic Landmark.” 

Landmark status came in 1979. That time, the ceremony was at Tanglewood.

The day in 1969 became even more special for Gunn when she attended a quiet evening program at First Congregational Church in Stockbridge arranged by David Gunn, a member of the local NAACP chapter. Horace Mann Bond sat in the front pew. 

“He sat forward,” Gunn said, “and he did not take his eyes off his son. He had such pride. Bond talked for quite a while. We got two for the price of one that day. 

“If you were a Black college student in the 1920s, ’30s or ’40s you knew Dr. Du Bois and you knew Horace Mann Bond. They were the leading educators of Black folk. You looked up to them.

“It was so important for Julian Bond to come here.”

•  •  •

She was saddened to hear of Bond’s passing earlier this month, but it brought “wonderful memories” of Great Barrington’s small part in the Civil Rights movement.

Today the park is maintained by the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. There is a small parking lot and a woodland trail leads to the site of Du Bois’s grandparents Othello and Sally Burghardt’s small house. Felicia Jamison, Ph.D candidate in history at UMass, through Oct. 4 offers guided tours at the Homesite Saturdays at 1 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m., and downtown at the birthsite on Church Street at 3 p.m. on Saturdays and 4 p.m. on Sundays. 

A color film of the 1969 ceremony may be viewed at Credo, the Du Bois Library website, www.credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b246-i001.

The writer and Mrs. Gunn have been members of the Friends of the Du Bois Homestead.