A Mighty Mission
W.E.B. DU BOIS AND THE BLACK BERKSHIRES, THEN AND NOW
By Dr. Kendra Taira Field
Photos By Jimmy ienner, Jr.
From the pages of our August 2022 Issue.
A June 10 celebration and commemorative unveiling of the W.E.B. Du Bois Center for Freedom and Democracy was held on the lawn of the Clinton A.M.E. Zion Church at 9 Elm Court in Great Barrington. Restoration of the church is now underway.
I FIRST CAME TO KNOW W.E.B. Du Bois as a young person. Driving through western Massachusetts in the 1980s, my dad would pull off in Great Barrington, and point out its significance to me as Du Bois's homeplace. David Levering Lewis’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Du Bois was the last book my father gave me before he died, and a few years later, I was given the opportunity to edit the two-volume biography down to one. As a newcomer to the region and a student at Williams College in the '90s, much of my knowledge of Black heritage in the Berkshires had centered on Du Bois, the individual—including all the ways in which this civil rights pioneer marched to the beat of his own drum and shaped the world for the rest of us.
The broad strokes of Du Bois's Berkshire years are now well-known. Drawn from a long line of Burghardts, including African ancestors once enslaved by the Dutch, and one who fought in the Revolutionary war, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in 1868 in Great Barrington. "I was born by a golden river and in the shadow of two great hills,” he reflected, “five years after the Emancipation Proclamation which began the freeing of American Negro Slaves.” Although he was “the only colored student” in his Great Barrington school, for a time he was “happy” and at ease with his classmates, sometimes “the leader” of the “town gang of boys.” As William entered adolescence, while mentored in his studies by his white principal Frank Hosmer, he was increasingly rejected by his white peers; refusing to dwell in the rejection, Du Bois recalled being “drawn up into higher spaces and made part of a mightier mission.”
Following his mother’s death at 54, in 1885 William boarded the train south to Fisk University, the first African American institution of higher education to form after emancipation and the emerging sacred heart of the black world. In a matter of days, William went from being the sole Black student to being awestruck, he wrote his former Congregational pastor in a letter his freshman year, "to know that I stand among those who do not despise me for my color." Many of his new classmates were members of freedom's first generation, enslaved as babies or toddlers amidst the Civil War. A mighty mission indeed.
Yet Fisk was not Du Bois's first exposure to freedom’s first generation and the legacies of slavery. His experience of the “sorrow songs” of former slaves in Nashville stirred feelings of reverence, pride and belonging in the sixteen-year-old, but his first hearing of many of these songs was right here in Great Barrington. “Ever since
I was a child these songs have stirred me strangely,” he recalled. “They came out of the South unknown to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew them as of me and of mine.” During his high school years, while tending to his mother’s failing health, mother and son attended occasional services of the AME Zion Society (later renamed the Clinton A.M.E. Zion Church). Unlike their involvement in Rev. Scudder’s white Congregational church, these took place in members’ homes and at various locations across town. The group had grown significantly in the two decades since the Civil War, and some of its members were former slaves from the Southern states. They were at least partially responsible for Du Bois's introduction to African-American spirituals and Black aesthetic traditions.
While Du Bois’s relationships with white ministers like Rev. Scudder, teachers and principals like Frank Hosmer, and the white community more broadly left behind ample paper trails—from well-preserved letters to tuition checks—it is much harder, and all the more necessary, to rescue from relative oblivion the quieter evidence of Du Bois’s immersion in Black family and kin networks, communities, and institutions of his youth.
OVER THE LAST FEW YEARS, I have had the opportunity to support an organization that shares this commitment, the W.E.B. Du Bois Center for Freedom and Democracy. The mission of the Du Bois Freedom Center is to educate the public about the life and legacy of civil rights pioneer W.E.B. Du Bois and the rich African American heritage of the Berkshires. Located at the former Clinton A.M.E. Zion Church—the first Black institution of Du Bois's life—this center of Black thought and remembrance will be the first museum and living memorial in North America dedicated to Du Bois's life and legacy. For me, this work is about deepening public understanding of the Black families, communities, and institutions that shaped not only Du Bois’s life, but Black life in the Berkshires more broadly. While the center now carries Du Bois's name, it also carries a history far deeper and more expansive.
It asks us to think about the context, the history, and the community that Du Bois came from. To imagine, for a moment, those communities of African descent that began over two centuries before his birth, and to remember those communities that continued to grow and diversify long after Du Bois left home and boarded that train South to Fisk University.
The Berkshires has long been home to people of African descent, free and enslaved, beginning as early as the 1600s. During the Revolutionary War era, Black men such as Agrippa Hull fought against the British, while women such as Elizabeth Freeman submitted freedom petitions that contributed to slavery’s end across Massachusetts. During the nineteenth century, the Berkshires was home to abolitionist communities in Great Barrington, Stockbridge, and Williamstown, and the state had begun to enact some of the earliest Civil Rights laws in the nation. African Americans lived and worked throughout the region, forming churches, mutual aid societies, and other institutions independently of their white neighbors. In 1861, African Americans in Great Barrington formed the AME Zion Society and began holding their own church services in buildings across town, including Sumner Hall, Centre School, and the Carriage House at Searles Castle. This community—which included a diversity of Black northerners and recent southern arrivals—began construction of the Clinton Church building in 1886. Once complete, African American women, men, and children began to use this building as a site for religious, political, and cultural sustenance.
Amidst the Great Migration of the twentieth century, Great Barrington and the Berkshires increasingly became a site for Black refuge, culture, and intellectual engagement. In the early decades of the twentieth century, African Americans vacationed here and the region came to host Harlem Renaissance artists, writers, and scholars. Here, we can see up close the local roots of a national and global story of Black life, culture, and resistance. From the Mohonk and Amenia gatherings Du Bois organized to the photography of Lenox-born James Van Der Zee, the writing cabin of James Weldon Johnson, the stage at Jacob’s Pillow, and the classrooms of Sterling Brown and Rayford W. Logan, African Americans have long sought refuge and planted the seeds for Black intellectual and artistic traditions right here in the Berkshires.
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WHEN ITS DOORS OPEN, the Du Bois Freedom Center’s exhibits will illuminate three inextricably linked histories—the history of African American heritage in the Berkshires, the biography of W.E.B. Du Bois, and the story of the Clinton A.M.E. Zion Church. The links between these histories will be seamless.
Du Bois Freedom Center board members, advisors, scholars, and a neighbor gather for a group photo. Front row: Wray Gunn, Sr., board president; Cora Portnoff, board secretary; MaryNell Morgan, scholar; David Levering Lewis, honorary chair, National Advisory Council; Kendra Taira Field, historian-in-residence; Fran O’Neil, neighbor; Kerri Greenidge, scholar. Second row: Eugenie Sills, interim executive director; Sandra Burton, board member; Sabrina Allard, board member; Whitney Battle-Baptiste, advisor; Dennis Powell, vice chair. Back: Beth Carlson, board member.
When I first got involved with this project, I was awed to learn that Wray Gunn, former parishioner of the Clinton Church whose family had close twentieth-century connections to Warren Davis and Du Bois, was also a descendant of Agrippa Hull, the eighteenth-century Black soldier who fought valiantly against the British in the Revolutionary War. Further, Agrippa Hull’s neighbor was Elizabeth Freeman, the first enslaved African American to successfully sue for her freedom in Massachusetts, a Berkshires luminary that Du Bois desperately tried to claim as his own ancestor in the course of his genealogical work. Suffice it to say I’m no longer surprised by such connections. (An eight-foot-tall bronze statue of Freeman will be unveiled on August 21 on the Village Green in Sheffield.)
So while the Center will carry national, global, and diasporic significance as the first museum dedicated to W.E.B. Du Bois in North America, it is ultimately a deeply local and community-based cultural heritage center that will offer exhibits, tours, and contemporary programming—on the past, present, and future of Black life in the Berkshires—for young people and the general public. One of Du Bois's lifelong dreams was to bring together Black scholars, writers, and artists, to institutionalize support for their individual and collective work. In this spirit, the Center is also supporting the establishment of a retreat center and forum for scholars, writers, and artists of color. (The first public event of the forum this summer was July 10, at Jacob’s Pillow.) Together, we are creating space for this rich history to be shared and taken up by future generations, and in the course of ongoing struggles for racial justice.
In his book about the Western Apache, Keith Basso writes, “Long before the advent of literacy, to say nothing of ‘history’ as an academic discipline, places served humankind as durable symbols of distant events and indispensable aids for remembering and imagining them—and this convenient arrangement, ancient but not outmoded, is with us still today. In modern landscapes everywhere, people persist in asking, “What happened here?” The answers they supply… should not be taken lightly, for what people make of their places is closely connected to what they make of themselves as members of society and inhabitants of the earth…” I hope that this collective work to memorialize W.E.B. Du Bois and African American heritage of the Berkshires will make more complex, more diverse, and more complete the answer to the simple question, “What happened here?” and, the closely related question, “What might happen next?” for generations to come.
CLICK HERE to learn more about the African American Heritage Trail in the Berkshires.
The W.E.B. Du Bois Mural in Great Barrington was painted by Railroad Street Youth Project participants.
Dr. Kendra Taira Field is the author of Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War (2018), which traced her Afro-Native (Creek) ancestors’ migratory lives in the Black towns of Indian Territory and Oklahoma. She is associate professor of History and Africana Studies and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University. She abridged David Levering Lewis' W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography (2009). Field directs the African American Trail Project and serves as project historian for the W.E.B. Du Bois Center for Freedom and Democracy.