In Great Barrington, monument to W.E.B. Du Bois will mark a homecoming
GREAT BARRINGTON — W.E.B. Du Bois is coming home. Earlier this month, sculptor Richard Blake was tapped to create a monument depicting the sociologist, writer, and civil rights activist seated in front of the Mason Public Library on Main Street here in his native town.
Blake and the two other finalists for the commission, Vinnie Bagwell and Dana King, were chosen from among 17 applicants; all designed models according to the nonprofit W.E.B. Du Bois Sculpture Project’s specifications, with the writer on a bench. Blake’s version opens his hand.
“We found Richard’s sculpture welcoming,” said gallerist Lauren Clark, a Sculpture Project board member who led the jury that selected Blake. “A passerby might see a man sitting on a bench with an outstretched hand and say, ‘I wonder what’s that about.’”
Last month, Blake, the 2023 recipient of the National Sculpture Society’s Medal of Honor, installed his Frederick Douglass monument in New Bedford’s Abolition Row Park. He has crafted several statues commemorating civil rights activists and leaders, including Rosa Parks for the United States Capitol and Martin Luther King Jr. for Fairleigh Dickinson University in Teaneck, N.J. Blake says he sees his work as fulfilling a need to recognize histories of people of color as “part of the fabric of America.”
“Du Bois was important as a Black intellectual and sociologist, but more importantly, I believe, as a great American,” Blake said over the phone from his home in Lancaster, Pa. “I want to bring all my experience and artistry to make not just a good monument, but a statement that is commensurate with his worth to the world.”
The maquette is just a working sketch. Now, Blake said, the real work on the bronze statue begins.
“As a sculptor, I’ll be trying to express his personality from the way he sits, his hands, his face, the choreography of the drapery, making sure the monument is not just a mannequin, but has something of the essence of the man,” he said.
Du Bois wrote of his hometown in his 1940 book “Dusk of Dawn”: “My town was shut in by its mountains and provincialism; but it was a beautiful place, a little New England town nestled shyly in its valley with something of Dutch cleanliness and English reticence.”
“The Berkshires was a powerful and emotional place for Du Bois,” said Dr. Kendra Field, associate professor of history at Tufts University. “He traveled the globe, and he would always return. In 1928, friends purchased his homesite for him there, for him to write.” He scouted land nearby as a retreat for Black artists and intellectuals, she said.
The effort to memorialize Du Bois comes at a time when “there are attempts across the nation to prohibit teaching African American history, and prohibit a complete and complex treatment of American history,” said Field. She directs the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts, which oversees the African American Trail Project, launched in 2016, connecting Black history sites across the state. And following Du Bois’s dream, Field cofounded the Du Bois Forum, an annual retreat for Black intellectuals and artists inaugurated last year.
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, born in 1868, was the first Black student to graduate from the local integrated high school; community members paid his tuition at Fisk University. The first Black man to receive a PhD from Harvard, he was a founder of the NAACP. As a progressive, he was drawn to Communism during the Cold War. In 1951, after he circulated a petition against nuclear weapons, the US Justice Department indicted him as a Soviet agent. He was later acquitted.
Du Bois ultimately joined the Communist Party and left the United States, moving to Ghana in 1961, invited by President Kwame Nkrumah to edit the “Encyclopedia Africana.” He died two years later, at 95.
“Growing up in this area, I always felt the town, to a degree, bullied Du Bois,” said Randy Weinstein, chair of the town’s W.E.B. Du Bois Legacy Committee. As longtime director of Great Barrington’s Du Bois Center, he has worked to bring local attention to the writer.
“Great Barrington has always had a problem with Du Bois at 93 joining the American Communist Party,” he said.
In 2005, the Berkshire Hills Regional School District School Committee voted down a proposal to name a school after the writer. In 2020, another vote was taken, and the local middle school was renamed for Du Bois. Opponents to the change cited his support of Communism.
Weinstein closed the Du Bois Center in May. “I opened in 1997 with the idea to make Du Bois’s legacy part of the DNA of Great Barrington,” he said. “I feel it’s a part of our community now, and my mission is really done.”
Ari Zorn, co-chair of the Sculpture Project and a decades-long resident of Great Barrington who is a Black man, said he doesn’t think everyone in town knows Du Bois’s Communist history. He thinks the resistance to memorializing the activist is “a flat-out color thing,” he said.
“The Black community, it’s really not that big here, but because of oppression, because of systemic racism, they’re beaten back,” said Zorn. The World Population Review, which tracks demographics, estimates that more than 90 percent of Great Barrington’s citizens are white.
Zorn said working on the monument has built bridges between white people and Black people in town. “It gives you hope for humanity,” he said.
While the monument may prove the most visible evidence of Du Bois’s rich history in the town, there are other Du Bois sites and projects. The W.E.B. Du Bois Center for Freedom and Democracy is raising funds to restore and move into the former Clinton A.M.E. Zion Church. The Du Bois Legacy Committee has instituted an annual celebration every Feb. 23, the writer’s birthday. The W.E.B. Du Bois National Historic Site sponsors self-guided walking tours of the town and the homestead of his ancestors.
The Sculpture Project has raised about $225,000 of the $375,000 they’ll need, said Julie Michaels, the committee’s other co-chair, and a former Globe editor. If all goes smoothly, Blake’s sculpture of Du Bois should be seated outside the library next summer.
“It’s not like we’re starting something,” said Michaels. “We’re finishing something.”