The following article by Rachel Fletcher from the Upper Housatonic Valley African American Heritage Guide (2005), pp.35-38, details a history of commemoration at the W.E.B. Du Bois Boyhood Homesite:

The lumber dealer and land speculator Warren Davis first introduced Walter Wilson to the Burghardt home on the Egremont Plain in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Walter Wilson, a White southerner who had moved to East Chatham, New York, was a life-long member of the NAACP, a former southern secretary of the American Civil Liberties Union, and a land developer. Twenty-five years or so after his meeting with Davis, he discovered the Burghardt house for sale, by that time in ruins. With Edmund W. Gordon, a renowned scholar of psychology and education and former national research director for Project Head Start, he purchased the property in 1967, assembling a five-acre U-shaped parcel, hoping one day to achieve a memorial for Du Bois in his own town. In 1968 Wilson and Gordon co-founded the Du Bois Memorial Foundation, which later received the property in 1969. The foundation’s committee of incorporators included David Gunn, Frederick Lord, and Ruth D. Jones, a cataloger at Simon’s Rock College who served as secretary and treasurer. Among more than two hundred founding sponsors were Horace Mann Bond, Edward W. Brooke, Aaron Copeland, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Martin Luther King, Jr., Sidney Poitier, and Norman Rockwell.

The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968 spurred the committee to create a memorial in earnest. When the committee presented its plans for a park in 1969, the Great Barrington selectmen and local citizens threatened to stop the effort with numerous legal and political challenges. Editorial comments in the Berkshire Courier (recanted in 1979), neighboring property owners, and members of the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars criticized Du Bois for joining the Communist Party at age ninety-three and alleged, incorrectly, that he had renounced his U.S. citizenship. The FBI later said that it had taken part in stirring up local opposition, although Berkshire Eagle writer Stephen Fay concluded that it was largely homegrown.

Photo by R. Fletcher The NAACP lent the committee the services of legal defense counsel Jack Greenberg. The legality of using the property for a park remained in question, but the right to free assembly prevailed, and on 18 October 1969, Du Bois’s boyhood home was dedicated as the W. E. B. Du Bois Memorial Park. Civil-rights activist and future Georgia legislator Julian Bond gave the keynote address, and Ossie Davis presided as master of ceremonies.

The dedication took place amidst newspaper attacks and reported threats of violence and disruption both from “local ultrapatriots” and “black militant groups” (“Du Bois Rites,” Berkshire Eagle, October 25, 1969). Medical personnel and ambulances were on hand, as were local police equipped with riot gear shipped from Hartford, Connecticut. A State Police single-engine aircraft made passes overhead, and a unit of the National Guard stood by. But Great Barrington resident Elaine Gunn recalls, “It was a beautiful day, a lovely day; people sat around on bales of hay. The afternoon came off without a hitch, then everyone left quietly.” A reported eight hundred people came from as far away as Boston and New York City. In 1970, Du Bois’s widow, Shirley Graham Du Bois, visited the site for a ceremony that included Gordon, Wilson, Freedomways editor Esther Jackson, and others.

A ten-ton granite boulder had been trucked to the property, intended to hold a bronze memorial plaque that was never fabricated. For many years, fearing vandalism and retribution, nothing was installed in the park, although the committee continued to maintain the site.

Continue reading the commemoration story of the W.E.B. Du Bois Boyhood Homesite after 1970.

Download the rare eight-minute film of the 1969 dedication event.