W. E. B. Du Bois, Native Son
Near Great Barrington, Massachusetts
On the twenty third of February, eighteen sixty eight, in a small house near the Housatonic River, a child named William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington. He would become one of the most important thinkers in American history. Du Bois spent his boyhood in this quiet Berkshire town, one of only a handful of Black families in a mostly white community.
He walked these streets, attended the town school, and wrote for local newspapers as a teenager. A teacher recognized his brilliance and helped send him south to Fisk University in Tennessee, where for the first time he lived among a large Black community and saw the harsh realities of the segregated South. From Fisk he went to Harvard, and in eighteen ninety five he became the first African American to earn a doctorate there.
He studied in Germany, taught at Atlanta University, and in nineteen oh three published The Souls of Black Folk, a landmark collection of essays that gave voice to the idea of double consciousness, the feeling of always seeing oneself through the eyes of a nation that devalued you. He famously wrote that the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line. In nineteen oh nine Du Bois helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and for more than twenty years he edited its journal, The Crisis, shaping the fight for civil rights.
His path grew more radical with age. He embraced Pan Africanism, socialism, and peace activism, and in nineteen sixty one, disillusioned with his country, he moved to the newly independent nation of Ghana, where he died in nineteen sixty three, on the eve of the great March on Washington. His grandfather's homestead, a few miles from the town center, is now a National Historic Landmark, five acres of quiet ground where Du Bois once played as a boy.
For decades some in town resisted honoring him, uneasy with his politics. Today Great Barrington claims him proudly, a native son who taught the world to see the color line clearly.
