W.E.B. Du Bois Boyhood Homesite - History

History

The Burghardt family (of Dutch origin) was present in the vicinity of Great Barrington, Massachusetts in colonial times, with documented ownership of land in the area from the 1740s. Tom Burghardt was a slave of the family who probably earned his freedom for his participation in the American Revolutionary War. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (commonly referred to as W.E.B. Du Bois), a leading African American intellectual, civil rights activist, and cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was born into this family in 1868. By the early 19th century the "Black Burghardts" had settled in the Egremont Plain area a few miles outside the center of Great Barrington. Although he was not born in his grandfather Othello's house (the house in which he was born in was torn down around 1900), it is where his mother moved the small family when Du Bois' father abandoned them while Du Bois was an infant.

When Du Bois was five years old, his grandfather died, and his grandmother was forced to sell the house to settle debts. Du Bois's mother moved the family into Great Barrington, where Du Bois grew up in financially difficult conditions. A gifted student, he attended Fisk University on scholarship, and then Harvard, after which he embarked on his long and distinguished career.

Dubois expressed interest in purchasing his grandfather's property on a visit to Great Barrington in 1925. Three years later the brothers Joel and Arthur Spingarn, both civil rights activists involved in the NAACP, raised funds and purchased the old Burghardt homestead as a gift to Du Bois for his sixtieth birthday. Du Bois developed plans to transform the property into a middle-class summer retreat, but financial difficulties and his move in 1934 from New York City to Atlanta, Georgia scuttled the possibility of executing those plans. Du Bois finally sold the property to a neighbor in 1954, who had the now-dilapidated house torn down.

In 1967 Walter Wilson and Edmund W. Gordon purchased two parcels of the old Burghardt lands, including the site of the Burghardt house, that form a U shape around a private residence. These properties were transferred to the newly founded Du Bois Memorial Foundation, funded in part by high profile donors including Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Sidney Poitier, and Norman Rockwell. The site was prepared as a park and dedicated in 1969. The dedication was marred by local hostility: the Berkshire Courier, while counseling against violence, suggesting the site be vandalized. Du Bois had long been a focus of attention by the FBI, and his Communist sympathies and opposition to the Vietnam War added to merely racist opposition to commemorations of his life.

In 1976, a decade after Du Bois' death, the site was designated a National Historic Landmark, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1983 the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, which had amassed a collection of Du Bois papers, began a series of archaeological excavations on the property, seeking to research the Black Burghardt history. In 1987 the Foundation turned the property over to the state, with the university as its steward. It is considered part of the Upper Housatonic Valley National Heritage Area.