W.E.B. Du Bois Boyhood Homesite

W.E.B. Du Bois — sociologist, civil rights leader, co-founder of the NAACP, and author of "The Souls of Black Folk" — was born and raised in Great Barrington. A small historic site marks the location of his boyhood home on Burghardt Street; the house itself no longer stands, but the site is maintained as a memorial, and plaques give context to his early life in western Massachusetts.

The Du Bois National Historic Site nearby offers more context; the visitor centre is worth a stop for anyone interested in American civil rights history. Du Bois spent his last years in Ghana, where he died in 1963 at the age of 95, one day before the March on Washington.

things to do sight
A story
W.E.B. Du Bois was born in Great Barrington in 1868 and grew up in a town that was, by the standards of post-Civil War New England, relatively integrated. He later wrote that he did not fully understand racial injustice until he left Massachusetts — which made the shock of the Jim Crow South all the more radicalising. Great Barrington shaped him before America reminded him of his place in it.