Great Barrington — In a breezy ceremony on Friday on the lawn of 9 Elm Court, Wray and Cora Gunn welcomed a new era for the Clinton A.M.E. Zion Church as they unveiled its redesignation as the W.E.B. Du Bois Center for Freedom and Democracy and the Center’s logo.
The Center will pay homage to Black scholar, author, and Great Barrington native Du Bois and will celebrate the heritage of Berkshire County’s Black communities.
Dozens gathered on the lawn before the former church to observe the unveiling and celebrate the path forward for this historic building. The Center will constitute the first museum and memorial in North America dedicated to Du Bois and his legacy.
The church is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is an important site on the Upper Housatonic Valley African American Heritage Trail. Plans were put on display for the renovation of the building which will consist of interpretive exhibits and a performance space that Interim Executive Director of the Freedom Center Eugenie Sills states “will highlight the voices of Black writers, artists, scholars, creatives, and performers.” The Center will also feature a community fellowship hall with a meeting space and kitchen in the basement which the men of the church spent about two years digging out by hand.
The renovation is still in its early phases and will likely take several years. The leaky roof—which caused much of the damage to the building’s structure—has been removed and replaced with a watertight, base layer roof and substantial structural repairs have been made to support the new roof.
The Board of the W.E.B. Du Bois Freedom Center plans to continue with fundraising as former longtime parishioner Chair of both the Freedom Center Board and the Clinton Church Restoration Wray Gunn noted in his opening statement before the crowd, “We hope that in the future we will get as much support as we have already.” He reassured, “Everything takes time, I just hope it’s within my time.”
Sills remarked to The Edge, “It’s been really wonderful to see the community support for the project which we have experienced from day one.” She noted, “When the group first came together in the fall of 2016 we set our fundraising goal of $100,000 and within five months had met that goal with almost all small, local donations.”
In addition to these small donations, the Center has received several funding grants, including a $117,000 grant from MassDevelopment and the Mass Cultural Council and a $20,000 Expanding Massachusetts Stories grant from Mass Humanities. These grants in combination with others and small, local donations, have allowed the organization to amass over $2.3 million in funding.
In his speech before the crowd, Honorary Chair Dr. David Levering Lewis, whose two-volume biography on Du Bois earned him two Pulitzer Prizes, emphasized the importance of the building’s repurposing and dedication in the “Du Boisian renaissance” that has been occurring, invoking the renaming of the Great Barrington middle school.
Not only is this Center monumental in its recognition of Du Bois, but for its celebration of Black heritage, culture and history in South County. Talking on the myth of Berkshire County lacking any Black communities, Sabrina Allard, who is Vice President of the Berkshire County Chapter of the NAACP and a board member of the Center, poignantly remarked, “If you believe that myth, you are ignoring the families who live here, have lived here and are raising families here.” The Center hopes to celebrate these Black and multi-racial communities, their legacy and their culture.
This Center marks a shift, a renaissance as Dr. Lewis put it, in which Great Barrington and South County are celebrating their Black communities and celebrating the ongoing heritage rather than casting them aside as a marginal demographic in an otherwise largely white rural area. In 1969, the dedication of the W.E.B. Du Bois homesite was so fraught with controversy and resistance from the town that few town officials attended the dedication event. Friday’s celebration and unveiling was a demonstration of just how much the community has evolved.
Selectboard Member Ed Abrahams, a self-proclaimed observer of the restoration effort from the very beginning, excitedly told The Edge, “I think this is great! It’s exciting that it has come this far. I really want to echo what Dr. Lewis talked about in how far the town has come and I think [The Du Bois Freedom Center] is a really big part of that. It’s almost hard to realize that there was once resistance to restoring his childhood home.”
