Now another movement to rename a different school building in Berkshire Hills is taking shape. Supporters of Du Bois are ramping up an effort to rename Monument Valley Regional Middle School in memory of Du Bois.
In an incident that garnered much publicity, the Berkshire Hills Regional School Committee in 2004 declined to name after Du Bois one of the two new regional schools it had just built.
Certainly Great Barrington can simultaneously recognize his flaws and faults while also finding ways to remember publicly, in a permanent way, his profound contributions to the struggle to push the United States to live up to its founding ideals, particularly regarding the plight of African-Americans.
Du Bois not only accepted and advocated the principles of human equality and natural rights embodied in America’s Declaration of Independence. He actually sought to apply them worldwide.
Undoubtedly the greatest African-American intellectual in U.S. history and an activist who pioneered the modern civil rights movement and worked tirelessly for African peoples’ freedom throughout the world, Du Bois is long overdue for public recognition in Great Barrington and the nation. Yet like Banquo’s ghost, the controversy surrounding Du Bois — and particularly his political ideology and affiliation at the end of his life — will not go down.
Last month, the board of trustees of the town's libraries endorsed the idea of putting a statue of the scholar, civil rights leader and Great Barrington native in front of the Mason Library on Main Street in the center of town. The project can only move forward if sufficient funds are raised and the Historic District Commission and the selectboard approve.
Not only are supporters of the legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois trying to name one of the local public schools after him, but they want to commission a sculptor to come up with a life-sized likeness of him that would be placed on the front lawn of the Mason Library.
Trump became the second man to call Roy Cohn his mentor. The first was Joseph McCarthy. Cohn was disbarred for unethical conduct in 1986. He died of AIDS in 1987.
Wesker’s plays are vividly grounded in daily life that evoke, among other themes, what it meant to be working class in a class-delimited, class-obsessed and class-dominated England.
For unknown reasons, Yolande’s grave was left without a headstone. Her grandchildren were unaware of where she was buried, until her grandson Arthur McFarlane II was informed of it during a visit in 2012.
