This year Great Barrington celebrated W.E.B. Du Bois’s birth in our town 150 years ago. The celebration, which is still going on has been a huge success. There were lectures, study groups, murals painted by our young people, and banners on Main Street. The events were enthusiastically supported by the town’s Selectboard, the Mason Library (with a splendid exhibit), and many organizations, businesses and residents of our town and Berkshire County. As Cornell Brooks, the former president of NAACP, said: “I can’t imagine any town with so important, so titanic of a figure in American history not claiming and exulting W.E.B. Du Bois as its own.”
In that spirit, a group of residents came forward with the idea to permanently honor our native son with a statue of him on Main Street. We conceived of it as a private effort: we would raise the funds ourselves, not involving any town funds. When looking for an appropriate location of the statue, we came to the conclusion that the ideal spot would be in front of the Mason Library. After all, the written word was what Du Bois was all about. Not known as an orator, it was on paper that Du Bois excelled. His enormous output (more than fifty books) and the enduring influence of his books worldwide, make him the perfect figure to encounter as our residents, young and old, enter our wonderful library.
Happily, the trustees of the library agreed with us. They voted unanimously to support a possible placement of the statue on library grounds. They also made the suggestion, much to our delight, that the statue should be placed on a bench, with room for a man, woman or child to sit next to the great writer, maybe even having an imaginary discussion with him.
Soon after press reports about the meeting with the trustees appeared, the push-back began. Letter writers and individuals at a subsequent trustees meeting argued that a statue of Du Bois on public land was not appropriate, because he was a “communist.” Perhaps, they said, it would be fine to place a statue at the homestead site, but public land on Main Street was a bridge too far.
With that, we were thrown back to Great Barrington’s long and regrettable history around celebrating our most famous son. (For an excellent recounting of GB’s fraught history of commemorating Du Bois, read “Those About Him Remained Silent, The Battle over W.E.B. Du Bois”by Amy Bass).
The first time this controversy raised its head was in the late 1960’s, when a memorial to Du Bois on his ancestral land was opposed by local residents. I was completely ignorant of this history – having moved to Great Barrington in 1980 – until I met the civil rights leader Julian Bond in the late nineties. Bond had been a young activist when he spoke at the contested commemoration of Du Bois in 1968. When I met Bond for an interview in the 1990’s, we were chit-chatting during the set-up of the camera crew. He asked me where I was from. And I told him that my home was Great Barrington, a small Massachusetts town, he had probably never heard of. He burst out laughing. He told me that his appearance at the dedication of Du Bois’ home site was an event he had never forgotten because of the local opposition against honoring Du Bois. “Yeah, supposedly because he was a commie,” Bond said, “but really.”
I explained to Bond, that Great Barrington was a very different town now, and that Du Bois was no longer vilified because of his membership of the communist party. Bond reacted skeptically.
And sure enough, Bond’s skepticism proved right. Because when in 2004 some citizens proposed to have the newly-built school to be named after Du Bois, it was rejected by the school board.
Ultimately, the current voices against a statue of Du Bois again reduce Du Bois’s 95-years of life and writing to his two years as a member of the communist party. It is high time to put this charge in perspective.
Let’s take a look at what happened on February 16, 1951. That was the day Du Bois was arraigned in federal court in Washington DC, searched, finger printed and briefly put in handcuffs. His alleged crime? Failure to register as a Soviet agent under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). “From then until the trial actually took place six months later, I went through a gruesome experience,” Du Bois wrote in his book about the case (“In Battle for Peace, The Story of My 83rdBirthday”). “I was walking through the world as an indicted criminal with a possible sentence of five years in prison and a fine of $ 10,000.”
What had happened? As an advocate for world peace, Du Bois had become the head of a small anti-war and anti-nuclear nonproliferation organization in New York called the Peace Information Center (PIC). Its major mission was to circulate the Stockholm Appeal, a petition launched by the Nobel Prize-winning chemist and French communist Frédéric Joliot-Curie, and endorsed by famous people like Marc Chagall, Thomas Mann, and Pablo Picasso. This caught the attention of the U.S. government, in large part because the Stockholm Appeal had by then received 1.5 million signatures in the U.S.
U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson took to the pages of The New YorkTimes to call the petition “a propaganda trick in the spurious ‘peace offensive’ of the Soviet Union.” Du Bois responded in the Times that “regardless of our other beliefs and affiliations, we [PIC] are circulating this petition for the one and only purpose of informing the American people on the issue of peace.” Du Bois added that he was speaking as an American.
The Justice Department disagreed. Federal prosecutors charged Du Bois and four of his co-workers under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, arguing that he and the PIC had to register as agents of a foreign power because their petition began in another country.
The trial took place on November 8, 1951. The prosecution’s star witness was O. John Rogge, a former member of the PIC who had hosted the organization’s founding meeting in his very own living room. When he testified at the trial, Rogge tried to paint his former colleagues at the PIC as communist puppets. However, the judge found Rogge’s testimony entirely speculative. When the prosecution rested its case after Rogge’s testimony, the judge declared that the government had failed to present any evidence of the PIC’s Soviet ties. He therefore acquitted Du Bois and his co-defendants.
Reflecting on his acquittal, Du Bois wrote: “What turns me cold in all this experience is the certainty that thousands of innocent victims are in jail today because they had neither money, experience, nor friends to help them. The eyes of the world were on our trial despite the desperate effort of press and radio to suppress the facts and cloud the real issues; the courage and money of friends and of strangers who dared stand for a principle freed me; but God only knows how many who were as innocent as I and my colleagues are today in hell. They daily stagger out of prison doors embittered, vengeful, hopeless, ruined. And of this army of the wronged, the proportion of Negroes is frightful. We protect and defend sensational cases where Negroes are involved. But the great mass of arrested or accused black folk have no defense. There is desperate need of nation-wide organizations to oppose this national racket of railroading to jails and chain-gangs the poor, friendless and black.”
Even though Du Bois walked out of the courtroom a free man, the prosecution had hurt him deeply. A major disappointment for him was that prominent African-Americans did not take up his cause, even though he understood that they were scared to be caught up in the “red scare” propagated by Joe McCarthy and others. He wrote that before his acquittal, he could see the doubts about him on the faces of others. There was also the matter of money. Mounting a defense was a costly undertaking and Du Bois was not a wealthy man. To raise money for his defense, he traveled the country together with his second wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois. This turned out to be the one positive experience of the ordeal. Although travel at his advanced age was not an easy matter, and even though he was not a natural orator, he felt invigorated by the crowds he was attracting. Ordinary folk, black and white, church people and unionists came to hear him and contributed money.
A little known consequence of the government’s prosecution of Du Bois centered on his passport. Shirley Graham Du Bois writes about it in a postscript In Battle for Peace. Du Bois had been invited to speak at the American Intercontinental Peace Conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1952. Since his passport had been taken away from him, he had applied for a new one. But on their wedding anniversary, on February 14 1952, a letter arrived from the State Department, informing Du Bois that “since it appears that your proposed travel would be contrary to the best interests of the United States, a passport is not being issued to you.” In subsequent years, Du Bois would receive many invitations to speak overseas. All of which he had to turn down. Not until 1958 would he be able to travel again on his American passport.
This, then, was 83-year-old, W.E.B. Du Bois’s prelude to joining the American communist party and going into exile in Ghana less than a decade later, in his early 90s. Both were acts of hopelessness, but both were also symbolic acts against McCarthyism, racism, and poverty.
We will get back to this final period of Du Bois’s life in a future article.
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Freke Vuijst is American correspondent for the Dutch magazine, Vrij Nederland. She is the author of four books and the producer/director of many documentary films. She has lived in Great Barrington for forty years.
