Those About Him Remained Silent: The Battle over W. E. B. Du Bois (review)

In the summer of 2009, I traveled to Great Barrington, in search of a quiet place to rest, read, and write, but also, to track down the former homestead and family gravesites of W. E. B. Du Bois. Throughout my encounters with various Great Barrington citizens, whether in the Bed & Breakfast where I stayed or at the Visitor’s Center where I investigated, I found the town to be openly proud of its prodigal son. The woman manning the Visitor’s Center gave me directions—to the W. E. B. Du Bois Historic Site, the Du Bois Center run by local Du Bois enthusiast Randy Weinstein, and the Mahaiwe Cemetery where Du Bois’s first wife, Nina Gomer, infant son Burghardt, and daughter Yolande are buried. Moreover, she regaled me and my companion with the story of how Du Bois had spent one summer vacation helping to build a stone wall in the town. The paths to the various sites of Du Bois were frequently and clearly marked, and as I made my way through them, camera in hand, I felt his spirit in the wood and bricks and trees around me.

So I was fascinated—and somewhat surprised—to learn that in 1969, in the wake of Du Bois’s death, some citizens of Great Barrington nearly derailed a movement to dedicate a memorial to him. In Those About Him Remained Silent: The Battle over W. E. B. Du Bois (2009), historian Amy Bass reveals how W. E. B. Du Bois, arguably one of the most important Civil Rights leaders and public intellectuals in the United States, was rejected by his own hometown and erased, therefore, from its collective history. Focusing not on the more familiar tale of Du Bois’s struggle against the forces of racism and nationalism, but on the startling and heretofore unknown tale of how such forces worked to undermine his legacy, Bass’s book—part historical exposé and part regional memoir—shows the way discourses of nationalism and patriotism draw sustenance from their covert investment in racism and xenophobia. In engaging, detailed prose, Bass describes how some of Great Barrington’s citizens opposed the creation of a memorial site for Du Bois, unpacking a “counter-narrative” (35) about Du Bois—not as an American hero, but as a traitor—”the author of political ideologies that worked against democracy and, particularly, on behalf of communism” (35). Cognizant of the fact that Du Bois had joined the Communist Party toward the end of his life, a contingent of the Great Barrington community “no longer felt any connection” to him (35).

Although Du Bois is often associated with the post-bellum Southern environment about which he wrote, the modern locale of Harlem where he served as editor of The Crisis, and the international, cosmopolitan spaces of London, Paris, and Ghana—he cherished his New England upbringing in Great Barrington. As Bass points out, Du Bois sought refuge in his hometown: his children were born there; he sent his family there to escape the Atlanta riot of 1906; and he chose Great Barrington’s Mahaiwe Cemetery as the family burial place. Du Bois’s affection for his hometown persisted throughout his life. In 1928, at the height of his urban work with the NAACP and The Crisis, he planned to refurbish his pastoral, childhood home, but the cost of the project proved too great (xv–xvi). Du Bois’s Great Barrington roots are aptly archived, both in his own autobiographical writings and in David Levering Lewis’s biography, but Bass devotes her first chapter to placing in detailed relief Du Bois’s fondness for his birthplace and also, the relative shelter it furnished him from overt racism.

But although Du Bois cherished Great Barrington, and although some of its residents appreciated and nurtured him (including, as Bass points out, local white educators and religious leaders), by the twentieth century, a silence had...