Commemorating 15O Years of WEB DuBois
It’s difficult to forget the good ideas of a good man. I want to commend The Berkshire Eagle for publishing the special pullout commemorating the 150th anniversary of W.E.B. Du Bois’s birth. This tribute speaks not only to the enduring relevance of Du Bois’s ideas but also to the thoughtful consciousness of those involved in its creation. Your commemoration reminds us that human-centered ideas have a way of breaking through—even when efforts are made to suppress them. My awareness of Du Bois’s work has grown steadily over the past 12 years, ever since I moved to the Berkshires. One source of this growth has been walking through the southern Berkshires and encountering the memorials erected in his honor. One such memorial—a mural that has since been removed—traced Du Bois’s roots in Great Barrington and the threads of his ideas that resonate in the lives and legacies of Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama. Though the mural no longer exists, its message endures. W.E.B. Du Bois...