SHGAPE Blog

By Emily Parrow

September 10, 2026

In the fourth installment of “Field Notes: Public History in the GAPE,” Marcus P. Smith shares how the Du Bois Freedom Center interprets the life of author, scholar, and civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) in his hometown of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The region, known as the Berkshires, is rich in history, culture, and natural beauty. As Smith explains, the Du Bois Freedom Center helps ground visitors of all ages in the Berkshires’ Black cultural heritage using the places that shaped Du Bois’s upbringing.

Tell me a bit about your organization’s scope and focus. What makes it unique?

The Du Bois Freedom Center is a public history and cultural organization dedicated to preserving and interpreting the life, thought, and global legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois while also examining the broader history of Black life in the Berkshires. Our work connects sites such as the W.E.B. Du Bois Boyhood Homesite, Clinton A.M.E. Zion Church, Mahaiwe Cemetery, and other regional landmarks to larger histories of African American community formation, abolition, labor, religion, civil rights, and internationalism. One of the defining aspects of the organization is our ongoing effort to restore the historic Clinton A.M.E. Zion Church and transform it into a museum and interpretive center. In doing so, we are building the only institution in the United States specifically devoted to interpreting the life and legacy of Du Bois through the landscapes and community that shaped him.

How does your organization interpret GAPE history? What tools are you using?

Much of our interpretive work centers on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and how those years shaped both Du Bois and Black life in the Berkshires. We interpret this history through walking tours, exhibitions, archival research, public programs, and material culture. Visitors encounter physical sites tied to Du Bois’s childhood, Black church life, labor, and civil rights activism alongside historic photographs, newspapers, oral histories, architectural spaces, and objects connected to Clinton A.M.E. Zion Church and the broader African American community. Our approach is deeply place-based. Rather than presenting Du Bois only through biography, we encourage visitors to physically move through the environments that informed his worldview. Interpretation at the Homesite, for example, draws on archaeological research, landscape interpretation, and Du Bois’s own writings about the “House of the Black Burghardts.” We also emphasize the role of Clinton A.M.E. Zion Church as a social, political, and cultural center for Black residents during the Jim Crow era and into the twentieth century.

Tell me about your current position. What does a typical day look like for you? 

I am a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at UMass Amherst and currently serve as the History and Interpretive Fellow at the Du Bois Freedom Center. My work integrates historical research, public interpretation, education, and community engagement. A typical day may involve leading interpretive tours for university or K–12 audiences, conducting archival and site-based research, developing exhibition materials, coordinating educational programming, or collaborating with scholars, artists, and local organizations regarding future interpretive and cultural initiatives. Because the organization is relatively small, the work is necessarily collaborative and interdisciplinary, requiring the continual intersection of public history, preservation practice, education, and community-based cultural work.

Can you describe a noteworthy finding, exciting research rabbit trail, encouraging public response, or other insight that occurred through your work?

One of the most meaningful aspects of this work has been witnessing how strongly visitors respond to the relationship between Du Bois’s global stature and the intimacy of the places connected to his early life, as well as the striking gap between the scope of his intellectual and political influence and the relatively limited efforts toward his commemoration in the United States. Visitors unfamiliar with the Berkshires might expect expansive institutional spaces associated with a world-renowned intellectual and civil rights activist, and instead encounter a wooded Homesite, a small historic church, or traces of a once-small Black community in rural New England. That contrast frequently becomes transformative, grounding Du Bois within the landscapes, institutions, and relationships that shaped his worldview. At the same time, the small scale and immediacy of these surviving landmarks allow for unusually intimate conversations about Black domestic life, labor, consumption, spirituality, and community formation in nineteenth-century New England. Another recurring public response is surprise that Du Bois maintained a profound and enduring relationship with the region throughout his life. Visitors often come to recognize that the creativity, intellect, discipline, and moral vision associated with Du Bois were not simply the qualities of an isolated exceptional figure, but were nurtured within a broader Black community whose values, institutions, and traditions profoundly shaped him. Many leave reconsidering assumptions about both Black history in New England and the geographic and cultural foundations of major civil rights thinkers.

Who is your audience? Does that shape your presentation of this history?

Our audiences range from local residents and tourists to scholars, university students, educators, activists, and K–12 groups. Many visitors arrive with only a partial familiarity with W. E. B. Du Bois, often knowing him primarily for publishing The Souls of Black Folk in 1903 and co-founding the NAACP in 1909. However, Du Bois passed away in 1963, in Ghana, West Africa, just one day before the March on Washington, leaving more than five decades of his life still to explore, understand, and learn from. That shapes our interpretive approach considerably. We try to move beyond presenting Du Bois solely as an abstract intellectual or civil rights figure and instead ground him within the physical landscapes, institutions, and relationships that shaped his worldview. Through our walking tours, visitors engage not only with the Du Bois Homesite, but also his birth site, sites of commemoration throughout Great Barrington, the historic Black community on Rossetter Street neighborhood adjacent to the Clinton A.M.E. Zion Church, and the histories and legacies of figures such as Elizabeth Freeman, Agrippa Hull, and James Van Der Zee and their contributions to Black life and culture in the region. By interpreting the Black church, the Berkshires, and the local African American community alongside Du Bois’s writings, visitors gain a fuller understanding of how his ideas emerged from lived experience. We also work carefully to create layered interpretation that remains accessible to first-time visitors while still offering depth for scholars and audiences already familiar with his work.

How do you think the GAPE is reflected in our contemporary moment? What can the public learn from your organization/work? 

The GAPE remains deeply relevant to the contemporary moment because many of the political, social, and economic conflicts Du Bois examined during his lifetime continue to shape American society. The period was defined by profound contradictions: constitutional promises of Black citizenship and equality coexisted with segregation, disfranchisement, racial violence, and expanding economic inequality. Debates over labor, democracy, education, migration, industrial capitalism, and public memory were central to the era and remain unresolved in many respects. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America remains especially instructive because it challenged dominant historical narratives by centering Black political participation, institution-building, and democratic possibility during Reconstruction, arguing that formerly enslaved people were active participants in reshaping American democracy. The era also witnessed major expansions in Black education, including the rise of normal schools and institutions such as Tuskegee Institute, founded in 1881 by Booker T. Washington, which reflected broader debates concerning labor, industrial education, self-determination, and citizenship. At the same time, industrialization and the migration networks it accelerated transformed how Black communities moved, worked, organized, and pursued opportunity across the United States. Through the work of the Du Bois Freedom Center, visitors are encouraged to understand these histories as foundational to ongoing conversations about democracy, inequality, education, labor, and historical memory.

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Marcus P. Smith is a Ph.D. candidate in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at UMass Amherst. He is the founder of the Black Grassroots Heritage Preservation Network, host of the Black Preservation Stories podcast, and serves as History and Interpretive Fellow at the Du Bois Freedom Center in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.