Open Palms, Open Heart: Last Saturday, July 19, Great Barrington paid tribute to the legacy of native son Dr. W.E.B.DuBois at the unveiling of a statue in his honor in front of the Mason Library on Main Street. In this photo, as historian David Levering Lewis looks on, young people took turns clasping the bronze statue’s open palm.
In his description of the event, scholar Imari Paris Jeffries said: “Du Bois meets us not with a sword … not with a fist, not with a flag. He meets us with an open hand. An open hand is never just a hand. It is a symbol, a language, a refusal. It is peace, the kind that does not forget violence, but refuses to replicate it. It is a welcome.
The statue, Dr. Jeffries said, is a model “of memory and of intellect, of unyielding belief that Black life contains multitudes, a monument to love. It is a gesture that says you belong here, even in a nation that tried to make you feel otherwise.”
Jeffries added that “thousands of monuments in the U.S. named for confederate leaders and “planted after Reconstruction in the hard soil of Jim Crow and then the aftermath of Brown v. Board [of Education]… were constructed not to grieve the dead, but to police the living.
(photo Stephanie Zollshan for the Berkshire Eagle.)
Editor’s Note: Brooklyn, NY can claim W.E.B. DuBois presence. The NAACP founder and first Crisis magazine editor lived in a Brooklyn Heights brownstone during the 1950’s. He purchased the Montague Street property from Arthur Miller, the late playwright. DuBois later moved from there to Ghana, where he passed in 1963.