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Those About Him Remained Silent

The Battle over W. E. B. Du Bois

2009
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Author:

Amy Bass

Those About Him Remained Silent

Uncovers racism and red-baiting in the dynamic between the cold war and civil rights

Amy Bass provides the first detailed account of the battle over W. E. B. Du Bois and his legacy, as well as a history of Du Bois’s early life in Massachusetts. Showing the potency of prevailing, often hidden, biases, Those About Him Remained Silent is an unexpected history of how racism, patriotism, and global politics played out in a New England community divided on how—or even if—to honor the memory of its greatest citizen.

Amy Bass’s excellent history of ‘un-American activities’ in a pleasant New England town is another cautionary illustration of the banality of evil: in this case, the long, willful distortion of the progressive legacy of their greatest native son, W. E. B. Du Bois, by the people of Great Barrington in the service of a perverted patriotism.

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David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963

On the eve of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois died in exile in Ghana at the age of 95, more than a half century after cofounding the NAACP. Five years after his death, residents of Great Barrington, the small Massachusetts town where Du Bois was born in 1868, proposed recognizing his legacy through the creation of a memorial park on the site of his childhood home. Supported by the local newspaper and prominent national figures including Harry Belafonte and Sydney Poitier, the effort to honor Du Bois set off an acrimonious debate that bitterly divided the town. Led by the local chapter of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, opponents compared Du Bois to Hitler, vilifying him as an anti-American traitor for his communist sympathies, his critique of American race relations, and his pan-Africanist worldview.

In Those About Him Remained Silent, Amy Bass provides the first detailed account of the battle over Du Bois and his legacy, as well as a history of Du Bois’s early life in Massachusetts. Bass locates the roots of the hostility to memorialize Du Bois in a cold war worldview that reduced complicated politics to a vehement hatred of both communism and, more broadly, anti-Americanism. The town’s reaction was intensified, she argues, by the racism encoded within cold war patriotism.

Showing the potency of prevailing, often hidden, biases, Those About Him Remained Silent is an unexpected history of how racism, patriotism, and global politics played out in a New England community divided on how—or even if—to honor the memory of its greatest citizen.

Those About Him Remained Silent

Amy Bass is professor of history at The College of New Rochelle. She is author of Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete (Minnesota, 2002).

Those About Him Remained Silent

Amy Bass’s excellent history of ‘un-American activities’ in a pleasant New England town is another cautionary illustration of the banality of evil: in this case, the long, willful distortion of the progressive legacy of their greatest native son, W. E. B. Du Bois, by the people of Great Barrington in the service of a perverted patriotism.

—

David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963

As one who also once searched for remembrance of Du Bois in Great Barrington nearly in vain, I find this book a bracing revelation. Amy Bass tells her own compelling story of how her home region ignored its most famous son for decades because of politics and race. This is a startling and important tale of social denial, of erased historical memory, and a hidden past now coming to light.

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David W. Blight, author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

An excellent example of local history on a national canvas, this volume charts over three decades of conflict about the legacy of the ‘most famous native son’ ever to hale from the Berkshires.

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ForeWord Review

Without question, this book belongs in all libraries.

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Choice

Those About Him Remained Silent has enormous potential and undoubtedly raises many issues for future research. Debates over the nation’s history take place at the national and local levels, and individuals construct history one public debate at a time. This conclusion is essential in thinking about how social change and history are crafted by individuals in the local arena, often through public debate and discussion.

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Journal of African American History

Those About Him Remained Silent joins the ranks of recent, noteworthy scholarship on Du Bois. . . But Bass’s book is unique in that it also aims to reinterpret—and challenge—the actions of those who could not remain untouched by the vision and daring of an unparalleled African American intellectual.

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Callaloo

Those About Him Remained Silent

UMP blog - Obama, Du Bois and Hitler: "Qui tacet consentire videtur" ("Silence gives consent")

9/18/2009
History is never about the past. It wasn’t then. It isn’t now. In the midst of a lot of people who don’t seem to understand this, Barney Frank does. His confrontation in August with Rachel Brown of the La Rouche Youth Movement demonstrated how the national debate on health care reform, which was increasingly getting crushed by Sarah Palin’s spurious claims of “death panels,” would take the high road. Comparing Obama’s stance on Medicare expenditures to Hitler’s Aktion T4 strategy in 1939, Brown asked Frank how he could “continue to support a Nazi policy.” Frank’s reply to her question – “On what planet do you spend most of your time?” – drew laughter. But it was his continued response that gave me hope for a brief and shining moment that sanity was going to prevail. Read more ...