W.E.B. Du Bois's legacy at Five Acres: The Fifth Annual Du Bois Forum Returns to Great Barrington

There's a small structure tucked into the grounds of a property called Five Acres in Great Barrington that most visitors would walk right past. One may think, it's just a cabin. But James Weldon Johnson wrote some of his most enduring work inside it during the 1920s and '30s,  one of only a handful of Black writers known to have had a dedicated writing space of their own, a distinction he shared with Frederick Douglass and Anne Spencer. That detail says something most history books don't: preserving Black intellectual life has always required someone willing to protect the physical ground it happened on.

That idea sat at the center of this year's Du Bois Forum, now in its fifth year in the town that shaped W.E.B. Du Bois. But the forum isn't really about looking backward. Founded by biographer David Levering Lewis and a group of Tufts University historians, it treats Du Bois's legacy less like a museum piece and more like an open question, one still being worked out by the people who show up to answer it.

Jill Rosenberg Jones, Chairperson and Treasurer, and Rufus E. Jones, President of the James Weldon Johnson Foundation, now steward Five Acres together, a role she calls a thoughtful reminder of legacy. 'We are stewards of the land,' she said. Hosting the Forum this year is itself an act of preservation, a continuation of the same work Johnson's writing represented.

That same tension between private memory and public history showed up in the roundtable discussion, where scholars Kellie Carter Jackson and Blair Kelley both described encountering Du Bois not through institutions built to teach his work, but almost by accident,  a mislabeled textbook chapter, a library shelf, a single sentence that didn't match what they'd been taught. Their paths into his ideas ran around the education system rather than through it. It's a reminder that Du Bois's most useful insights have often survived less because of formal canon-building and more because individual people kept insisting he mattered.

And then there's the question of what happens when the descendants show up. Du Bois's great-grandson, Jeffrey Peck, wasn't there to represent a family archive. He described something closer to an ongoing relationship,  a town that is still, in his words, shaping and molding him the way it shaped his great-grandfather. That's a different kind of legacy than the one usually discussed at historical commemorations: not a fixed inheritance, but a living, unfinished one.

The forum closed with a screening of "W.E.B. Du Bois: Rebel With a Cause," a fitting note, since the weekend's real throughline wasn't a single event or building, but the ongoing labor of people deciding, year after year, that this ground is worth protecting.