Those About Him Remained Silent: The Battle over W. E. B. Du Bois

Description

Amy Bass provides a detailed account of the battle over Du Bois and his legacy, as well as an account of Du Bois's early life in Massachusetts. Those About Him Remained Silent is an unexpected history of how racism, patriotism, and global politics played out in a community divided on how to honor-if at all- the memory of its greatest citizen.

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).

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