Jordon Crawford, a fellow at the Du Bois Freedom Center and a doctoral student in the Du Bois Department of African American Studies at UMass Amherst, tells visitors Saturday about the importance of AME Zion churches to the black community. Crawford spoke during a tour of the former church in Great Barrington, which is being preserved and renovated to house the Du Bois Freedom Center.
GREAT BARRINGTON – The former Clinton AME Zion Church building on Elm Court, once the center of the congregation, has been stripped down to its beams and will soon be supported with steel girders and crossbeams.
The peeling paint on a wall of the former sanctuary reveals most of the letters of the words “The Lord is in his holy temple.”
And there are some holes in the wooden floors where generations of the city’s African-American community have stepped as they came and went for over a century.
Among them was WEB Du Bois, a native of the city. Du Bois became a scholar, writer, poet, professor and, as co-founder of the NAACP, the architect of the civil rights movement.
Visitors were given a guided tour Saturday morning to see the restoration work being done on the former church building that will soon be the Du Bois Freedom Center, whose executive director, Ny Whitaker, is offering limited tours on Saturdays through September.
Du Bois Freedom Center Executive Director Ny Whitaker led a tour of the center Saturday morning, informing visitors about the restoration work and the organization’s role in the former Clinton AME Zion Church building in Great Barrington.
The Du Bois Freedom Center took ten years to build after former church members began restoring it and transforming it into a community center and “focal point” for African-American heritage in the Berkshires and the wider region.
The first phase of stabilizing the building and roof is almost complete, and now they will turn their attention to renovation, Whitaker said. The doors of the fully completed Du Bois Freedom Center should open in two to three years.
A capital campaign will begin soon to raise $5 million to $7 million to complete the project, Whitaker added. Nearly $2 million in grants have been allocated over the past 10 years for this first phase to stabilize the building.
But the center has already begun its work, collaborating with other organizations and hosting its “Reflections on Democracy” events with guest speakers at Saint James Place on Main Street. On September 19, for example, the guest speaker will be writer and award-winning Leslie Odom Jr., known for his role in the musical “Hamilton.”
Once completed, the center will focus on Du Bois’ legacy and create an institute for “scholars and activists,” said Whitaker, an “Obama scholar” – she served as a senior adviser in the administration of former President Barack Obama.
The top floor and former sanctuary of Clinton AME Zion Church in Great Barrington during a Saturday tour. The church was deconsecrated in 2014 and is currently being restored and renovated to become the home of the Du Bois Freedom Center, an African-American heritage center.
Whitaker was accompanied on the tour by Jordon Crawford, a Du Bois Center Fellow and doctoral candidate in the Du Bois Department of African American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Crawford is also a Methodist minister from Jamaica.
Crawford pointed out that Clinton Church and other AME churches were not just for worship. In the years after it was built in 1886, it was also the center of the community, Crawford said.
“It was the spiritual, cultural and political center of black life in Great Barrington and the region,” Crawford added, noting that the church was “a focal point” of social and political activism during the Jim Crow era and hosted NAACP meetings in the 1950s and 1960s.
After touring the building on Saturday, visitors from several states and representatives of the Du Bois Freedom Center posed for a photo in front of the historic church building in downtown Great Barrington.
Parishioners say it was the late Rev. Esther Dozier who realized how important it was to save the historic building.
“This was her life,” said Virginia Conway, a member of the congregation for more than 40 years and now on the board of the Du Bois Center. “She and her husband put so much work into this church.”
Conway told The Eagle that it was Dozier, the first female pastor here, who kept the flame of Du Bois’ memory alive in a town that ignored his legacy for decades. The church, under Dozier’s leadership, held an annual celebration on his birthday.
Dozier, Conway added, also worked hard to protect the building, which led to its being added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2008.
Project architect Steve McAlister told visitors that Dozier and her community maintained the building on a shoestring budget – as did previous generations. This gave his team something to work with “to get it safely ashore so we can do what we’re doing now.”
Project architect Steve McAlister provides a guided tour of the historical research and forensics involved in preserving and renovating the historic black church in Great Barrington that will house the Du Bois Freedom Center.
He also explained that the project involves “forensics” and historical research. Teams are peeling away the layers of history and working to preserve what was essential to the “life of the Church.”
Creating this church life was an uphill struggle. “Most of the work in the church was done by hand,” Whitaker said, “so you have to remember that time and that members didn’t have access to bank credit.”
The basement, Whitaker said, was “dug out by hand” by members. The basement is damp, so the project requires jacking it up with two steel beams. There are many stories, Whitaker said, of members over the years “being in the basement with buckets and mops trying to get the water out that was flooding the common room.”
“This was the place for ice cream parties, fish suppers and meetings (and) conversations,” Whitaker said, “that you couldn’t have outside the walls and doors, about ways they wanted to organize to support the black community.”
