In embrace of W.E.B. Du Bois, Great Barrington names middle school after the civil rights icon

​Deanna Pan | Boston Globe

Gwendolyn VanSant (right) and Randy Weinstein of the W.E.B. Du Bois Legacy Committee stood outside the newly renamed W.E.B. Du Bois Middle School in Great Barrington on Friday. MATTHEW CAVANAUGH/FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE

Following more than a decade of public strife, Great Barrington, a small idyllic town in the Berkshires, has finally embraced hometown hero W.E.B. Du Bois, the iconic civil rights activist, scholar, and founder of the NAACP.

At the end of a two-and-a-half-hour Zoom meeting — in which dozens testified, mostly in favor of the proposed change — the Berkshire Hills Regional School District committee voted unanimously Thursday evening to rename the local middle school in honor of Great Barrington’s perhaps best-known native son.

Monument Valley Regional Middle School is now W.E.B. Du Bois Regional Middle School, a symbolic though important gesture to the local activists who toiled for years to educate the region about the early civil rights pioneer’s life and legacy.

​“To me, in this moment of ’Black Lives Matter,’ this was the action, right? We can put a lot of words up and hold signs, but this was a clear action that would stand for what I see as reparations in Great Barrington for past community hurts,” said Gwendolyn VanSant, CEO and founding director of BRIDGE, a Berkshire-based nonprofit that provides cultural literacy and competency training.

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