"W.E.B. Du Bois – An American Hero," Staring His Grandson Honors Local Icon's Birthday

February 21 | Monument Mountain Regional High School, Great Barrington, MA | 5pm

The W. E. B. Du Bois Freedom Center celebrates Du Bois's birthday weekend, February 21, with a performance of "W.E.B. Du Bois – An American Hero," a theatrical portrait of the scholar, activist, and Berkshire native whose intellectual and political influence shaped the civil rights movement.

Co-presented by the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, Multicultural BRIDGE, BerkShares Inc., the Freedom Center, and the NAACP Berkshire County Branch, the production is written and produced by New York–based playwright and actor Chad Lawson Cooper. The title role is performed by Du Bois’s great-grandson Jeffrey Du Bois Peck, bringing a generational dimension to a work that traces Du Bois’s journey from Great Barrington to the global stage. Veteran actor Ralph Carter joins the cast as well.

The performance, held at the Monument Mountain Regional High School, situates Du Bois not only as a founding voice of the NAACP and author of The Souls of Black Folk, but as a complex thinker whose work on race, democracy, Pan-Africanism, and economic justice continues to reverberate. The script draws on historical record to dramatize Du Bois’s evolution from scholar and historian to outspoken critic of American racial capitalism, offering audiences a staged encounter with ideas that remain urgent.

Tickets are available via Eventbrite.