Two weeks ago, one of my students ventured with me to visit the homesite of Dr. DuBois in Great Barrington, MA, the bithplace of Dr. DuBois, and the town where I live and work. We were discouraged to find that the site was covered with pine trees, blanketed with snow, and barely visible from the road. I had been told by a local historian that there was a hole in the ground, "where Dr. DuBois' chidhood basement had been." Not suprisingly, that was untrue: after all, the hole had little chance of remaining visible after almost a century had gone by.

It is, indeed, prophetic, that the place that marks the birth of the greatest African American intellectual of our century should be made "invisible", and bare witness to the state of invisibility that he claimed was assigned black folks in America.

On his 84 birthday, Dr. DuBois expressed, with great anguish and anger, that as he stood in handcuffs, in the land of his birth, he was, in the eyes of America no more than "a nigger".

The DuBois homesite, and the utter emptiness left there was devestating to me. It would not have been to Father DuBois, whose comments on America were intended to prepare me for that days voyage.