Since 2009, staff and those hired with grants have been scanning documents, describing what's being entered and building the website.
A screen shot from the site.AMHERST – Since word has gone out that some of the work and writings of W.E.B. Du Bois are online, the head of special collections and the University of Massachusetts archives has received calls from places as diverse and farflung as Florida, England and Ghana asking about the collection.
“They’re just effusive,” says Robert C. Cox about the expanded opportunity for the world to see the civil rights pioneer’s work.
Before, those interested in Du Bois’ work would have to have traveled to the university to see it. Now, the university is about half-way through the process of putting all his work in the UMass special collection online.
The project began two years ago with a $200,000 grant from the Verizon Foundation and was augmented a year later with a three-year $315,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Since 2009, staff and those hired with the grants have been scanning documents, describing what’s being entered and building the website, according to Cox. There are more than 100,000 items that will eventually be online, with about 40,000 available now.
Du Bois was “never confined to place or time,” says Cox. His work was “intended to help people see the interconnectedness. He was speaking to a world audience about the issues he saw across borders.”
Those were issues of civil rights and justice. With Du Bois’ work now digitized, “his ideas can be on this national and international canvas,” Cox added.
Du Bois was born in on Feb. 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, and in 1895 he became the first black American to receive a doctorate in history from Harvard University. He is the author of “The Philadelphia Negro,” which provided a detailed sociological analysis and interpretation of black urban life.
Du Bois also helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The UMass library bears his name, and his boyhoood home on Route 23 in Great Barrington is a National Historic Landmark.
By having his work so more available Cox said he hopes it will spark greater interest in his life and work to lead people to have the conversations about the issues he wrote about that are still being faced today.
The name of the search site – Credo – “comes out of Du Bois’ Credo,” Cox said, which is kind of a prose poem about his philosophy of life. “It’s a beautiful statement (about his thinking.)”
It begins this way:
“I BELIEVE in God who made of one blood all races that dwell on earth. I believe that all men, black and brown and white, are brothers, varying, through Time and Opportunity, in form and gift and feature, but differing in no essential particular, and alike in soul and in the possibility of infinite development.”
With Du Bois’ work now available in this manner to this broad an audience, Cox said, “I would think he would be ecstatic. I really see this as fulfillment of Du Bois’ vision.”
To view the site, visit http://credo.library.umass.edu.
A celebration of the site will be held Oct. 27.