GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass — The Du Bois Freedom Center announced the first event in its 2024 Reflections on Democracy salon series. The Center will commemorate Juneteenth by hosting An Evening with Congresswoman Nikema Williams who will be in conversation with the Du Bois Freedom Center’s Visiting Scholar on Democracy, Michael Blake. The June 19th event will start at 6pm at Saint James Place. This event is free, open to the public, and all are welcome at attend. Registration is required via this link.
The Center’s Reflections on Democracy is a series of educational events and public programs that ask featured scholars, elected officials, students, artists, musicians, philanthropists, and the community, to share their hopes for our democracy and reflections via this site in response to the following Du Bois passage:
“…I dream of a world of infinitive and valuable variety; not in the laws of gravity or atomic weights, but in human variety in height and weight, color and skin, hair and nose and lip. But more especially and far above and beyond this, is a realm of true freedom: in thought and dream, fantasy and imagination; in gift, aptitude, and genius—all possible manner of difference, topped with freedom of soul to do and be, and freedom of thought to give to a world and build into it, all wealth of inborn individuality. Each effort to stop this freedom of being is a blow at democracy—that real democracy which is reservoir and opportunity . . . There can be no perfect democracy curtailed by color, race, or poverty. But with all we accomplish all, even Peace.”
– Excerpt from The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History, 1947.