GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. — The former Clinton A.M.E. Zion Church building on Elm Court, once the center of its community, has been stripped to its studs and will soon be propped up with steel beams and cross timbers.
The peeled-back paint on one wall in what was once the sanctuary reveals most of the letters of the words: “The Lord Is In His Holy Temple.”
And there are some holes in the wooden floors on which generations of the town’s African American community stepped as they flowed in and out for well over a century.
Including, at one point, town native W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois went on to be a scholar, writer, poet, professor and the architect of the civil rights movement as a co-founder of the NAACP.