UMass Anthropologist Whitney Battle-Baptiste Embarks on Journey to Ghana to Commemorate Du Bois Anniversary
Whitney Battle-Baptiste, professor of anthropology, recently represented the W. E. B. Du Bois Center and UMass Libraries in Accra, Ghana to mark the 60th anniversary of the death of W. E. B. Du Bois. The scholar-activist died there at the age of 95 on Aug. 27, 1963, the eve of the March on Washington.
Battle-Baptiste participated in a symposium that also featured scholars David Levering Lewis, of New York University; Aldon Morris, of Northwestern University; Karsheik Sims-Alvarado, of Morehouse College; Akosua K. Darkwah, of the University of Ghana; Jeffery Peck, great-grandson of W. E. B. Du Bois; and Lanisa Kitchiner, chief of the African and Middle Eastern Division at the Library of Congress. The program was sponsored by the W. E. B. Du Bois Museum Foundation.
Members of the delegation also took part in an audience with Ghanaian President H. E. Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to emphasize the importance of preserving the legacy of Du Bois to his country and the larger African diaspora.
The W. E. B. Du Bois Center at UMass Amherst was established in 2009 to engage audiences in discussion and scholarship about global issues involving race, labor and social justice. The university is home to the W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, which are housed on the 25th floor of the library in the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center and are free to view digitally.