I’ve been crying for the past hour about the news that our beloved friend Esther Dozier, pastor of the AME Zion Church here in Great Barrington, was murdered last night. I did not know Esther the way David did (through working on two books with her), but I’ve known Esther, and photographed her and her congregation, for years. She was an effervescent presence, a woman of faith with a sense of humor and much compassion.
Levinson said Dozier also was involved in housing and homelessness issues and helped establish the African-American Heritage Trail that extends from Pittsfield to northern Connecticut. She also organized regular lectures about W.E.B. Dubois, the black educator who was born in Great Barrington. “Even though her congregation was small, she turned the church into a force,” Levinson said. “There was no pretense with her. She was direct and honest and very funny.”
We miss her, and the town and her church community misses her leadership.
Later: The funeral at the Congregational Church was an extraordinary event, lasting over two hours; we will never forget the sight of hundreds of people—white and African American, young and old, local residents and church officials from across New England—on Main Street afterwards in the summer sunshine.
As publishers based in a small New England town and not in New York City, we’ve always been pleased by the fact that an eminent U.S. intellectual and activist, W. E .B. Du Bois, a leader of the civil rights movement, grew up in and throughout his life returned to Great Barrington. In 2006, Berkshire published two books connected with the local African American community, one a guide to African American history in the Housatonic River Valley, and the other a history of the Clinton AME Zion Church, which Du Bois attended as a teenager and wrote vividly about for a New York City newspaper. David Levinson has done many national interviews about Pastor Dozier and the church since her death. Her efforts to preserve and promote the legacy of Du Bois will be continued by her friends as well as by the University of Massachusetts, owners of the Du Bois Homesite.
Here are PDFs of pages about Esther Dozier and the Clinton AME Zion Church from the two books published in 2006 by Berkshire:
From Sewing Circles, Dime Suppers, and W.E.B. Du Bois, by David Levinson
From the African American Heritage Trail, edited by David Levinson, Rachel Fletcher, et al.
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