Clinton A. M. E. Zion Church

The Clinton A. M. E. Zion Church in Great Barrington was the spiritual, cultural, and political heart of Black life in the region for nearly 130 years. The A. M. E. Zion Society that built the church in 1886, was a formative influence in the life of W. E. B. Du Bois, the pioneering author, intellectual, and NAACP co-founder who was born and raised in this small, rural town.

The most enduring African American church in Berkshire County, the Clinton Church was more than a place of worship. The Sewing and Literary Societies hosted public readings, plays, debates, concerts, and guest speakers. The Children’s Mite Society offered music, rhetoric, and public speaking classes not otherwise available to Black students at the time. The church was also the focal point for social and political activism, driven first by the segregation and violence of the Jim Crow era and continuing into the 1950s and 1960s when it hosted the Berkshire County chapter of the NAACP, early meetings of the housing agency Construct, and United Church Women, an ecumenical organization devoted to human rights, peace, and justice.

“The Clinton Church was my church home from childhood to adulthood. Within its walls, my moral values and sense of community were nurtured.”

Everett Brinson, b. 1938, Great Barrington

The Clinton Church’s history of advocacy for racial justice has been well-documented in David Levinson’s book, The African American Community in Rural New England: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Clinton A.M.E. Zion Church.

In the fall of 1895, the Church hosted the New England Conference of the A. M. E. Zion Church’s annual Sunday School convention. Dozens of pastors and teachers attended the event, where grave concerns about lynching and the treatment of Black people were expressed.

The Berkshire County NAACP Chapter, formed in 1918 and reactivated in 1945, met in the Church’s basement throughout the 1950s and ’60s. Pastors and congregants complained publicly about housing discrimination, harassment and police brutality against Black youth in Great Barrington, advocacy that led to the establishment of a town-wide committee on police relations in 1969.

Rev. Esther Dozier, who became the church’s first female pastor in 1999, was equally outspoken on matters of injustice. Under her leadership, the Church promoted Black history and the life and legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois, who had been largely ignored in his hometown for decades. While the church first became publicly involved in honoring Du Bois in 1994, when historical markers were dedicated at the site of his birth and the cemetery where his first wife and infant son were buried, it was Dozier who initiated the town’s annual celebrations of Du Bois that continue today.

The shingle-style church is also historically and architecturally significant for its association with the religious and cultural heritage of African Americans in rural New England and as a distinctive example of 19th-century vernacular church architecture. A key site on the Upper Housatonic Valley African American Heritage Trail, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2008. The church closed its doors in 2014.