BOSTON
The University of Massachusetts in Amherst said Friday it would scan, catalog, digitize and put online papers of civil rights movement pioneer W.E.B. Du Bois.
The university’s W.E.B. Du Bois Library has an estimated 100,000 diaries, letters, photographs and other items related to Du Bois, who helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
“What we’re looking to do is spark conversation about difficult issues in race, inequality, class and all these things are things that concerned Du Bois,” said Robert Cox, director of the special collections at the library.
UMass received a $200,000 grant from the Verizon Foundation to put the collection online during the two-year project, which begins in July.
The collection includes correspondence with other influential African-Americans, such as Booker T. Washington and Langston Hughes, as well as important public figures of his day, such as Albert Einstein and Mohandas Gandhi.
One of Cox’s favorite pieces is a menu signed by those who attended the first meeting of the Niagara Movement, a precursor to the NAACP. The group was forced to meet in Ontario, Canada, because no restaurant in Buffalo, N.Y., would serve them.
