On this day, February 23, 1868, civil rights activist, author and scholar W. E. B. Du Bois was born.
Du Bois was a public supporter of the effort to save Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. He spoke at the "Save the Rosenbergs Rally" (1952) in NYC and read a prayer at their funeral after efforts to stop the execution proved unsuccessful.
The young sons of the Rosenbergs, Robert and Michael, met their soon-to-be adoptive parents, Abel and Anne Meeropol, for the first time at a holiday party thrown by the Du Bois’s in their Brooklyn brownstone in December of 1953.
A typed version of Du Bois’s powerful 1952 rally speech with mark-ups is available online from the Du Bois collection at UMass Amherst: https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b202-i055