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W.E.B.Du Bois responds
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Pearl Tatten, music director at Storer College, a black school in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, had brought her college singers to the dedication of the Heyward Shepherd Memorial, which honored the first victim of the John Brown raid, a free black man who worked as a porter at the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad station. He also filled in as ticket clerk when the regular agent was away. He had been shot by one of Brown’s men on the early morning of October 17, 1859, when he had gone to investigate the disappearance of a night watchman on the Potomac River bridge.
The memorial was erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and (UDC) and the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), and dedicated October 10, 1931. Henry McDonald, the white president of the college, had made some introductory remarks, but the main speeches were by Matthew Page Andrews, a Baltimore historian, and Elizabeth Bashinsky, President-General of the UDC.
What Tatten had believed would be “celebration of interracial good-will” was in fact a celebration of American slavery, with Andrews saying that blacks had benefited from their “racial apprenticeship” and Bashinsky extolling the virtues of the “old negro ‘Mammy.’” Before her singers performed, she let the audience know that her father had been a Union soldier who had fought against the enslavement of his people.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was just as incensed as Tatten. W.E.B. Du Bois, editor of the NAACP magazine Crisis, wrote that the dedication was a “pro-slavery celebration.” Walter White, NAACP executive secretary, asked permission to hold a meeting on the Storer College campus to honor John Brown. McDonald assented, but requested a place on the program “because some have misunderstood my attitude in respect to the Heywood Shepherd memorial.” The NAACP also asked to place a memorial inside John Brown’s “fort” (the armory enginehouse where Brown and his men made their last stand), which has been moved to the Storer College campus. McDonald gave tentative approval, but wanted to see the text before making a final decision.
If the UDC and the SCV used a monument to a black man to defend slavery, the NAACP would honor the memory of a white man who fought against the “peculiar institution.” The monument’s text, written by W.E.B. Du Bois, read as follows:
Here
John Brown
Aimed at human slavery
A Blow
That woke a guilty nation.
With him fought
Seven slaves and sons of slaves.
And 4,000,000 freemen
Singing
“John Brown’s Body lies a-mouldering in the grave
But his Soul goes marching on!”
In gratitude this Tablet is erected
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
May 21, 1932
While McDonald allowed the tablet to be dedicated, he refused permission for the tablet to remain at the fort.
Storer College closed in 1955, and the fort has since been relocated to downtown Harpers Ferry and is part of the National Park Service’s historic district. But the NAACP’s John Brown memorial tablet has never returned to Harpers Ferry. The Heyward Shepherd Memorial remains, though now there is a marker that puts it into context.
Next: A personal reflection.
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