HARPERS FERRY, W.Va. - Seventy-four years ago, W.E.B. Du Bois and members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People were rebuffed when they traveled from their convention in Washington, D.C., to place a plaque honoring abolitionist John Brown on the grounds of Storer College, a historically black school in Harpers Ferry where Brown's 1859 raid set the stage for the Civil War.
On Friday, NAACP Chairman Julian Bond led a new pilgrimage to what now is the National Park Service's Mather Training Center to place a replica of the bronze tablet on its grounds.
"Today, we revisit history and, simultaneously, we make history," the Rev. Theresa A. Dear, a member of the NAACP's national board of directors, told an audience of about 200 people. Dear also noted that, on this pilgrimage, "we are welcomed unequivocally."
"No other white person, including President Lincoln, has been so widely admired by black Americans as John Brown," Bond said at the dedication. "Slavery to Brown was the sum of all evil ... It denied millions their rights and their dignity."