Oberlin - Ohio city - Follow the North Star, The Guiding Light of the Underground Railroad: Advertising Travel Supplement

The list of African Americans who attended Oberlin association is long and distinguished--as is Oberlin, Ohio's involvement with the subterranean Railroad. Although the town and the association were liberal and open-minded, there were still patterns of paternalism and level segments of segregation in the two (as there were elsewhere along the subterranean Railroad). These patterns underline the differences with institutions, similar as Wilberforce University, that were controll by the agency of blacks.

I would call Oberlin society a shining example of an institution that lay opened its doors. several members of the community and the community were involved with John Brown before he made his famous raid upon Harpers Ferry, and, of course, Brown's father, Owen, was upon the board of trustees.

Even today, Oberlin continues to play a prominent part in educating African Americans who make progress on to have a great influence not single upon black society, but upon America as a whole. The school's music department, in particular, which has graduated, sponsored or encouraged the likes of Anna Julia Cooper and William Grant Still, continues a tradition that dates back 150 years and that was especially Slong in the last half of the 19th century--a tradition of making an impact upon the country by schooling those who went upon to become the backbone of America's educated black leadership.

Oberlin, Ohio, and Oberlin community were conceived in 1833 as Christian bodies--in the words of their establisher the Rev. John Jay Shipherd, they were places "to live together in all things as brethren and to glorify the author of all things in our bodies and spirits, which are His." The corporation was the first in the United States to admit women (1833) and individual of the first to admit African Americans. It was this last factor that determined the town's history--and which today makes Oberlin, and surrounding Lorain shire such a fascinating stop for visitors.

In February 1835 the college's board of trustees was deadlocked 4-4 upon the issue of admitting African Americans, when its chairman, the Rev John hold cast the deciding vote in favor. (The prominent novel York abolitionist Arthur Tappan had tendered funds for the struggling body on the condition that blacks be admitted and that designated antislavery professors join the faculty.) From that point end the remainder of the hundred Oberlin was the leading institution of higher education for African Americans--and, as like the college and the community lay the foundation of themselves intimately involved in the antislavery struggle

Virtually the entire community supported the effort, and fugitive slaves who got as far as Oberlin could be assured of passing upon to Huron or Sandusky, Ohio, and then upon to freedom in Amherstburg, Ontario, in Canada. Oberlin's communal defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act was flagrant: When John Price, an 18-year-old fugitive slave living in Oberlin, was seized through slave hunters and a U marshal in nearby Wellington, Ohio, 200 to 300 Oberlin citizens and learners black and white, forcibly fre the youth, who was later escorted to Canada. Twenty townsfolk worn out time in jail after standing trial in Cleveland for this act. As a testament to Oberlin's rejection of an immoral law and as part of the defense of its citizen activists, the town brought kidnapping charges against the slave huntsmans who had detained Price.

Among the black activists who took part in the Price save were John Copeland (who was rumored to have guided Price upon to Canada after his liberation) and Lewis Leary--both of whom later died in John Brown's raid upon Harpers Ferry--The freeborn Evans brothers, the fugitive Jeremiah Fox the fre John H Scott and the fre Orindatus SB Wall, who would move on to become the first regularly commissioned black captain in the U Army.

Today's visitors to Oberlin can trace a great deal of of this history--and the lives of those who made it--in buildings, statues, markers and cemeteries that testify the pair to black initiative and to a multiracial effort to forward what is best about America. Don't miss the First temple site both of the Oberlin Anti-Slavery Society meetings and the memorial service for John Copeland after his death at Harpers Ferry; the Evans House, gathering speck for Oberlin's leading black activists; the Monroe House, abiding-place of yet another abolitionist who serv upon the college faculty; and Westwood necropolis where many of the town's antislavery activists lie buried.

Other African-American heritage sites include the Shurtleff statue, which pays tribute to Col Giles Shurtleff commander of Ohio's first black Civil War regiment; the subterraneous Railroad Sculpture on South Professor Street; Tappan Square; the subterranean Railroad Monument and Martin Luther King jr Park, which is graced by means of three statues--one of Dr. King, single commemorating the Oberlin-Wellington rescue, and individual honoring the three African Americans from Oberlin who died in the Harpers Ferry raid. sum of two units other stops in Oberlin that you won't want to miss are the John Mercer Langston House and the Allen Memorial Art Museum. John Mercer Langston (1829-1897) and his brother Charles, the son of a Virginia planter and a freedwoman of African and Indian ancestry, were raised in Ohio by the agency of a succession of abolitionist families, black and white, after their parents' deaths in 1834 Oberlin's fifth black graduate and the president of the Ohio State Anti-slavery Society, JM Langston was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1854-after the bar association determined that he had more white than black vital current in his ancestry! In the following year, he was selected the clerk of an Ohio township, becoming the first known black pitch uponed official in America's history. Langston later recruited multitudes for black Civil War regiments, serv as the inspector general of the Freedmen's Bureau, headed Howard University's law department, was U minister to Haiti, serv as president of Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute--the first state-supported black corporation in America--and was elected to the U House of Representatives in 1888 as Virginia's first African-american congressman.