Storer College and the Niagara Movement of Nineteen Oh Six

In the years after the Civil War, a Baptist minister named Nathan Cook Brackett came to Harpers Ferry with a conviction: freed Black Americans needed schools. In eighteen sixty-five he started a school that was chartered in eighteen sixty-eight as Storer College on the hillside above the lower town, funded in part by a ten-thousand-dollar matching grant from a philanthropist named John Storer. The school's charter was explicit: it existed to educate youth without distinction of race or color. Over nearly ninety years, Storer graduated teachers, ministers, nurses, and professionals who spread across the region.

The college's most consequential moment came in August of nineteen oh six. The sociologist and activist W. E. B. Du Bois gathered a group of Black intellectuals on the Storer campus for the second meeting of an organization he had founded called the Niagara Movement. It was the first meeting of the movement held on American soil. The members chose Harpers Ferry deliberately, for its connection to John Brown and to the cause of Black freedom. During the gathering, Du Bois and the other delegates walked from the campus to the Murphy farm, where John Brown's Fort stood, barefoot, in a gesture of solidarity with Brown's memory. Du Bois later called it one of the greatest meetings that American Negroes ever held.

The Niagara Movement reorganized within a few years as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded in nineteen oh nine. Storer College closed in June of nineteen fifty-five, amid mounting financial troubles, after the state of West Virginia ended its annual appropriation in the wake of Brown versus Board of Education. The former campus was transferred to the National Park Service in nineteen sixty-two and today houses the service's Stephen T. Mather Training Center.