Page:John Brown (W. E. B. Du Bois).djvu/103

Rh this and established dozens of schools of their own all over the land. At last in 1839 Oberlin was founded and certain earnest students of Cincinnati, disgusted with the color line at Lane College, seceded to Oberlin and brought the color question there. It was fairly met and Negroes were admitted.

It was the establishment of Oberlin College in 1839 and the appointment of his father as trustee that gave John Brown a new vision of life and usefulness—of a life which would at once combine the pursuit of a great moral ideal and the honest earning of a good living for a family. Brown proposed to survey the Virginia lands of Oberlin, as we have shown, locate a large farm for himself and settle there with his family. Here be undoubtedly expected to carry out the plan previously laid before his brother Frederick. He consulted the Oberlin authorities concerning "provision for religious and school privileges" and they thought it possible to have these, although nothing was said specifically of Negroes. The position was strategic and John Brown knew it: in the non-slaveholding portion of a slave state, near the river and not far from the foothills of mountains, beyond which lay the Great Black Way, was formed a highway for the Underground Railroad and a place for experiment in the uplift of black men. That he would meet opposition, and strong opposition, John Brown must have known, but probably at this time he counted on the prevalence of law and justice and the stern principles of his religion rather than on the sword