r class. Du bois then proceeded to describe the essential elements of browns thinking and planning in his crusade against slavery.A speaker closed with the assertion that browns real contribution to his times was his effort to contain evil. Du bois ended by saying of the high commitment, just as brown sacrificed himself, he said, so must he and his listeners sacrificed our work, our money, and our positions, in order to beat back the evil of the world. The applause lasted for a long time.In 1881 or 1882 the most prominent blacks of his day, george Washington Williams, then working on a lengthy history of negra Americans, looked for information on john brown from mrs. George l. sterns, widow of a brown benefactor. In her long letter to reply, mrs sterns related for the first time the manner in which john brown had come to write a brief account of his boyhood. She told a story that brown, while a visitor at the sterns home just outside Boston in January 1857, had been asked by thirteen-year-old hennery to tell him what sort of a boy he had been.When brown was thirteen, he and a clave became friends. The black boy was about his own age and, added brown, was fully his equal, if not more. The slave own treated brown in the kindest and most treatment and was heartless and cruel to the slave boy. This led brown to much sober reflection on the wretched, hopeless condition of the parentless slave children, raising a question in his mind as to whether they had a father even in god.He first verifiable reference by brown to blacks came late in 1832 in a long letter to his brother, Frederick. Writing from Randolph Township in northwestern Pennsylvania, where ha server as postmaster, the thirty-four-year-old brown said that he had been tiring to devise ways to help those in bondage.Browns letter also spoke of a long-held interest he had in opening a school for blacks, expressing the opinion that in Randolph there would be no strong opinion that in Ra...
