Harpers Ferry Black Heritage Walking Tour

Most interpretive histories of Harpers Ferry focus on the John Brown Raid, the Federal Armory, and the Civil War. Lesser known, are the important legacies of the African American community, the Niagara Movement and Storer College.

This tour focuses on the working class and emerging middle-class African Americans who lived in the upper town of Harpers Ferry — and connects them and their significance with the Harpers Ferry of today. Through their struggles and perseverance, Harpers Ferry evolved into a place of which Frederick Douglass said, “The people of Harper’s Ferry have made wondrous progress in their ideas of freedom, of thought and of speech. The abolition of slavery has not merely emancipated the Negro, but liberated the whites.”

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