Jefferson Morley: From Abolitionism to OccupyDC

Jefferson Morley is the Washington editor of Salon and author of the forthcoming book, Snow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835 (Nan Talese/Doubleday).

Before there was  Martin Luther King, there was John Francis Cook. He was Washington’s first civil rights leader, a preacher, and teacher who founded of the 15th Street Presbyterian Church, which originally stood in the place now known McPherson Square, today the home of the OccupyDC camp.

And just as some once hoped to rid the capital of Cook, so some wish to get rid of his spiritual descendants camped on 15th Street. Rep. Right-wing bloggers revile them. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House committee with responsibility for the District, calls them “lawbreakers,” and wants them evicted. Mayor Vincent Gray wants them removed because they are allegedly unsanitary, a charge the occupiers reject.

Things change perhaps less than we think. When John Cook first held forth on 15th Street in the 1830s and 1840s Washington was the capital of a slaveholding republic dominated by congressmen who (like their political descendants today) defended an extreme version of property rights. Cook not only  denounced the 1% of the day–those who  insisted on the white man’s right to own property in people. He also taught young people not to accept the injustices inherent in the status quo. He too was reviled.

Cook lived and worked in the neighborhood of what would become McPherson Square.  Born into slavery in Fredericksburg, Virginia, he came to capital in 1826 when his aunt, Lethe Tanner, a free woman of color who ran a vegetable stand near the White House, bought his freedom. At eighteen years of age, he enrolled in John Prout’s school for black children near the corner of Fourteenth and H streets. As he learned to read and write, his capacious intelligence became evident to all. Before long, he obtained a job in the government’s Land Office on Seventh Street where his “indefatigable application” to learning was “a matter of astonishment” to the white man who hired him. When Prout had to leave town for aiding a runaway slave, Cook quit his government job and took over as the school’s headmaster....