September 3 - On the 56th anniversary of his escape from slavery, Frederick Douglass gave an extraordinary speech dedicating the new Manassas Industrial School, which would remain open to Black students until 1959 and served as the only officially sanctioned option for post 7th grade schooling for Fairfax County's Black student population until 1954, when Luther Jackson High School opened.

The famous orator noted the historical signicance of the location of the school, saying, "Since the great and terrible battle with which its name is associated...no event has occurred here, so important in its character and influence, and so every way significant, as the event which we have this day met to inaugurate and celebrate.

"To found an educational institution for any people is worthy of notice, but to found a school, in which to instruct, improve, and develop all that is noblest and best in the souls of a deeply wronged and long neglected people, is especially worthy." (Douglass, 1894)

"The founding of this and similar schools on the soil of Virginia - a state formerly the breeder, buyer, and seller of slaves; a State so averse, in the past, to the education of colored people as to make it a crime to teach a negro to read, - is one of the best fruits of agitation of a half a century, and firm foundaton of hope for the future."

"Thirty years ago when Federal and Confederate armies met here in deadly conflict over the question of the perpetual enslavement of the Negro, who would or could have dreamed that in a single generation, such changes would be wrought in the minds of men that a school would be founded here for the mental, moral and industrial educaion of the children of this same people whose enslavement was sought even with the sword?" (Douglass, 1894)

Douglass noted gravely the growing resistance to Black education, the disenfranchisement of so many Black men who had gained political power since the Civil War, and the evident backlash against Black upward mobility. "The resistance we now meet is the proof of our progress," he said.

Frederick Douglass died less than 6 months after delivering this speech.

The Plessy v Ferguson decision in 1896 enshrined the "separate but equal" doctrine that underpinned a system of segregated education. In Virginia, however, since schools had been segregated since 1870, the Plessy decision didn't have much of an impact on the status quo.