Five figures, taken from the seal itself.
The tree is the household. It is drawn with its roots out in the open because a family should know exactly what it stands on. Roots do their work in bad weather. That is what they are for.
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.”
FREDERICK DOUGLASS · 1857
A lit lantern hangs in the branches. On the roads north out of slavery, a lamp burning in a window marked a safe house. It means the same thing here. The light is not decoration. It is a standing offer.
“There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven.”
HARRIET TUBMAN
Above everything sits the star people steered by when every road was hostile. It stands for direction, not destination. You hold to it for as long as the journey takes, and you do not trade it away when the weather turns.
“Right is of no sex. Truth is of no color. God is the Father of us all, and we are all brethren.”
THE NORTH STAR
A chain runs the whole border of the seal, and one link in it is snapped open. One is enough. A chain that has been broken once can be broken again, anywhere, by anyone willing to do the work.
“I hear the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are today rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them.”
FREDERICK DOUGLASS · JULY 4, 1852
Libertas. Iustitia. Solidaritas. Freedom, justice, solidarity, and the order matters. Freedom without justice is just privilege. Justice without solidarity is just paperwork.
“I pity the poor in bondage that have none to help them; that is why I am here. It is my sympathy with the oppressed and the wronged, that are as good as you, and as precious in the sight of God.”
JOHN BROWN · OCTOBER 1859Where the mottoes come from.
The line comes from the letter to the Hebrews, and in the years before the Civil War it was a watchword among American abolitionists. John Brown carried it into the courtroom that sentenced him, in the same breath as the golden rule:
“It teaches me, further, to remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them. I endeavored to act up to that instruction.”
JOHN BROWNThis family keeps both together, the way he did. Treat others as your own. Remember the ones still bound.
People are never property. Not by chain, not by contract, not by debt.
The door opens for the person who needs it, and the lamp in the window is lit on purpose.
Work with your hands, own your hours, and do to another as you would have done to yourself.
And when what is legal and what is right disagree, this house already knows which one it answers to.