Boston ? Deval Patrick, the second black in U.S. history to be elected governor, was sworn in Thursday, taking the oath of office with his hand on a Bible that was given to John Quincy Adams by slaves he helped free in the Amistad affair.

“I am descended from people once forbidden their most basic and fundamental freedoms, a people desperate for hope and willing to fight for it – and so are you,” the 50-year-old Democrat said from the Statehouse steps to a crowd of thousands that stretched into Boston Common.

Patrick borrowed the Bible from the Adams National Historic Park in Quincy for the ceremony. Adams, the nation’s sixth president, received it from Africans on the slave ship Amistad after he won their freedom in 1841 in a celebrated legal case.