Remember John Brown

Wednesday, December 2, marked the 150th anniversary of the hanging of John Brown.  John Brown?   Most Americans have no idea who he was and why he was executed.  Brown was hanged for treason after his raid on the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry in 1859.

Brown’s plan was to secure the weapons at the arsenal and then distribute them to liberated slaves and thereby create a massive rebellion equal to the one in Haiti some fifty years earlier.

It’s truly sad that Americans know very little about Brown and his courageous act that was viewed as insane, and even less about the men who rode with him, including five Black men.

More than one historian has demanded that Brown be pardoned by the governor, but the same request is not made for Lewis Sheridan Leary, John Copeland, Dangerfield Newby, Shields Green, and Osborne Anderson, the five Black men among Brown’s band of 21.

If you are ever fortunate enough to travel to Oberlin, Ohio you will find the memories of the martyrs Green, Copeland and Leary enshrined there in Martin Luther King, Jr. Park.  Leary and his nephew Copeland were free men who didn’t hesitate to join Brown when they learned of his plan.  Leary’s widow would later marry Charles Langston, the brother of John Mercer Langston, the notable Reconstruction politician.  Her grandson was the poet Langston Hughes.

Shields Green, who like Copeland was hanged two weeks after Brown, came into the fold via Frederick Douglass.  When Douglass met secretly with Brown at Chambersburg, Pennsylvania prior to the raid, Green traveled with Douglass, having runaway from slavery and living temporarily with the great leader.

When Douglass turned down Brown’s request to join him in the raid, Green stepped up and immediately told Douglass that “I go with the old man.”

Dangerfield Newby, the first of the five to die when he was shot, joined Brown mainly with the purpose of liberating his wife and children held in bondage.  His quiet but determined resolve was exemplary of the Black men who had volunteered to be agents of liberation.

Osborne Anderson, a free man from Pennsylvania, was among the few survivors of the raid, and later made his way back to Chatham, Ontario where he had first encountered Brown during a recruitment trip.

In this town of abolitionists, Anderson, with the help of Mary Shadd Cary, wrote his memoir, A Voice from Harpers Ferry, providing indispensable details about the raid and the men who carried it out.  He would later serve in the Union forces during the Civil War.

And that Civil War is perhaps the most meaningful legacy of these men and Brown, who proclaimed that the land would never be purged of the sin of slavery without blood.

America has had its battle cries—Remember the Alamo, Remember the Maine, Remember Pearl Harbor, and to these we should add Remember John Brown and Black Americans in particular should honor his memory.