What to America is John Brown?

[marmar]

What to America is John Brown?
Maybe a lesson about people who refuse to learn from the instructive dissent of social movements

By AILISH HOPPER
PUBLISHED DECEMBER 2, 2023 5:45AM (EST)


(Salon) On December 2, 1859, the United States carried out its first execution of a prisoner convicted of treason: a white man who challenged slavery. Today, America still can’t imagine a nation of white people who dissent from white supremacy. That's partly because we can't imagine healthy dissent.

As a professor of peace and conflict, I am often teased about my support for the 19th-century militant John Brown. Peace Studies involves studying alternatives to violence, and certainly not the advocacy of violence, so I admit that Brown is a difficult figure to square with my work facilitating multi-partisan and multi-ethnic collaborations. Brown, who was hanged in 1859 for raiding a federal armory in Harpers Ferry, VA, aiming to support enslaved people’s escape to freedom, had also clashed with pro-slavery groups during the battles known as “Bleeding Kansas,” including an alleged midnight ambush and slaughter of five pro-slavery leaders.

After decades of giving speeches arguing against slavery, and leading conversations and appeals to the wealthy and powerful, Brown was impatient with this pacifist approach, which insisted on “moral suasion,” as mainstream abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison called it — what we'd now call “changing hearts and minds” or “changing the narrative.”

....(snip)....

What, to America, is John Brown? Maybe a lesson about people who refuse to learn from the instructive dissent of social movements, whatever “side” they’re on. But the fact that there are only three statues of Brown in the country tells us something of a particular shame attached to his legacy. I don’t think the shame is for his violence. I think it’s for our white history of coordinated repression, instead of the moral courage needed to finally create a just, multi-ethnic democracy. ................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2023/12/02/what-to-america-is-john-brown/

[MuseRider]

1. Thanks for posting this.

I will get to it after my morning chores are done.

When he was here in Kansas he was functioning mostly close to where I live. I have seen letters from Mr. Brown mentioning my family who rode with him while he was here. I have always been proud of that and of what my family was and did back then for our Free State.

[Chainfire]

2. John Brown was found guilty of treason, murder and insurrection.

He is glorified because he supported abolition, which was admirable and courageous at that time, but he was just another crazy religious zealot.

[Qutzupalotl]

3. Brown was also honored in this instrumental song:

[GreenWave]

4. Pete Seeger: John Brown's body

[Uncle Joe]

5. I view John Brown as righteous insanity

under the theory that insanely unjust situations that if not corrected for a long enough period of time create a righteous insane counter force.

This dynamic can happen anywhere.

Thanks for the thread marmar