John Brown

When my mother came to America in 1923 with her aunt and uncle, who had adopted her when she was a month old, they found a place to live on Riverside Avenue in Torrington, Connecticut. Four years later, when her mother was able to leave Germany, still reeling from the First World War, and join them, she moved back in with her - right next door on Riverside Avenue.

My father, too, grew up in Torrington, met and married my mother there and my passport tells the world that Torrington, Connecticut, is my birthplace.

Now if you walk from their houses up Riverside Avenue to where it crosses Migeon Avenue and becomes Norfolk Road, right by Dunkin Donuts, and keep walking another couple of miles to Hodges Hill Road and turn up University Avenue, you’ll come to John Brown Road. Or, you can also do all this in about seven minutes in a car, of course.

I realize there is probably not a human being on the planet, besides myself, for whom this walk, or seven-minute car ride, would be of any great interest. But it was only yesterday that I learned that John Brown (whose body lies ‘a-moulderin’ in the grave’), contemporary of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas, and first American ever to be executed for treason (for leading the raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia that many call the flashpoint that started the Civil War,) was born in a house on that road that now bears his name, one hundred forty years and five days before me, in Torrington, Connecticut. And my interest in Black Lives Matter and the newfound awareness that white people in America are developing about how little they know of the lives of black Americans has suddenly taken on a personal connection.

I knew, of course, that Winsted, the town where I grew up, nine miles north of Torrington, because my father was able to buy a house there in 1938 for $2800, was also the birthplace of Ralph Nader. I’ve boasted that connection all my life and brought friends there only recently to visit Nader’s Tort Museum, now the major attraction of the town. But nobody. Not my parents, not my high school history teacher, nobody ever told me that I shared a birthplace with John Brown, the abolitionist. That history was simply buried. In the spirit of the title of that wonderful book by James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, I call this a lie by omission.

Much as I’d like to join the voices of folk calling for America to heal its wounds and reach out to people on the other side of the culture war divide, I’m finding it easier to resent the white backlash to the election of Barack Obama. Trump got elected, we are told, because too many white folk felt that black Americans and White progressive urban elites were leaving them in the dust as the pendulum was beginning to swing, at long last, toward greater justice and equality for the racially disenfranchised. As carefully as I’m inclined to listen to Sam Harris, and the other “Four Horsemen of Atheism,” and the arguments they present as leading clear-thinking intellectuals of the modern day, I was taken back the other day as I heard Harris declare that he couldn’t get behind the Black Lives Matter movement because they were “overdoing” it. We need to be ruthlessly objective and recognize that the movement is exaggerating the negatives and failing to see the racial progress that has taken place in recent years, Harris argues.

Yes, yes, yes, I want to say. All true. But what I think Harris underestimates is the need for a radical change in white attitudes. And changes, much as I’d like to support Harris’s endorsement of reason as “the only way,” I’m not convinced we can reach white supremacists and the folks they manipulate through fear, without appealing to our common humanity. Call it guilt, if you like, or shame, or an innate sense of fair play. A terrible historical disaster happened when the Civil War ended and the white supremacists decided the south will rise again, and even decent whites embraced the view that the slaves and their descendants might eventually find justice, but they’d do it at the pace white Americans wanted to go, with time measured not in years but in decades.

What’s happening today, thanks to the speed of change brought about by ubiquitous cell phone coverage of injustice and the power of the internet to cover news events in real time, is that we are getting to see up close what history has long covered up. And that means we can now revisit the question of just how aggressively injustice should be fought. Do we wait for the older generation of racists, fascists, Nazis to die off and a new generation without historical memory to be born? Or do we speed up the process of remembrance? Do we continue to define John Brown as a traitor and a terrorist, as we did during the backlash years from around the turn of the 20th century until the 70s, following the Civil Rights movement? Or do we replace that narrative with one in which he was on the right side of history?

That’s where I’m coming down. On the view that we have been told the wrong story. America is fighting a culture war today, between those insisting that truth matters, on the one hand, and those getting behind Donald Trump and urging we bring back the good old days of white ignorance, when we had no need to speed up the need for change, that things were working themselves out in their own good time, and black men and women could jolly well wait another generation or two and things would get better on their own. Especially if black people would stop taking drugs and committing so much of the crime and playing the victim and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

I have to ask myself whether my sudden awareness of John Brown is nothing more than a function of my realization that we share a birthplace, an awareness that fits the current narrative of a too-slow pace of change in American race relations? Or whether I should be grateful for the impetus to get on this bandwagon? It’s no trivial question. Even Frederick Douglas questioned John Brown’s tactics. I live now in Berkeley/Oakland, where the Black Panthers took up that question in the 60s, scaring the middle class folk of America with their argument that blacks needed guns. John Brown, according to an article in The New York Daily Herald of October 21, 1859, [cited in a Wikipedia article on John Brown], insisted that “moral suasion is hopeless” and that violence is necessary if slavery was to be eliminated in America, a claim borne out by the Civil War. Listen to his defense, reenacted here.

It’s one of those eternal dilemmas of ethics. How much cruelty and injustice do you put up with before you leave moral suasion behind and take up arms, or commit to violence. People of every generation make that decision, and we are faced with it today, as Black Lives Matter and other organizations cry “enough” over police brutality, while both peace-loving folk as well as the retrograde Trump administration supporters bring out the words “treason” and “terrorist” to describe the folks in the street, some of them violent. One side reminds us of Chamberlin and the Munich Pact, which gave the OK for Hitler to take Czechoslovakia and opened the door to the invasions of Poland and France. The other side tries to convince us any reference to Hitler and to fascism is bombastic overreach, and shows us we are fools for making the comparison.

I can't be sure that my inclination to view the folk urging us to continue to “reach across the aisle” as foolish appeasers will bear out in the long run, but that's definitely how it looks from here. The right-wing has become a truth-denying self-serving force for whom self-interest has taken precedence over a commitment to traditional American two-party democracy.

I am struck with a line attributed to Frederick Douglas, who worried initially that Brown was going too far.  Speaking of John Brown after his execution, though, Douglas said, “His zeal in the cause of my race was far greater than mine—it was as the burning sun to my taper light—mine was bounded by time, his stretched away to the boundless shores of eternity. I could live for the slave, but he could die for him."

A terrorist is a terrorist only if they are not fighting for something you take to be a life-or-death cause.

I think the time is way past due that we stopped apologizing for fighting the Civil War, that we admit we waited far too long as it was to rid the nation of slavery, and that to call John Brown a terrorist is to put yourself on the wrong side of history.

The so-called culture war now being waged in America should not be weakened by an appeal to “reach across the aisle.”  Well-intentioned as the peacemakers and compromisers may be, such timidity in the face of justice way too long delayed is not just a foolish attempt to hold back modernity. It’s a tragic failure to recognize we are at a moment when we have the opportunity to do the right thing. The founding fathers worked around the genocide of the North American Indian and wrote a Constitution which gave the white people of the southern half of the nation the right to own men and women of African origin. Why are we still arguing about further delays in fixing that?

We’re gradually getting rid of the monuments to Confederate generals. Little by little the states of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi are taking - or have taken - the Dixie stars-and-bars out of their state flags. The effort to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill in place of Andrew Jackson has been delayed by Donald Trump and his Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin. But there is hope these guys won’t be around forever. 

In schools around America, textbooks are beginning to add alongside historical American heroes such as Betsy Ross and Helen Keller (not to mention all the men) the likes of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, and the tales of their contribution to the elimination of slavery.

It would be really OK with me if they would also give greater recognition to the name of John Brown of Torrington, Connecticut.