Volume 3, No. 3 (Winter 2000) -- Black History Month Issue

When John Brown was executed for the crimes of murder, slave insurrection and treason against the state of Virginia on December 2, 1859, African Americans declared it "Martyr Day." In New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Detroit, African American owned businesses closed for the day. African American men walked down the streets of these cities wearing black armbands. Throughout the urban North, African American families and community leaders held vigils of prayer and fasting in their churches. Others convened in meeting halls and sent financial donations to the widow and family of John Brown.

Not only did John Brown sacrifice his life to bring down the nation's nefarious system of chattel slavery, but unlike most white abolitionists, he devoted a great deal of his adult life to fostering the practice of racial equality. During the 1830s, he and his family took up residence in a predominantly African American community where he earned a reputation for treating everyone as his peers. Moreover, he frequently demonstrated a strong intolerance for acts of racial discrimination, such as those he encountered when traveling with his African American colleagues. By the time he began to take up arms against the forces of chattel slavery in Kansas, John Brown had developed allies and friends among many African American leaders, of whom Frederick Douglass, his long-term friend, was the closest.

Consequently, the execution of John Brown evoked a massive public reaction of sorrow and praise from Black America. At a John Brown memorial program in Cleveland, Ohio, Charles Langston, an African American teacher and civil rights activist who would later move to Kansas and marry the widow of one of the participants in the Harper's Ferry raid, announced "I never thought that I should ever join in doing honor to or mourning any American white man." Indeed, never before had the death of a white person galvanized the national African American community as did John Brown's.

Image 2: (l to r): Tim Rues, curator of Constitution Hall in Lecompton, U.S. Senator Sam Brownback and Karl Gridley, historian, tour the site of "Battle of Blackjack," the first battle between Free and Slave states.