Happy Birthday to white abolitionist John Brown (b. May 9, 1800, in Torrington, CT), who organized and led an uprising of enslaved people that raided the Harpers Ferry federal armory in October 1859. He was fiercely committed to ending slavery by any means necessary. The great scholar W. E. B. Du Bois poignantly reflects on how Brown should be remembered, writing that “John Brown loved his neighbor as himself. He could not endure therefore to see his neighbor, poor, unfortunate, or oppressed. This natural sympathy was strengthened by a saturation in Hebrew religion which stressed the personal responsibility of every human soul to a just God. To this religion of equality and sympathy with misfortune, was added the strong influence of the social doctrines of the French Revolution with its emphasis on freedom and power in political life. And on all this was built John Brown’s own inchoate but growing belief in a more just and a more equal distribution of property. From this he concluded,—and acted on that conclusion—that all men are created free and equal, and that the cost of liberty is the price of repression.”
Citations: W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, John Brown (Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Company, 1909), 374-375, https://archive.org/details/johnbrown00dubo; Augustus Washington, “John Brown,” photograph (location unknown, c. 1846-47), collection of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery (Washington, D.C.), public domain, https://www.si.edu/object/john-brown:npg_NPG.96.123.
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