John Browns Place in Niagara Movement Iconography

1
John Browns Place in Niagara Movement
Iconography

• Scot French
• Associate Professor
• University of Virginia

2

• Johns Browns central place in Niagara Movement
  iconography is well known to activists and
  scholars.
• The Niagara Movement Address to the Nation,
  penned by W.E.B. Du Bois and enthusiastically
  approved by the delegates to August 1906
  convention in Harpers Ferry, concluded with a
  stirring tribute to Brown and the principles for
  which he stood.

3
Niagara Movement Harpers Ferry, West Virginia,
Aug. 1906
We do not believe in violence, neither in the
despised violence of the raid nor the lauded
violence of the soldier, nor the barbarous
violence of the mob, but we do believe in John
Brown, in that incarnate spirit of justice, that
hatred of a lie, that willingness to sacrifice
money, reputation, and life itself on the altar
of right. And here, on the scene of John Browns
martyrdom we reconsecrate ourselves, our honor,
our property to the final emancipation of the
race which John Brown died to make free.
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Niagara Movement Address
to the Nation, second annual meeting of the
Niagara Movement, August 16, 1906, Harpers Ferry,
West Virginia
4

• The question I will put to you today is simple
• What were W.E.B. Du Bois and his fellow black
  activists thinking when they chose to honor John
  Brown, a white man, as the spiritual leader of
  their movement?

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• Du Bois and his fellow activists were hardly
  naïve. They knew that their choice of Harpers
  Ferry as the locus of the convention and Brown as
  their symbol would challenge the conservative,
  reconciliationist politics of the day.

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• My talk today will both acknowledge and expand
  upon the pioneering work of previous historians
  most notably Benjamin Quarles who have sought
  to understand Browns enduring appeal within the
  context of anti-slavery/anti-racist political
  activity.

7
Any study of John Browns place in African
American history and memory must begin with
Benjamin Quarless two pioneering bookson the
subject Blacks on John Brown (1972)and
Allies for Freedom (1974)
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• For them as for so many black leaders before
  and since Harpers Ferry was hallowed ground.
  Frederick Douglass had delivered an oration there
  in 1881

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• Q Why not pay tribute to the six or seven
  African-Americans (out of twenty-two in all) who
  followed Brown into battle and, with one
  exception, sacrificed their lives to the cause?

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Shields Green
Osborne P. Anderson
Dangerfield Newby
John A. Copeland
Lewis S. Leary

• Why not honor the memories of Osborne P.
  Anderson, Shields Green, Dangerfield Newby,John
  A. Copeland, Lewis Leary, John Anderson, and
  Jeremiah Anderson the seven Negro raiders
  singled out by Du Bois in his later (1909)
  biography of John Brown?

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• A It was Browns leadership, no less than his
  sacrifice, that Du Bois admired. Brown was the
  magnetic force that drew these 22 men of diverse
  backgrounds 7 of them black, 15 white --
  together in common purpose.
• Through him they had come to hate slavery, and
  for him and what he believed, they were willing
  to risk their lives. They themselves had
  convictions on slavery and other matters, but
  John Brown narrowed down their dreaming to one
  intense deed.
• Du Bois, John Brown A Biography, 1909

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• Q Why not dedicate the Niagara Movement to the
  spirit (if not the deeds) of Nat Turner, a black
  abolitionist icon hailed by some as the first
  John Brown?

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• Good question. Du Bois had long considered Turner
  one of the great men of American history,
  worthy of far greater scholarly attention than he
  had received. His doctoral work at Harvard, he
  recalled, began with a bibliography of Nat
  Turner and ended with a history of the
  suppression of the African slave trade to
  America.

14

• In 1904, Du Bois proposed to write a biography
  of Nat Turner for the American Crisis
  Biographies series, a twenty-five volume
  history of the causes, the course, and the
  consequences of the Civil War.

Around him would center the slave trade, foreign
internal, Negro insurrections from Toussaint
down to John Brown, the beginnings of the
Underground railroad, the beginning of abolition,
the movements of the free Negroes of the North
the whole plantation economy which was changing
critically in the thirties, and the general
subjective Negro point of view of the system of
slavery. Du Bois to Ellis Oberholtzer, Jan. 30,
1904
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Asked by his (white) editor if Turner could be
made to appear as anything more than a deluded
prophet who led a little band of men armed with
scythes and broad axes, Du Bois replied

• In my opinion no single man before 1850 had a
  greater influence on Southern legislation
  feeling than Nat Turner and in the North it
  disfranchised the Negroes of Penn. strengthened
  the black laws. There is abundant material for
  his life times.
• Du Bois to Oberholtzer, n.d., 1904

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• So, the question remains Why not dedicate the
  Niagara Movement to the spirit of Nat Turner,
  whose remarkable uprising in 1831 convinced Brown
  that the enslaved multitudes to the South given
  arms, opportunity, and leadership would risk
  their lives to take their freedom.

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• A Because Turner represented an attitude of
  revolt and revenge that Du Bois explicitly
  rejected as anachronistic in the
  post-emancipation era and ill-suited to the
  African-American struggle for equal rights in the
  early twentieth-century.

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• How do we know that Du Bois viewed the rebellious
  slave as a figure to be admired but not emulated
  in the 20th century?
• In his 1901 essay on The Evolution of Negro
  Leadership, published in The Souls of Black
  Folk, Du Bois observed that the attitudes of an
  imprisoned or oppressed group could take three
  main forms
• Revolt and Revenge (Turner)
• Adjustment and Assimilation (Douglass)
• Accommodation (Washington)
• Du Bois explicitly rejected what he called the
  old ideas of revolt and revenge, symbolized by
  Turner, and embraced instead the
  interracialist/integrationist ideal of the
  Northern abolitionists, personified by Frederick
  Douglass.
• Du Bois viewed the emigrationists not the
  radicals agitating for full civil and political
  rights as the modern-day heirs to the attitude
  of revolt and revenge.

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• In the end, Du Bois was persuaded to write a
  biography of the far better known figure of John
  Brown instead.