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Essays Examining Xenophobia by William W. Berry of Buffalo, New York
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A JOHN BROWN REVIVAL
William W. Berry
495 Connecticut Street
Buffalo, New York 14213
1300 Words
First Serial Rights
May, 2000
A John Brown Revival
"By any means necessary." I had not heard those words articulated outside over a microphone since a rally rattling the Justice Department in early May, 1971. But here it was, May 6, 2000, and Ron Daniels, Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, had just come up from New York City and pronounced them. He spoke of shared values in the mid-afternoon sun in an Adirondack mountain meadow, punctuated by huge gray boulders and the leaning grave stone of a hero. As the peaks of Marcy and Algonquin emerged from the clouds, he pictured his audience as a "family gathering."
It sure was a diverse family. Two hours earlier, as I arrived in the mist with hundreds of them at John Brown's farm after a mile's walk up from Trinity Chapel together, an innocent young white man, done up in his take on a Union uniform, knife in sheath at his side, saluted me. Before us, a troupe of teen-aged African-American women dancers quivered and stepped in the grass to resonating drum beats. Uniformed park rangers swayed to the same rhythm.
Ron called out to us all for a new abolitionism, because "the color line is still there."
He demanded a moratorium on prison construction and the abolition of the death penalty, illiteracy and the disenfranchisement of 1.4 million non-violent felony convicts. He pleaded with this family to reverse the attack on affirmative action and asked, "When will we get paid for the work we did as slaves?"
The occasion was a two-day celebration of John Brown's 200th Birthday, and Ron Daniels declared, as Ossie Davis had the night before, that "John Brown is smiling today" at this gathering put together to remember his suffering and to keep his egalitarian spirit alive.
Indeed, the Adirondack-based "grassroots freedom education project" which planned the event calls itself "JOHN BROWN LIVES!". Martha Swan, the electric, energetic (and prophetic) organizer of the group, told me earlier that morning that last year JOHN BROWN LIVES! revived a yearly birthday wreath-laying tradition begun by the Philadelphia NAACP in 1922.
Terry Noe, the serene park ranger who helped arrange the events of the past two years, and proudly pointed out to me Marcy, also known as Tahawus or Cloudsplitter, and Algonquin, said she thought the yearly pilgrimage had died out "somewhere around 1978." Swan agreed that the enormity and influence of Russell Banks' Cloudsplitter had rekindled enthusiasm for the yearly ceremony. Last year's was "kind of a dry run for this year's 200th," she recalled. She intends to carry it on into the future. She will do this to afford activists for equality the models and examples she believes they need. Sweet home grown music and singing graced all this year's events and set a palpable tone of life and reinvigoration.
At Trinity Chapel that Saturday morning, after the music, speaker Bob Albrecht, a professor at Alfred State College in western New York, had anticipated Ron Daniel's "by any means necessary" sentiments. Though his students had created perhaps thirty posters examining the varied reactions to the "Old Man's" deeds at Harper's Ferry and Pottawatomie Creek, all hanging that day in John Brown's barn, he cut to the quick.
"Why are there no John Brown High Schools or John Brown Memorial Bridges in all of New York State?" he wondered. "Why is there no John Brown postage stamp?" Then he answered himself: "America's difficulty with John Brown is, very simply, the violence." He meant, of course, "non-official" violence. The educator then implored the congregation to understand the context of John Brown's fight to the death against slavery and its sympathizers.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 permitted a bounty hunter to earn a year's wages by charging any black person found in the North with being an escaped slave and "returning" that person to the South. The person so charged had no right to answer. In 1856, southern Congressman Preston Brooks beat anti-slavery Senator Charles Sumner almost to death on the floor of the U.S. Capitol. He stopped only when his shillelagh broke. When the vote to expel Brooks from Congress failed, he resigned and was immediately re-elected. Kansas was at war over slavery and John Brown's son, Frederick, died there, Albrecht informed us.
Dr. Katherine Butler Jones, whose African-American ancestors settled in the Adirondacks, and called the place Timbucto, had just explained that in 1843, at an abolitionist meeting in Buffalo, a black minister by the name of Garnett had declared the inability of moral suasion to end slavery and publicly urged slaves to revolt, reasoning that it was better to die a martyr than live as a slave. The Garrisonians defeated the proposal by one vote.
For me, her tale revived all the old anti-war movement debates on the role of violence in the work for social change. The ups and downs began swimming in my head, reminding me that my own peace with the dilemma came only after I had been physically attacked by Federal agents and responded in kind, without thinking about it very much at all.
I almost missed Dr. Jones' revealing that Timbucto was the plan of a wealthy abolitionist, Gerritt Smith, to grant land to black men so that they would be able to vote. At the time of Smith's Adirondack land grant in 1846, black men in New York could vote only if they owned property worth at least $250. White men didn't have to own property to have the right to vote. John Brown, a shepherd and breeder and land surveyor had moved to Timbucto to assist the black settlers. Later, at the meadow outside John Brown's home, Amy Godine, a regional historian, would describe the "Dreaming of Timbucto" Exhibition, of which she is curator. It will open next Spring in the Adirondacks and "set the record straight" on the Adirondacks' African-American pioneers and the land they needed to own to vote.
Maurice Kenny, the native Mohawk poet, followed Dr. Jones to the pulpit and proceeded to lyrically and honestly equate religion, liquor and smallpox "blankets soaked in death." Adding a dose of humor, he observed that he was so excited about his reading, he had forgotten to brush his teeth.
The previous evening, thirty miles away in another church in Elizabethtown, actor Ossie Davis had engaged us all by admitting that he was so wrought-up about reading from an 1881 Frederick Douglass speech in praise of John Brown, he had forgotten to shave. Mercifully, no other performers owned up to their particular bodily omissions.
Referring to his own extensive FBI dossier, Ossie Davis remarked that "after tonight, the FBI will assign someone to John Brown. If anyone knocks on your door asking about John Brown, tell them 'John Brown lives and that he's a grand, brave and good old man.'"
Ossie Davis recited the Douglass speech and got to its heart :
The Harper's Ferry Raid, viewed alone, is an atrocity.
But it cannot be viewed alone, just as Sherman's March
cannot be viewed alone.
Shortly, the steaming crowd of 250 got to its feet in applause. They had listened in tears to folksinger Peggy Eyres' wonderful and emotional "Mary Brown's Lament," from a letter written by his wife to John Brown on November 1, 1859, the day she learned he was to be hanged. They had witnessed Frederick Douglass in the person of Ossie Davis exclaiming, "They could kill him but they could not answer him."
But for me the most moving point of the evening came a little earlier when Matt Dickerson, an Elizabethtown high school student, asked everyone a question. He wondered if John Brown had done what he did at Harper's Ferry, not then, in 1859, but at this time in this place, in a fight for those who are dispossessed in the here and now, would we execute him? Surrounded as we were in the Adirondacks by New York's proliferating prisons and its putative death row, as Martha Swan had just observed, no one in that church could have had an easy answer to that one.
-end-
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"Am I a Slave?" from Vol. 1, No. 4, Nov. 5, 1968 (Cambridge, Mass.) "Old Mole"
"AM I A SLAVE?"
by Bill Berry
MIT students by the hundreds pour into their student center--not to the fifth floor library, but to the second floor sanctuary. Instead of checking meter readings with their lab partners, they speak of how their work is being used, how they are being used. In recognition of their manipulation by a society which forces them to produce weapons of oppression, in sympathy now with soldiers like Mike O'Conner, for the first time feeling themselves oppressed, they begin to organize. And with the prod of Sanctuary, the force of respect for another human being who has given a year of his life to bring them together, they organize strongly because they organize themselves.
Now, without hecklers at the laboratory door shouting "Murderer! Slave!" there is the man inside the laboratory wondering "Am I a slave? And a murderer?", answering that he is and no longer wants to be. There, right there, is a graduate of MIT refusing a job offer from General Dynamics. Everyone hears the conversations in the laboratories. They feel the energy of indignation in the halls that were not long ago so very stale. Everyone is affected by Sanctuary.
A technician at the Instrumentation Laboratory walks into Sanctuary after lunch: "Just wanted to see what was going on." Mike says he would like to see technicians working on developing air pollution control and high speed ground transportation rather than improving Polaris missiles; that is one reason why he is here. The technician: "Yeah. He's right. But what am I going to do about it?" Mike: "Look at me." The technician is not really committed to radical change or anything even approaching that. But still, even if just in the back of his mind, he's aware that someone thinks that what he is doing is wrong, maybe even evil. He knows that kid up there on the platform is going to spend a year longer behind bars because he thinks something is wrong and wants to change it. Perhaps he's a bit pissed that he, a good technician, can't work on the projects he knows to be better for everyone. Maybe he's saying something to his buddies back at the lab, to his wife and kids.
An MIT second year graduate student in Electrical Engineering, a research assistant, comes to Sanctuary. Not once during his four undergraduate years at MIT did anyone see him leave his dorm room except for classes and meals. There are very few people who have ever heard him say a word. Nervously, he edges up to a discussion group and sits down. The discussion is among students who have decided to find out just what MIT's defense contracts are; the people in the group are actually working on these projects. This has never happened before. Our loner speaks: "I'm a little worried about the work I've been doing." He describes it; someone says it's probably a guidance system for satellite-launched missiles. An hour later--it's 12 midnight--he walks out the door, still alone, but obviously committed to do something other than what he's been doing. Someone notices and remarks, "It's too bad he isn't spending the night." At 12:30, though, he is seen back at Sanctuary--this time with a pillow and blanket under his arm.
An MIT senior in Electrical Engineering, from Southeast Asia, has just returned from talking with a group trying to build a liasion with other campuses to communicate the MIT experience. He is running wildly, ecstatically, around the crowded second floor, snapping pictures of everyone and everything. He stops to chat with another senior who lived in the same dorm with him freshman year, to whom he has never said more than hello.
"Isn't this amazing? So many good shots. Going to put them in a book about Sanctuary. Unbelievable!"
"Yeah. It's good. Everyone's sleeping on the floor together. Never thought I'd see that here. Actually worrying about what they're doing and how they're doing it, not just doing."
"Remember freshman year? I tried to tell everybody that that war's no good. Nobody'd listen to me. Now look at this. It's unbelievable. Makes me very happy."
"Me too."
Security lookouts patrol MIT's environs with walkie-talkies, and a boat with ham radio cruises the Charles on the lookout for Feds. It's 6 a.m. on the security balcony, and three electronics hacks are doing incredibly strange and complex things to the wiring system of the Sala de Puerto Rico. They have been working through the night, and have set up seven or eight separate telephone and walkie-talkie systems to insure that Mike and everyone else will have some kind of warning if the police come. They are a bit flaky from little sleep and much work, and mutter about electrical ways of keeping "them" out; yet from them comes an air of seriousness, recognition of Mike's courageous stand, willingness to do what they know best to make it more of a success. The hippies are impressed, though bewildered. They pat them on their backs and get to know them.
On the front steps, a few hours after midnight, a very strange-talking, stranger-looking member of the Living Theatre tells a crew-cut ROTC cadet why we're in Viet Nam. They actually talk with each other.
Another electrical engineering student, a Goldwaterman, finds out what the Old Right and New Left have in common, is impressed, and falls asleep on the marble floor under the steps to the third floor. The next day, after listening to the Maryknoll priest, and finding out why the United Fruit Company, the U.S. Marines, Allen Dulles and the CIA insist that we call Guatemala a "banana republic," he applauds the Guatemalan peasants' efforts to claim the land and standard of living which they have a right to, sees that the only way they can do this is through united action and common ownership.
It's bust-scare time, and the Sala is packed with people sitting close together. An MIT professor, whose wife and children are home asleep because it's 4:30 a.m., intentionally sits in the line that the Feds would take in getting to Mike. Most of his students don't know that he was arrested in Alabama for civil rights work in the early 1960's; since then he has been telling them not to let political activity interfere with their reading of the text. But apparently he has found some new cause for hope because he has been at the Sanctuary since it started. Hit in the face with Mike's irrevocable and very dangerous commitment, he has made one of his own.
The bikers are at the security desk, saying that they are there so Mike can say what he has to say. One of them writes a moving speech telling how he knows things have to be changed. Students and hippies, puzzled, immediately label them "friendly." After the rivet-embroidered denims have been around for four or five days, have become a part of the community, people find out that they are, indeed, friendly.
Finally, again and again, there is Mike. He sees what is going on and is glad he has come. He continually states that the people of MIT and Boston are doing him a favor; those around him see what he has done for them. Mike looks and sees that his act of defiance has been validated; those around him see that act as a lesson in action. The tension between these views is called rapport; its result is a mutual respect and an inspired organization.
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Extra Essays Examining Xenophobia
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