To assist the free black settlement called "Timmbucto," abolitionist John Brown moved his family to North Elba (Lake Placid), NY in 1849 and six years later constructed their home.
The John Brown farm is located two miles east of Lake Placid, on the John Brown Rd.
CLICK HERE to download the 150th Commemoration events PDF (Adobe Acrobat Reader required)
Call for 100 Conferences to End Slavery
ANTI-SLAVERY CALL HONORS BLACK RAIDERS IN HARPERS FERRY
December 16, 2009. Lake Placid, NY. As the sun rises over New York’s highest snow-capped mountains where abolitionist John Brown is buried, the sacrifice made by fellow Harpers Ferry raiders John A. Copeland and Shields Green will be remembered on Wednesday, December 16, with a call for 100 Anti-Slavery Conventions around New York State.
Copeland and Green were executed by the state of Virginia 150 years ago on this date for their role in John Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Copeland, who was born a free black, was a twenty-five year-old student at Oberlin College in Ohio when he decided to join Brown’s small band of men. In a letter to his family penned the morning he gave his life to free the slave, he regrets not his death so much as “such an unjust institution [as slavery] should exist as the one which demands my life.”
Shields Green, born in slavery in South Carolina, first met Brown in the Rochester, NY, home of Frederick Douglass and voluntarily went to help Brown execute his Harpers Ferry plan. Described by Douglass as a man whose “courage and self respect made him quite a dignified character”, Green reportedly could have escaped capture in the October 1859 raid.
Instead, Green returned to the fray, was captured and, along with Copeland, was indicted, tried and convicted along with Brown for treason against the State of Virginia. Green and Copeland hanged from the gallows two weeks after Brown was executed on December 2, 1859.
Borrowing a chapter from their 19th century abolitionist forebears, the freedom education project John Brown Lives! and organizers of the recently completed John Brown Coming Home 150th Commemoration in Lake Placid, NY are issuing a call for 100 Anti-Slavery Conventions to be held throughout New York to combat global slavery and human trafficking that still exists in the 21st century.
More than 27 million people are held in slavery today, in nearly every country of the planet, including the United States. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, roughly 55,000 cases of slavery have been reported in the U.S. New York State numbers among the top 4 states where slavery is a reality today.
“Despite these shocking numbers and the laws that prohibit it, modern day slavery is a largely invisible and under-reported crime that goes unpunished,” said Martha Swan, director of John Brown Lives! “Following in the footsteps of our abolitionist forebears, from Buffalo to Brooklyn, from Lake Placid to Long Island, we seek to transform ignorance into awareness and compassionate action over the course of the next year.”
“In this highly technological era, ‘conventions’ may take many forms, from on-line chat rooms and Facebook encounters to ‘old-fashioned’ sermons from the pulpit, lessons in a Social Studies classroom, town hall debates, tent revivals, and more,” said Naj Wikoff, coordinator of John Brown Coming Home.
“We just need to get creative and to get active,” said Swan. “New York abolitionists were leaders in the antebellum movement to end chattel slavery in the 1800s. Through 100 Anti-Slavery Conventions across the state in 2010, we aim to reclaim that mantle and join with others worldwide who are working to dismantle slavery, in all its forms and everywhere it exists, today.”
“What a wonderful way to remember my great-great-great uncle”, said Brenda Pitts, one of Copeland’s descendents who lives in Indiana. “He would be pleased that we are carrying on the work that he and Shields Green sacrificed their lives to do.”
For more information, contact: johnbrownlives@westelcom.com
Welcome to John Brown Coming Home, the 150th anniversary commemoration of abolitionist John Brown’s return to and burial at his farm in North Elba, NY following his death in Harper’s Ferry.
At 11:45 a.m. December 8th the 150th Commemoration of John Brown concluded at his grave site in Lake Placid, NY with his great, great, grand daughter Alice Keesey Mecoy placing in his grave soil taken earlier in the fall from Mary Brown's grave at the Madronia Cemetary in Saratoga, CA while at the same time her father Paul Keesey placed soil from John Brown's grave in hers. Immediately following, while Alice remained kneeled on a pad next to the lightly snow covered grave, church bells across Lake Placid began to ring has they had 150 years earlier.
Earlier Greg Artzner, part of the acting - singing duo known as Mapie, read the prayer given by the Reverend Joshua Reynolds and Naj Wikoff, coordinator of the Lake Placid-North Elba program, read the words given by famed orator and member of Boston's Anti-Slavery Society Wendell Phillips.
A coffin, which had lain in the Farm House over night after arriving to the Farm by a horse drawn wagon, had been carried out and lain on the gave. Following a moment of silence the Reverend Brock Baker of St. Eustace Episcopal Church in Lake Placid gave the blessing and Artzner sang Brown's favorite hymn Blow Ye Trumpets Blow.
This simple service culminated a series of events that included people from Lake Placid participating in the concluding events in Charles Town, WV - the symbolic shift from his execution to the journey home - a journey that in many ways has yet to be completed as slavery still exists in the world.
In Lake Placid the results of an artist-in-residency program held in partnership with six area public schools was showcased; a remarkable exploration of slavery and racism through film was present by SUNY Plattsburg professor J.W Wiley; a standing room only symposium was held on Saturday December 5 that featured presentations by Cornell professor Margaret Washington, historian Louis DeCaro, Jr., president of Free the Slaves Kevin Bales and activist and former slave Maria Suarez; a panel led by author Russell Banks and included along with Washington, Mecoy, DeCaro and Wiley, C.O.R.E. executive Director George Holmes and Bernardine Dohrn, director of the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University.
This symposium was followed by a wreath laying out at the Farm organized by Bob Bullock, the director of the New York State Archives Partnership Trust and led by Roy Innis, president of C.O.R.E. and featuring John Brown's final speech given in the Charles Town Courthouse read by Natalie Ross, 15, along with her own words on behalf of future generations.
Other events included on Sunday the 6th a reading from his novel Cloudsplitter by author Russell Banks and a presentation by Don Papson on aspects of the Underground Railroad held at the Heritage Center in Westport, NY; the arrival of John Brown's cortege into Elizabethtown, NY, a candlelit procession to the Essex County Court House where he body was Laid in Sate 150 years ago; a dramatic reading and musical performance - an artistic rendering of John Brown's life held at the Old Stone Church; and a reception at the Deer's Head Inn where mary Brown and her party stayed.
On Monday morning the Town Supervisors of Elizabethtown, Keene, North Elba and Westport carried the coffin out of the Court House and placed it on a wagon that would take it home to Lake Placid and the journey's end.
"Even as his body was shipped northward to its final resting place in New York's Adirondacks, a perennial contest over the meaning of his life and death in the collective memory of the nation was only beginning."-- Louis A. DeCaro Jr.
"Did John Brown fail? John Brown began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free republic. His zeal in the cause for my race was far greater than mine. I could live for the slave, but he could die for him."-- Frederick Douglas
"He had the courage to face his country herself when she was in the wrong."-- Henry David Thoreau
