John Brown’s Blood: A Descendant Looks at the Facts and the Fictions of the Abolitionist’s Life

John Brown's Spy tells the nearly unknown story of John E. Cook, the person John Brown trusted most with the details of his plans to capture the Harper's Ferry armory in 1859. Cook was a poet, a marksman, a boaster, a dandy, a fighter, and a womanizer—as well as a spy. In a life of only thirty years, he studied law in Connecticut, fought border ruffians in Kansas, served as an abolitionist mole in Virginia, took white hostages during the Harper's Ferry raid, and almost escaped to freedom. For ten days after the infamous raid, he was the most hunted man in America with a staggering $1,000 bounty on his head. Tracking down the unexplored circumstances of John Cook's life and disastrous end, Steven Lubet is the first to uncover the full extent of Cook's contributions to Brown's scheme. Without Cook's participation, the author contends, Brown might never have been able to launch the insurrection that sparked the Civil War. Had Cook remained true to the cause, history would have remembered him as a hero. Instead, when Cook was captured and brought to trial, he betrayed John Brown and named fellow abolitionists in a full confession that earned him a place in history's tragic pantheon of disgraced turncoats.

Lorenz Graham wrote two children’s books about the (in)famous abolitionist, John Brown—a picture book, John Brown’s Raid: A Picture History of the Attack on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (1972) and a biography for young adults, John Brown: A Cry for Freedom (1980). Both books recount a history of Brown’s life and antislavery work, situated within Brown’s African American context and recounted from a Black perspective. While Graham’s books are exceptional in their extended treatment of this historic figure for a child audience, they are not unprecedented. This essay situates Graham’s children’s biographies of Brown in the long history of Black writers’ work on him—for both adults and children. Reading Graham’s John Brown in this context shows how Graham follows familiar traditions for encountering Brown within the larger context of Black freedom struggles. Graham’s books follow a rich tradition of presenting him to Black children.

Theologizing in Black: On Africana Theological Ethics and Anthropology

We have examined the life and selected works of Phillis Wheatley from a black perspective. Since she is the only black woman who is highlighted in the Revolutionary Period, we believe that it is time to bring a more relevant interpretation to Phillis Wheatley-one that presents her as she really was in relationship to black people of her time and one that shows what she means to us now. When we began our study we felt that our responsibility as black scholars was to examine Phillis Wheatley realistically in terms of her contribution to the growth and development of black thought. This meant that the most significant question to which we had to address ourselves was: Did Phillis Wheatley do anything to sustain and perpetuate blackness, and give rise to Black people? From our perspective, everything that Blacks do must be done in the interest of black people; everything that Blacks observe must be analyzed from the point of view of Blacks; and, everything that Blacks experience must be examined within the framework of a black perspective, especially in a racist society. This perspective must be applied to the present and to the past if we are to redefine the experiences of black people in this country with any degree of significance. The perspective from which we have looked at the life and works of Phillis Wheatley was long overdue considering the fact that her life and works have not been interpreted, to any significant degree, in light of the enhancement of black thought. Her natural ability as a poetess has not been questioned because there is no doubt about the merit of her ability to write verse. But, neither have we glorified Phillis Wheatley or made a heroine out of her just because she was the first black woman to be published in the Revolutionary Period. We will present the facts in view of the awareness of black people.

In November 1969, Eldridge Cleaver’s essay “Education and Revolution” was published in The Black Scholar, a progressive journal that takes a black perspective on such issues as education, culture, and politics. Cleaver at the time was a member of the Black Panther Party, a militant revolutionary organization founded earlier in the decade. The initial goal of the Black Panthers was to promote selfdefense in the black community at a time when many urban blacks saw police forces as oppressive and racist. In time, the Black Panthers broadened their goals to include charitable work, principally by providing schoolchildren with breakfasts, and efforts to promote black self-awareness in the schools. The Black Panthers were also strong advocates of Socialism as a mode of social organization. In his essay, Cleaver articulates the Socialist goals of the Black Panthers and explains why, from his perspective, the black community has to take charge of its children’s education as a means of overthrowing an oppressive capitalist system.

Over past ten years, black scholars in field of English literature have identified a black literary tradition and developed critical strategies for studying that tradition from within black culture. And black historians have also been writing black history and American history from a black perspective. In field of history, their works include Sterling Stuckey's Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and Foundations of Black America (1987) and Mary Berry's and John Blassingame's Long Memory: The Black Experience in America (1982), and in literary criticism, Houston Baker's Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (1984) and Modernism and Harlem Renaissance (1987) and Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988). By taking an insider's view of black cultural and literary traditions, these books offer insights that cannot be achieved through more conventional means. The success of an Afrocentric perspective in these fields invites black music scholarship to move beyond standard approaches of musicology and ethnomusicology, by learning from theoretical insights of black historians and literary scholars and applying that knowledge to study of black music. For a glimpse of what existing theories of Afro-American history and letters offer to black music scholars, I will examine hypothesis of Stuckey and theory of Gates with musical implications in mind. In doing so, I will use Stuckey and Gates to read black music, Stuckey to read Gates, and Gates to read Stuckey, while recognizing that although literature, history, and music are all different things, certain aspects of black experience may be seen as common to all three. What I will propose here is a mode of inquiry that is consistent with nature of black music, that is grounded in black music, and that is more appropriate than other, existing modes for perception, study, and evaluation of black musical products. The Ring Shout: The Foundation of Afro-American Music One of central tenets of Stuckey's Slave Culture is that the ring shout was main context in which Africans recognized values common to them--the values of ancestor worship and contact, communication and teaching through storytelling and trickster expressions, and of various other symbolic devices. Those values were remarkable because, while of ancient African provenance, they were fertile seed for bloom of new forms (Stuckey 1987, 16). The shout was an early Negro holy in which the circling about in a circle is prime essential (Gordon 1981, 447). From contemporaneous descriptions of shout we learn that participants stood in a ring and began to walk around it in a shuffle, with feet keeping in contact with or close proximity to floor, and that there were jerking, hitching motions, particularly in shoulders. These movements were usually accompanied by a spiritual, sung by lead singers, based by others in group (probably with some kind of responsorial device and by hand-clapping and knee-slapping). The thud of basic rhythm was continuous, without pause or hesitation. And singing that took place in shout made use of interjections of various kinds, elisions, blue-notes, and call-and-response devices, with sound of feet against floor serving as an accompanying device. (1) The shout has been identified as an African survival by Courlander (1963). The earliest on record in United States dates from 1845 (Epstein 1977, 232), but practice in this country clearly antedates that record. As Epstein, Courlander, and numerous other scholars have shown, all ring shouts had essentially same elements, with variations manifesting themselves here and there depending on locale and other factors. From all accounts, shout was an activity in which music and dance commingled, merged, and fused to become a single distinctive cultural ritual in which slaves made music and derived their musical styles. …

M ULTICULTURALISM AND CULTURAL literacy are contemporary concerns in undergraduate sociology education (Adelman 1992; Brayfield, Adler, and Zablotsky 1990; Collins, Fischer, and MacMurray 1990; Downey and Torrecilha 1994; Dumont Jr. 1995). Collins et al. (1990:495) note that students need exposure to other perspectives to develop their awareness of social diversity. Brayfield et al. (1990:370) encourage teachers to facilitate effective learning by including the cultural referents of minorities. Downey and Torrecilha (1994:246) argue that instituting a multicultural requirement is only an initial step, that strategies are also needed to fulfill the multicultural mission. One strategy is to include research by black scholars in more courses. During the 1970s, black sociologists challenged the discipline to recognize the accomplishments of blacks, past and present (Hare 1976; Ladner 1973; Staples 1976; Watson 1976; Wilson 1976). More recently, Young and Taylor Greene (1995) use the term pedagogical reconstruction to describe a process of identifying, analyzing, and integrating research by black scholars into criminology and criminal justice curriculum. Reconstruction provides an opportunity for students to become aware of what Collins et al. (1990) describe as the many ways a given problem or situation can be approached. Clearly, research by black scholars is already included in courses, especially those that focus on blacks or minorities in general (for example, sociology of black/minority families, race and ethnic relations, sociology of minority groups). A truly multicultural sociology should include black (and other minority) perspectives in the more traditional courses as well. In this paper, I review

1. Inventing herself: examining the intersectional identities and educational leadership of Black women in the USA Sonya Douglass Horsford and Linda C. Tillman 2. This bridge called my leadership: an essay on Black women as bridge leaders in education Sonya Douglass Horsford 3. Leading through the challenge of change: African-American women principals on small school reform April L. Peters 4. The intersection of race and gender in school leadership for three Black female principals Latish Cherie Reed 5. Making the case for the outlier: researcher reflections of an African-American female deputy superintendent who decided to close the achievement gap Karen Stansberry Beard 6. When care trumps justice: the operationalization of Black feminist caring in educational leadership Lisa Bass 7. Race, gender, and leadership identity: an autoethnography of reconciliation Patrice McClellan 8. Advancing our legacy: a Black feminist perspective on the significance of mentoring for African-American women in educational leadership Cosette M. Grant 9. Inventing ourselves: an informed essay for Black female scholars in educational leadership Linda C. Tillman 10. Standing on the promises: a new generation of Black women scholars in educational leadership and beyond Judy A. Alston

Since 1976, the National Urban League has released its annual State of Black America (SOBA) report, a barometer of conditions of the African-American community in the United States. The 2008 edition of the State of Black America report is subtitled “In the Black Woman’s Voice.” As the subtitle suggests, the report provides the black female perspective of the challenges that currently confront women of color in America. With a Foreword by the esteemed Dr. Dorothy I. Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women, the 2008 State of Black America features essays from noted black female scholars, political activists, business consultants and other critical thinkers. The 2008 State of Black America presents the National Urban League’s groundbreaking Opportunity Compact, a comprehensive set of principles and policy recommendations designed to empower all Americans to be full participants in the economic and social mainstream of this nation. The Compact is not only detailed The Opportunity Compact provides the framework for the 2008 edition, with several essays addressing the recommendations set out in the Compact..

Introduction Chapter 1. The insurrection of the Blacks in St. Domingo: Remembering Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution PART I. OPENING THE CIVIL WAR OF WORDS Chapter 2. He patterned his life after the San Domingan: John Brown, Toussaint Louverture, and the Triumph of Violent Abolitionism Chapter 3. Contemplate, I beseech you, fellow-citizens, the example of St. Domingo: Abolitionist Dreams, Confederate Nightmares, and the Counterrevolution of Secession PART II. SECOND HAITIAN REVOLUTION? Chapter 4. Liberty on the Battle-field: Haiti and the Movement to Arm Black Soldiers Chapter 5. Emancipation or Insurrection: Haiti and the End of Slavery in America PART III. NATIONS WITHIN NATION Chapter 6. Many a Touissant L'Overture amongst us: Black Identity Chapter 7. A Repetition of San Domingo?: Southern White Identity Chapter 8. Do we want another San Domingo to be repeated in the South? Northern White Identity Conclusion Notes Index Acknowledgments

In November 1969, Eldridge Cleaver’s essay “Education and Revolution” was published in The Black Scholar, a progressive journal that offered a Black perspective on such issues as education, culture, and politics. Cleaver at the time was a member of the Black Panther Party, a militant revolutionary organization founded earlier in the decade. The initial goal of the Black Panthers was to promote self-defense in the Black community at a time when many urban Blacks saw police forces as oppressive and racist. In time, the Black Panthers broadened their goals to include charitable work, principally by providing schoolchildren with breakfasts, and efforts to promote Black self-awareness in the schools. The Black Panthers were also strong advocates of socialism as a mode of social organization. In his essay, Cleaver articulates the socialist goals of the Black Panthers and explains why, from his perspective, the Black community had to take charge of its children’s education as a means of overthrowing an oppressive capitalist system.

Reviewed by: John Brown’s Spy: The Adventurous Life and Tragic Confession of John E. Cook by Steven Lubet R. Blakeslee Gilpin John Brown’s Spy: The Adventurous Life and Tragic Confession of John E. Cook. Steven Lubet. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. ISBN 978-0-18049-7, 256pp., cloth, $28.00. Steven Lubet’s study of the life of John E. Cook is a revealing and distracting account of John Brown’s 1859 raid. Because the book focuses on one member of the twenty-two-man [End Page 203] army that perpetrated that infamous and ill-fated attack on southern slavery, Lubet is often following the sideshow of a many-ringed circus. Even as Brown was making history in Kansas, Harpers Ferry, and beyond, Lubet narrates Cook’s sometimes fascinating, but often extraneous, comings and goings. To his credit, Lubet’s writing is clear and informative, and he peppers his account with nice selections from the major characters, writers, and politicians of the time. Unfortunately, this book does not make a convincing case that any of the individual raiders, particularly John Cook, deserve more than “an extended magazine article” (269). Lubet’s own assessment of his protagonist is partly responsible for this dynamic; he provides a glass-half-full description of Cook as a “footloose adventurer” but soon adds that the Connecticut-born Yale dropout was also “a poet, a marksman, a boaster, a dandy, a fighter, a storyteller, and a womanizer, as well as a spy” (6). Nowhere on this list does the word “abolitionist” appear, a telling omission. After more than 150 years, Brown and his men still intrigue us as a singular group of antebellum Americans who took up arms to fight and possibly die to liberate slaves. In this context, Cook’s flash and desire for adventure do not offer much explanatory power. Lubet’s book is convincing on Cook’s boastfulness, his attraction to fancy firearms, and, to a lesser extent, his womanizing; this is surely the only book about John Brown in which readers will encounter the phrase “the couple made love” (43). But even the matter of Cook being a spy seems somewhat suspect. Given the naïve incompetence with which Brown executed the Harpers Ferry raid from start to finish, if Cook was a spy, then Brown should be called an experienced field commander or a tactical genius. To be sure, Brown sent Cook to provide reconnaissance of the town, but the manner in which Cook did so, and Brown’s less-than-inspired selection of this conspicuous fellow for the mission, underscore Brown’s delusions (a meaningful set of characteristics to explore) much more than they testify to Cook’s status or relevance to contemporary readers. Any commonly known historical narrative poses challenges to an author trying to create suspense. But because Lubet must constantly circle back to his titular character, a man he admits was a braggart and a fair-weather abolitionist, the drama underpinning his eventual betrayal of Brown all but disappears. Furthermore, several aspects of the raid suffer for the book’s focus on Cook. Readers do not learn nearly enough about the wild assortment of characters involved in the assault on Harpers Ferry, Brown’s hopes for his attack not just to end slavery but to clarify the nation’s founding principles, and the way the trial in particular focused the intense prism of national politics. Because the story follows John Cook so closely, these dramas are not given room to develop. Lubet is right to want to correct the tendency in Brown scholarship to treat members of this interracial force as mere “spear carriers,” but he does not sufficiently demonstrate how Cook’s life “tells a story of moral complexity writ large”(9). That story, of the moral complexities, hypocrisies, and contradictions of Brown, his men, and the institution of slavery, is told to much fuller effect by the journalist Tony Horwitz in Midnight Rising [End Page 204] (2011). [In full disclosure, this reviewer assisted Horwitz with the research for that book.] Set against the backdrop of the Civil War rather than focusing on one individual protagonist, Midnight Rising uses Brown as a window...

A group of scholars of African heritage convened in Berlin in December of 2017 to found a collective named ‘Network for Black Perspectives in Research and Teaching’. One of its foundational tasks is to bridge the divide between Black Studies and African Studies in Germany. This text is one of the manifestations of this collective engagement. In a reflexive rather than normative exercise, our text explores how Black Studies scholarship and African Studies scholarship are impacted by the ‘coloniality of knowledge and power’ and by the ‘violences of modernity’. We aim towards understanding our own entrapment, freedoms, complicity and solidarity as complex and layered realities. We draw on concepts of social cartography to conceptualize our embeddedness in the academy and to envision ways of navigating it in a decolonial mode. Borrowing from transnational decolonial scholarship, we attempt to map out the violent landscape we are faced with in African Studies and how we experience or endure harm in these spaces. We discuss four spaces of engagement, entrapment or reclamation within the wider institutional ecosystem of the University: The ‘Everything is Awesome’ space, the ‘Soft-Reform’ space, the ‘Radical-Reform’ space and the ‘Beyond-Reform’ space. Our collective text is generated from structured conversations around amplifying the voices of those who inhabit the shadow side of modernity in the context of transnational African Studies.

This essay analyzes two works of historical fiction about abolitionist John Brown and his followers: James McBride's The Good Lord Bird (2013) and Russell Banks's Cloudsplitter (1998). Both texts decenter John Brown from the raid on Harpers Ferry and examine how his followers, historical and imagined, made the choice to participate in violent resistance. Both authors use the metaphor of castration anxiety to depict their protagonists' relationship to Brown: his leadership leaves them "unmanned" and destabilizes their identities. I argue that, while Banks's text reinforces traditional notions of masculine leadership and privileges the story of his protagonist's white male maturation over the politics of abolition, McBride more genuinely focuses on the contributions of women and people of color in the abolitionist movement. In doing so, he tears down the Freudian notion of "normal" development and celebrates the possibilities of being "unmanned." For his character Onion, losing a stable male identity allows him to build solidarity and empathy with women and to reject stereotypical assumptions about what it means to be a man.

A Second Haitian Revolution: John Brown, Toussaint Louverture, and the Making of the American Civil War Matthew Clavin (bio) “One of the most extraordinary men of a time when so many extraordinary men appeared.”1 The French historian Alphonse Beauchamp, who wrote these words in the Universal Biography at the opening of the nineteenth century as a series of democratic revolutions in Europe and throughout the Americas came to an end, did not intend them for George Washington, the Virginia planter who led Britain’s thirteen North American colonies to independence. Nor did he intend them for Napoleon Bonaparte, the Corsican soldier who brought order out of the chaos of the French Revolution and conquered Europe, or Simon Bolivar, the Venezuelan aristocrat who ended Spanish rule throughout much of Latin America. They referred instead to François Dominique Toussaint Louverture, the black general and former bondman who led an army of rebel slaves to victory over their former masters as well as the [End Page 117] armies of France, England, and Spain at the end of the eighteenth century in the Saint-Domingue or Haitian Revolution.2 It may come as a revelation that Beauchamp was not alone in his assessment. While today it is difficult to find people who revere the black slaves who centuries ago killed whites to be free, in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution, men and women throughout the Atlantic world celebrated Louverture as a Great Man, a slave who compared favorably to other Great Men of the Age of Revolution. Americans in the new republic resisted this enlightened interpretation of history. Louverture’s greatness conflicted with their collective memory of the Haitian Revolution. They remembered that the slave revolt that began in 1791 in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue led to thirteen years of bloodshed between nearly a half-million black slaves; tens of thousands of mulattoes; and French, English, and Spanish colonists and soldiers—that when the revolution came to an end in 1804, black leaders declared national independence, gave their new nation the name used by the island’s indigenous Taino inhabitants, Haïti, and ordered the massacre of nearly every white man, woman, and child remaining in the territory. The events in Haiti had a profound impact on the American mind; they were a constant reminder of the possible outcome of any society built on the bedrock of slavery. It should come as no surprise, then, that in the 1850s when the sectional conflict between northerners and southerners grew violent and war over slavery seemed imminent, public memory of the Haitian Revolution surged. In public speeches and printed texts, southern secessionists and northern unionists conjured disturbing images of the horrors of St. Domingo in an effort to secure public policy committed to maintaining the status quo regarding the institution of slavery. Both groups warned that with the end of slavery the United States would experience a racial apocalypse like that which took place in Haiti a half century before. African Americans and their radical white allies put the memory of the Haitian Revolution to a different use. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, they joined the transatlantic commemoration of Louverture and in lectures, books, articles, pamphlets, and illustrations offered him to an American audience as a symbol of the virtue and potential of the black race. In addition to challenging the widespread belief in white supremacy, these abolitionists placed great emphasis on Louverture’s character for another reason: [End Page 118] to calm widespread fears of slave insurrection. By stressing his compassion and integrity at the expense of his militancy, abolitionists tried to soften the rock hard image of this indomitable black warrior. The strategy worked, for Louverture remained an antislavery icon among even the most conservative social reformers decades after his death. The convergence of European and American abolitionism around the memory of Haiti’s preeminent founding father proved resilient. It was, however, only temporary. An analysis of abolitionist oral, print, and visual culture reveals that in the decade before the Civil War, African Americans and their radical white allies transformed Louverture into a symbol of black masculinity and violence, which they deployed to bring about...