I will be discussing my book FIVE FOR FREEDOM: The African Americans in John Brown’s Army – how and why I came to write about these men, for 160 years treated, if at all, as footnotes to their martyred leader.  They arrived at this fateful time and place — October 1859 in Harpers Ferry — by different routes.  Their names were Osborne Anderson, John Copeland, Lewis Leary, Shields Green and Dangerfield Newby. Four would die — two at the scene, two captured and executed two months later — and one would survive to write the only insider account of the raid that historians agree was a major catalyst to the cataclysmic civil war that followed.  Their lives and deaths reverberated down through the generations to today.  I write about the world into which they were born and grew up and about the aftermath and the descendants.  This is African American history.  But, moreover, it is American history.  It is a story from the past that continues to resonate in the present.   It is our history. It is our story.

To register and to learn more, click here: