One hundred and fifty-seven years ago this week, mayhem ruled the streets of Harpers Ferry.  Late on the evening of Oct. 16, John Brown and his band of 21 raiders descended on the town at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers. In an ill-fated attempt to incite a slave insurrection, they seized the federal arsenal, took hostages and retreated to an engine house where they barricaded themselves until a contingent of U.S. Marines battered their way in on Oct. 18.

 

The raiders were routed, and several were captured. Soon after, they were tried, convicted and hanged. Among Brown’s raiders were five African Americans long overshadowed by their martyred leader and, even today, little remembered. Two – John Copeland and Shields Green – were executed.  Two others – Lewis Leary and Dangerfield Newby – died at the scene. Newby, the first to go, was shot in the neck, then dismembered by townspeople and left for the hogs. Leary was mortally wounded as he tried to escape across the Shenandoah.

 

Of the five, Osborn Perry Anderson was the sole survivor.  He escaped and lived to publish the only insider account of the event that, most historians agree, was a catalyst to the inevitable Civil War that followed over the country’s original sin of slavery.

 

In a recent visit to the new African American Museum of History and Culture on the National Mall, I searched in vain for them and their story. The museum is powerful and every American – especially every white American – should see it. But in this case it is incomplete. Even Brown merits only a small portrait with a minimal caption, and there is no mention of the African American soldiers in John Brown’s revolutionary army.

 

There is one standalone quote, in a section devoted to the pain of families separated by the whims of slave owners. It is from an 1859 letter to Dangerfield Newby from his wife Harriet expressing her “one bright hope…to be with you.” By itself, it is moving. But there is no context, no mention of Harpers Ferry or of Newby’s primary motivation in joining with John Brown: to free his enslaved wife and their children who would soon be “sold South” from Virginia to Louisiana.

 

It is these omissions that impel and motivate me in my research and writing, to tell the story of these five courageous men, who have for far too long been overlooked, dismissed or forgotten.