"Amongst whites representing the anti-racist tradition, John Brown remains the best known martyr. But there are more to be researched, documented, and taught about. Today who even knows the name of William Moore, the ex-Marine postal worker from Baltimore who had grown up in Mississippi and thought its people were basically good? In April 1963, he walked down Deep South highways, wearing a sandwich-board bearing anti-racist slogans, with the goal of hand-delivering a letter, a civil rights plea, to the governor of Mississippi. After 70 miles he was shot dead at close range on U.S. Highway 11 in Alabama. People blamed the victim: "He should have known better. Must have been crazy." We need to honor such "craziness." Rev. Jonathan Daniels, a young northern minister who had been working with the black community, was shot dead in Lowndes County, Alabama, in 1965. That same year, Viola Liuzzo, a civil rights volunteer from Detroit who had come to join the Selma-Montgomery march, was shot dead by Klansmen while driving a local black youth home after the event. We hear a little more about two white Summer Project volunteers, Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, murdered together with Black activist James Chaney at Philadelphia, Mississippi."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Elizabeth Martinez Letters from Mississippi: Reports from Civil Rights Volunteers and Freedom School Poetry of the 1964 Freedom Summer (2007 edition)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Brown_(abolitionist)
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
John Brown (abolitionist)
John Brown (9 May 1800 – 2 December 1859) was an American abolitionist who advocated and practiced insurrection as a means to the abolition of slavery. First reaching national prominence for his radical abolitionism and fighting in Bleeding Kansas, he was eventually captured and executed for a failed incitement of a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry preceding the American Civil War.
43 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by John Brown (abolitionist) →
Related Quotes
"I believe that to have interfered as I have done—as I have always freely admitted I have done—in behalf of His despis…"
"I bring you one of the best and bravest persons on this continent — General Tubman as we call her."
"Persons convicted of the forcible violation of any female prisoner shall be put to death."
"I am gaining in health slowly, and am quite cheerful in view of my approaching end, — being fully persuaded that I am…"
"I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but with blood. I ha…"
"Whereas slavery, throughout its entire existence in the United States, is none other than the most barbarous, unprovo…"
"These men are all talk; What is needed is action — action!"
"The marriage relation shall be at all times respected, and families kept together, as far as possible; and broken fam…"
"All persons known to be of good character and of sound mind and suitable age, who are connected with this organizatio…"
"Nothing so charms the American people as personal bravery."