While John Brown was on trial, the abolitionist Wendell Phillips spoke of
Brown’s place in history. Phillips foresaw that slavery was a cause whose
time was passing, and he asked “the American people” of the future, when
slavery was long dead in “the civilization of the twentieth century,” this
question: “When that day comes, what will be thought of these first martyrs,
who teach us how to live and how to die?”^79 Phillips meant the question
rhetorically. He never dreamed that Americans would take no pleasure in those
who had helped lead the nation to abolish slavery, or that textbooks would
label Brown’s small band misguided if not fanatic and Brown himself possibly
mad.^80
Antiracism is one of America’s great gifts to the world. Its relevance extends
far beyond race relations. Antiracism led to “a new birth of freedom” after the
Civil War, and not only for African Americans. Twice, once in each century,
the movement for black rights triggered the movement for women’s rights.
Twice it reinvigorated our democratic spirit, which had been atrophying.
Throughout the world, from South Africa to Northern Ireland, movements of
oppressed people continue to use tactics and words borrowed from our
abolitionist and civil rights movements. The clandestine early meetings of
anticommunists in East Germany were marked by singing “We Shall
Overcome.” Iranians used nonviolent methods borrowed from Thoreau and
Martin Luther King Jr., to overthrow their hated shah. On Ho Chi Minh’s desk
in Hanoi on the day he died lay a biography of John Brown. Among the heroes
whose ideas inspired the students in Tiananmen Square and whose words
spilled from their lips was Abraham Lincoln.^81 Yet we in America, whose
antiracist idealists are admired around the globe, seem to have lost these men
and women as heroes. Our textbooks need to present them in such a way that
we might again value our own idealism.