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Y’all imagine my Quaker and nonviolent and abolitionist and history-nerd joy in learning that none other than W.E.B. Du Bois wrote a bio of John Brown, the white man who set out to abolish slavery by any means necessary.

How? How had I not known about this book?

I love reading Du Bois almost as much as I love reading James Baldwin, for similar but not entirely the same reasons. Anyways �

Trust your Unruly Quaker pal that Du Bois� is THE definitive biography of John Brown.
Why?

Du Bois has no time for the TIRESOME debate about whether John Brown was sane / insane. I groan and roll my eyes at biographers' “debates� about Brown’s sanity.

I mean, I don’t think Brown was a chill hang.

He was clearly super intense and driven and judgey.

The sanity thing, though? I think the only reason people question his sanity is because he was a white man who used violence in what he considered necessary action to abolish slavery.

Do we question the sanity of Black folks who used violence in what they considered necessary action to abolish slavery? No. We don’t. Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Toussaint Louverture, Harriet Tubman: we don’t question their sanity. Yes, we do everything else to them � call them terrorists, villains, communists, assassinate them, and more � but their sanity isn’t questioned.

So. What (white) writers and historians cannot grok about John Brown is why a sane white person would put everything on the line for abolition.

But Du Bois gets it.

What you get in this biography is a deeply moral, beautifully written, contextual, and respectful presentation of Brown.

Du Bois understands that it was not, it is not, insanity to commit your life to the freedom and liberty of oppressed peoples. The only thing that makes John Brown seem insane to white people is that he was white and willing to give his life, and willing to take lives, for the cause.

This is also what challenges *me* so much about John Brown: his use of violence � and his uneasy feelings about nonviolent abolitionists (like I am).

John Brown, and Du Bois, ask us to reckon with the question of whether, and/ or when, violence is permissible to overturn violently oppressive systems.

Do you think about violence and nonviolence a lot? As tactics and strategies and morality and an ethos?

I sure do.

I call myself nonviolent. But what does that even mean? Does it mean anything?

It’s quite easy for me, a comfy-cozy middle class white cisgender (albeit bisexual) gal to espouse nonviolence both as a moral, a belief, a strategy, a practice, and a tactic.

But. And. What are the limits of nonviolence?

What if one day, and I mean God forbid, someone snatched my son and husband? Just took them away from me? Chained them? Transported them or made them walk 300 miles? Then forced them to work, in fields, dawn to dark? Did not pay them, kept them under lash and constant threat of murder? What if that was going to be their fate for the rest of their lives - and my potential grandchildren’s lives? And it was perfectly legal?

How would I respond?

Is my nonviolence truly rooted in, and grown from, from the knowledge that we are all children of the God, aka the Great Cosmic Echidna?

And / or � does it rely on the comfort of my relative safety?

Does it come from fear? (Fear of being injured or becoming unsafe?)

What would test my nonviolence?

What would break it?

When, if ever, is it legit to take up arms?

Can I really call myself nonviolent if I am complicit in systems of violence � humans being violently separated from their families and caged in my —in our� names? Humans in densely populated areas of Gaza being hit with 500-pound bombs that my taxes pay for?

What about the legacy of violence that my settler-colonizer family has perpetrated for the past four the centuries? Do I just get to wash my hands clean of that?

What about the violence I do every day to the planet by driving my car, putting clothes in the dryer, running the air conditioner at home and work?

What about the unspeakably gruesome violence our economic enacts on animals, just to have a sandwich at Chic-Fil-A, or an omelette at the diner?

I believe these are important questions.

I don’t think we should get comfortable until we can answer them, answer for them.

So, yeah: back to this book about John Brown, y’all.

In reading Du Bois you get primary sources: John Brown’s letters to family, contemporaries writing to and about him � including Frederick Douglass� thoughts and letters. (NERD RADAR PINGING! AWOOGA! FREDERICK DOUGLASS!)

And then you also get Du Bois as narrator: his wisdom, his politics, his morality.

For instance, on page 4, you get: “The price of repression is greater than the cost of liberty.� I mean. Come on. That’s just page 4.

Fast-forward to Chapter 5, “The Vision of the Damned�:

“Four things make life worthy to most men: to move, to know, to love, to aspire. None of these was for Negro slaves.� —page 41.

To move. To know. To love. To aspire.

We’ll come back to those another time.

After walking us through the (in)famous raid on Harpers Ferry, which, dudes, friends, girlies, Du Bois gives the clearest picture of that I’ve seen or read anywhere, Du Bois writes:

“Such was a such a light was the soul of John Brown. He was simple, exasperatingly, simple, unlettered, plain, and homely. No casuistry of culture or learning, of well-being or tradition moved him in the slightest degree: “Slavery is wrong,� he said,—“kill it.� Destroy it—uproot it stem, blossom and branch; give it no quarter, exterminate it and do it now. Was he wrong? No. The forceable staying of human uplift by barriers of law and tradition is the most wicked thing on earth. It is wrong. Eternally wrong. It is wrong by whatever name it is called, or in whatever guise it lurks, and whenever it appears. But it is especially heinous, black, and cruel when it masquerades in the robes of law and justice and patriotism." � p. 205

Whew.

That is the beautifully written moral clarity you just don’t get anywhere but with Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Unruly Quaker.

But that’s not all.

Get a load of this:

This isn’t in the book. It’s in a speech Du Bois gave at Harpers Ferry in 1932. They were dedicating a memorial plaque or something. From the end of Du Bois� speech:

"Some people have the idea that crucifixion consists in the punishment of an innocent man. The essence of crucifixion is that men are killing a criminal, that men have got to kill him, and yet that the act of crucifying him is the salvation of the world. John Brown broke the law, he killed human beings. Those people who defended slavery had to execute John Brown, although they knew that in killing him they were committing the greater crime. It is out of that human paradox that there comes any crucifixion."

I mean.

I’ll let you sit with that awhile.

Grateful to be sitting here with you.

Full post, with photos and art and recommendations, on my Unruly Quaker Substack: