the situation.” Siwatu-Hodari’s letter made clear that prison support activities such as running errands for people inside were not an adequate response to the threats posed by the Klan. “We were pushed to respond,” remarked Pam Fadem, a founding member of the Committee, “The Klan was burning crosses in the prisons, beating people. We were pushed to respond by Black leadership.”
The support network in New York City was taking off around the same time. To explore how best to respond to the fact that so many leaders were imprisoned, Pam Fadem, Lisa Roth, and Alan Berkman formed the John Brown Book Club, a study group that met in Roth’s living room. The commingling of the Inside Outside Coalition and the Book Club gave rise to the official formation of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee.
“Our main strategy was to bring white people into contact with the Black revolution and allow them to be changed by it the way we had been,” explained LauraWhitehorn, who joined the group after it formed. All of the founding members had participated in the early Civil Rights and Black Power movements through organizations such as the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The group decided to bring these threads together—political prisoner support, anti-Klan work, and rigorous study of liberation movements. The choice of John Brown as a namesake struck a defiant pose. For them, it signaled that the era’s liberal white agenda fell far short of the work that needed to be done to abolish white supremacy.
Throughout the history of the Black Freedom movement, the reliability of white allies was constantly tested. An early emblematic rift was the controversy at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Civil Rights organizer Fannie Lou Hamer brought sixty Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) activists to contest the seating of their state’s Jim Crow delegates to the convention. The all-white Credential Committee yielded a mere two atlarge, non-voting seats while keeping sixty-eight other old-guard delegates in their positions.46
Fannie Lou Hamer, Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegate, at the Democratic National Convention, Atlantic City, New Jersey, August 1964. Photograph by Warren K. Leffler. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
This drove home a sense that the government, established political parties, and many white allies would be unreliable—and if pushed, hostile—to the goals of Black Freedom movement. The MFDP refused the deal and walked away.47 Writing from solitary confinement in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. expressed his frustration with moderate white clergy who denounced his nonviolent direct-action tactics. King wrote: “I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate.”48
In this context, adopting the name John Brown intended to indicate the lengths the group was willing to go to in order to abolish white supremacy. In 1859, Brown led a group of twenty-one people in a raid on Harpers Ferry federal arsenal in Virginia. Brown’s goal was to seize weapons and catalyze an abolitionist war against white enslavers. The U.S. Marines, led by soon-to-be Confederate commander Robert E. Lee, defeated Brown’s militia. In his last speech before being executed, Brown appeared to be at peace with his decisions: “Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so, let it be done!”49
John Brown, circa 1859.
Reproduction of daguerreotype attributed to Martin M. Lawrence. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Harpers Ferry was the culmination of Brown’s lifelong commitment to end racialized slavery in the United States. A decade prior, he had helped Black people in Massachusetts form a self-defense organization to counter the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. When the fate of Kansas as a free or slave state was undecided, Brown’s small group of guerrillas attacked and killed many pro-slavery settlers. There were some who reached the conclusion, as Brown did, that only principled militancy could undo white supremacy. Yet there were others who believed that a more peaceful legal fight was a better way to end slavery and place the nation on a road to greater equality.50
In the long arc of racial justice organizing, people have held many views about John Brown. Black activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee initially cautioned white people who traveled to the South to avoid emulating Brown and adhere instead to collective decision-making as part of a group. In contrast, Malcolm X held up Brown as exactly the type of white person the movement needed: “If a white man wants to be your ally, what does he think of John Brown? You know what John Brown did? He went to war. He was a white man who went to war against white people to help free slaves.”51
In their first act as the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, members discovered that Klan leader Janice Schoonmaker was serving on a local board of education and that there was a Klan Youth Corps campaign to recruit in East Coast high schools. The Committee’s research involved connecting names of active Klan members to towns, and identifying what, if any, roles they played within public institutions. Once they had a scoop, they looked for ways to publicly expose Klan members. As Whitehorn described it, “We had a list of names of the Klan guards in the different prisons. We made posters with their names with the intention of going to the small towns they lived in in upstate New York to expose them.” Members regularly drove the two hours between Napanoch and New York City in order to gather information.
The group’s early research culminated in the publication of their first pamphlet. In it, they publicized thirty-five prison guards that incarcerated people exposed as active members or sympathizers of the Klan. Digging deeper, members of the group traveled to Albany to locate the incorporation papers of the New York Klan. They printed these papers, exposing the Grand Dragon of the New York Klan, Earl Schoonmaker (married to Janice), had been a prison teacher and the head of the Napanoch chapter of the New York State Correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Association.52 Following complaints from a white female prison employee who alleged that she was threatened and harassed for showing sympathy to incarcerated Black people, Schoonmaker had been investigated, and in December 1974, he was suspended from his job. In 1975, the NAACP filed a lawsuit against the prison, but this did very little to tangibly improve prison conditions. Despite the disciplinary action and widespread attention in the press, including coverage in the New York Times, violence continued at the prison. Activists behind bars were often placed in solitary confinement, assaulted, and harassed.
The Committee worked to publicize the demands of incarcerated people to immediately remove Klansmen from their jobs at Napanoch. During the summer of 1977, incarcerated people took over a cellblock to protest Klan-instigated brutality, a rodent-infested mess hall, and the use of rotten eggs in their food. Court records showed that about fifty incarcerated people overwhelmed several corrections officers and took thirteen hostages. Felix Castro, the imprisoned leader of the Latinos Unidos organization, was credited with negotiating the return of prison staff and later faced charges of instigating the uprising.53 When news broke that Klansmen were planning cross burnings in the local Klan unit, or “Klavern,” at Pine Bush, New York, the group decided to investigate Schoonmaker more closely. To get more information about his role, Whitehorn agreed to go to Schoonmaker’s house posing as a journalist. She wore a wig. “I sat in his house asking him questions, ready for him to reveal something we could use, but it was nothing that surprising,” she recalled. “He hated Black people, Jews, and the Catholics.” On multiple occasions, Laura Whitehorn, Terry Bisson, Lisa Roth, Nancy Ryan, and Afeni Shakur all piled into Laura’s van, driving two hours north to attend the deposition.
Incarcerated people at Napanoch continued to demand that Klansmen working at the prison be fired. John Brown members met with them regularly, as they were increasingly concerned about the