Oct 16, 2025
Oct 16, 1859, John Brown led a small group on a raid against a federal armory in Harpers Ferry in an attempt to start an armed revolt against the institution of slavery.
Among Brown’s raiders were five African Americans whose lives and deaths have long been overshadowed by their martyred leader.
Two — John Copeland and Shields Green were executed. Two others — Dangerfield Newby and Lewis Leary — died at the scene. Newby, the first to go, was trying to liberate his enslaved wife and children. Of the five, only Osborne Perry Anderson escaped and lived to publish the lone insider account of the event that, most historians agree, was a catalyst to the catastrophic Civil War that followed over the country’s original sin of slavery
