Remembering John Brown: Radical Memory, Strategic Forgetting, and the Field of Black Education
Schedule
Sun, 01 Feb, 2026 at 02:30 pm
UTC-05:00Location
The Gallery 15 N Water St. Lewisburg Pa 17837 | Lewisburg, PA
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This lecture traces how the memory of John Brown has been managed, softened, and sometimes erased within the field of Black education—from the Freedmen’s Bureau schools of Reconstruction to the museums and national parks of our own century. I begin with W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1932 visit to Harpers Ferry, where his plaque honoring Brown was rejected as “too bitter,” and follow that refusal back through the long history of what I call the politics of memory. Along the way, a curious local story from Lewisburg surfaces: the 1859 hoax letter that warned of “five hundred armed men” marching from this very town to rescue Brown. That rumor—false but consequential—helped script the panic that secured his execution and shaped the nation’s earliest acts of forgetting. Using A. J. Greimas’s semiotic square and Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the field, I map four recurring modes—radical remembrance, strategic forgetting, sanitized commemoration, and erasure—and show how they have structured the stories institutions tell about freedom. Figures like Douglass, Crummell, and Du Bois each negotiated those pressures differently, balancing truth against survival. The argument extends to the present, when museums and universities continue to prize civility over conflict. What I call radical remembrance insists that education’s task is not to make history comfortable but to make it clear.About the Presenter: Dr. Michael J. Drexler
Michael J. Drexler is Professor of English at Bucknell University, where he has taught since 2003. His PhD is from Brown University. He is the author (with Ed White) of The Traumatic Colonel: The Founding Fathers, Slavery, and the Phantasmatic Aaron Burr and editor of two collections: The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States and Beyond Douglass: New Perspectives on Early African American Literature.
Header Image Credit: “John Brown’s Farmhouse” by Tony Fischer Photography is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Please Register:
https://lewisburgartscouncil.com/events/remembering-john-brown-radical-memory-strategic-forgetting-and-the-field-of-black-education/?occurrence=2026-02-01
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Where is it happening?
The Gallery 15 N Water St. Lewisburg Pa 17837, 15 N Water St, Lewisburg, PA 17837-1531, United StatesEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
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