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Prophets Of Protest: Reconsidering The History Of American Abolitionism

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Prophets of Protest is a collection of essays by scholars who are also teachers and local historians. The editors, both young professors at Harvard, gathered the group and facilitated the research by asking each to critique and help the others.

This collection is very gratifying for me as an independent researcher and writer because my work has been to document the support of John Brown, abolitionist, by local African Americans in Virginia, both slave and free, in the Harpers Ferry raid in 1859. Hannah N. Geffert of Shepherd College (now West Virginia) writes "Regional Black Involvement in the John Brown Raid" by showing the geography that made sense of John Brown's plans. The local slaves supported him. They did not cause him to fail. Hannah Geffert writes this evidence in standard academic grounding; she is kind enough to credit my thirty years of research on this topic in her byline.