The valorization of violent historical figures has begun bleeding into explicit calls for modern-day activists to replicate their methods, raising concerns about a dangerous rhetorical trend gaining traction in certain academic and activist circles.
Hasan Kwame Jeffries, a history professor at Ohio State University and brother of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, recently posted on social media that 19th-century abolitionist John Brown "understood that the only way to free Americans from the scourge of White supremacy was to get rid of White supremacists by any means necessary." The post went viral, with observers viewing it as a rationalization for political violence dressed up in academic language.
Stacey Patton, a journalism professor at Howard University, has written extensively celebrating Brown's willingness to use violence. She has posed the question directly to contemporary audiences: "What am I willing to burn so somebody else can breathe?"
Brown, while an abolitionist who recognized slavery's evil, orchestrated the Pottawatomie massacre in 1856, in which he and his followers murdered pro-slavery settlers in cold blood. He later planned and executed the raid on Harpers Ferry, which ended with his capture and execution.
Even Frederick Douglass, who admired Brown's courage and conviction, explicitly rejected the Harpers Ferry raid, arguing that political change should be the path forward. Abraham Lincoln dismissed Brown as a delusional fanatic.
The intellectual argument being made by figures like Patton and Jeffries contains a kernel of historical truth: slavery was evil, and it only ended through violence. But it collapses under scrutiny because it takes a specific historical catastrophe and attempts to make it a general principle applicable to any contemporary cause deemed sufficiently just.
If violence is justified for any cause that meets some threshold of moral importance, then the definition of that threshold becomes everything. History shows that those who embrace this logic rarely show much restraint. One person's justified revolutionary violence is another person's terrorism.
In an age already marked by rising political violence and targeted assassinations, when academics with platforms begin publicly celebrating historical figures specifically for their willingness to murder their political opponents, they provide intellectual cover for those inclined toward extremism.
Sustainable social change in democratic societies tends to come through political organization, mobilization, and the slow, grinding work of shifting cultural and institutional norms. While less dramatic than violent uprising, it is far more likely to produce the lasting change that justice requires.
