Naj Wikoff made the opening remarks for the John Brown Day 2023 event and introduced Martha Swan, founder and executive director of John Brown Lives! (Provided photo — Martha Allen)

LAKE PLACID — Spring sunshine poured down from a cloudless sky on scores of attendees chatting as they walked to the big white tent erected on the grounds of the John Brown Farm historic site in North Elba for John Brown Day on Saturday, May 13.

The annual event, which commemorated the history of the abolitionist movement and Black freedom in the Adirondacks, was dedicated to the novelist Russell Banks. Banks, who died in January, was both friend and inspiration to many, as the speakers who took the stage that day would attest in their personal accounts and stories.

As longtime Keene Valley resident and Lake Placid News columnist Naj Wikoff put it, “Russell really walked the talk.”

Bank’s novel “Cloudsplitter,” published in 1998, kindled popular interest in the zealous abolitionist John Brown. In 1999, Banks, with the late Noel Ignatiev and others, called on those who shared the vision of “a country without racial walls” to gather at the John Brown Farm to renew the abolitionist’s legacy. This was the impetus for the celebration of “John Brown Day ’99,” held May 1-2 of that year.

According to Wikoff, the first to address the crowd, Banks was not a historian but a novelist who “changed the narrative of John Brown in this country.”

During the gravesite ceremony, Lewis Sheridan Hughes stood with Scott Renderer as he laid a wreath on John Brown’s grave. (Provided photo — Martha Allen)

“Russell showed John and his wife Mary as people who fanatically fought for equal rights,” he said. Banks “started to organize this event (John Brown Day 2023).”

When this became impracticable, Wikoff added, “I turned to Martha. I give you Martha Swan!”

“Russell Banks was the inspiration for John Brown Lives!” said Swan. Swan is the founder and executive director of JBL!, which she has described as “a nonprofit freedom education and human rights project that brings communities together using history, education, advocacy, and the arts to address critical issues of our time.”

Inside the tent, Erica Blunt and Jerilea Zempel, JBL! board members, welcomed the group.

Blunt quoted Rumi, saying “the breeze at dawn has something to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep.” The audience laughed. Almost at once, the wind began to gust through the tent and did not let up for the rest of the afternoon.

Charles Bickford and Ysanne Marshall (Provided photo — Martha Allen)

“We are standing on land of the Mohawk Nation,” Zempel said. After the Revolutionary War, Mohawk land was awarded to soldiers; the Mohawk lost their home in the face of genocide. She urged a “pledge to become better neighbors to Indigenous people.”

John Brown Day 1999 revived the tradition of pilgrimage to lay a wreath on Brown’s grave, started in 1922 by Black Philadelphians Dr. Jesse Max Barber and Dr. T. Spotuas Burwell, a tradition that had lapsed since the 1980s. At the 2023 event, a commemorative wreath was placed by Lewis Sheridan Hughes, 42, of Beacon, New York.

Hughes is the great-great-great nephew of Lewis Sheridan Leary, who joined John Brown’s army and was mortally wounded at the age of 24 in Brown’s 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry. Brown and his men seized the federal armory and arsenal In Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in hopes of starting a slave revolt in the Southern states. In 1899 Leary was buried at the gravesite of John Brown at the homestead with 11 others killed in the raid.

Hughes said that he had known that his relative had died at Harper’s Ferry — his aunt kept genealogical records and after all, Hughes was named after him — but he had not realized until three years ago that Leary was buried at the John Brown homestead in North Elba.

“I was in tears when I found out,” he said.

Guitarist and guitar-maker Charles (Chuck) Bickford, who accompanied singer-songwriter Ysanne Marshall during the event, also has a historical connection to John Brown: His great-great-great grandfather Rev. Herman L. Vaill was one of John Brown’s teachers, whom he addressed as “My dear steadfast friend.” Independent scholar and Adirondack Life contributor Amy Godine said of Banks, “He didn’t just fill in, he took liberties.” She called Banks “staunchly unrepentant” in his fictionalizing of the life of John Brown.

His unflinching tender prose “brings Brown’s faith and mania to life,” Godine said. “You feel your heart not soften, but strengthen.”

Speaking of fiction — when Gary Smith addressed the crowd, he admitted to reading only nonfiction. When the audience murmured in surprise, he threw out his arms and protested, “What do you expect? I’m a photographer!” Smith claimed that he “damn near assaulted” Banks when they met.

“There’s so much good nonfiction about this guy, why did you write fiction?”

Soon afterward the two walked John Farm together, and apparently Smith was won over to Banks’ point of view.