Larry Lawrence – a Remembrance
John Brown scholar & defender of the Trotskyist program
by Jason Wright
Larry Lawrence delivering the closing remarks at a graveside ceremony during the annual John Brown Lives! commemoration at the John Brown Farm, North Elba, New York, 4 May 2019
I was saddened by the death of Larry Lawrence (1950-2020), a long-time supporter of the Bolshevik Tendency and a close personal friend. I probably first encountered Larry in New York City at one of the 1995 “Shut the City Down” demonstrations protesting austerity cuts in education, particularly the City University of New York system. I know I picked up a copy of 1917 issue number 15 around that time from a forty or fifty-something vendor. It certainly could have been Larry, although that description would have fit most of the New York City Bolshevik Tendency (BT) local and their closest sympathizers. Whoever it was, I’m forever grateful as I read that issue cover to cover. Much impressed by the quality of the journalism and political analysis, it had a significant effect on my later political trajectory.
I know for certain that I was first formally introduced to Larry on a Friday night in late March 1998. It was the opening night of the Socialist Scholars’ Conference, which that year was held at the Borough of Manhattan Community College on Chambers Street, with the theme “A World to Win: From the ‘Manifesto’ to New Organizing for Socialist Change.” At that time, I was a contact, investigating both the Bolshevik Tendency and the Internationalist Group, and our meeting had been arranged by comrades who knew that I was visiting New York City to attend the conference. That first meeting, at an Au Bon Pain coffee shop in Manhattan, was an inauspicious start for a friendship that lasted more than twenty years.
I’m afraid I rather misjudged poor Larry on that occasion. It was at a juncture where I was increasingly irritated by the limitations of the liberal and social-democratic political milieu that is nearly hegemonic in my hometown of Albany, New York. So I was not impressed when Larry chose to focus on Pat Buchanan as the bellwether for an isolationist strand of American conservatism, deciphering the crisis of the conservative movement through the prism of recent articles in National Review. For my generation, Buchanan will probably always be remembered for his “Culture War Speech” at the 1992 Republican National Convention. As a nineteen-year-old I’d watched that speech broadcast live with a bunch of friends, playing a drinking game of our own invention. It involved taking shots whenever certain buzzwords like “communists,” “Nicaragua,” “Roe v. Wade,” or “homosexual” were mentioned during the convention. In the interest of not prematurely ending our young lives by alcohol poisoning, we cut the game short, about halfway through that appalling rant. I’m sure that every one of us woke up with hangovers the next morning.
While I was underwhelmed at the time, in hindsight Larry’s musings were both prophetic and indicative of one of his primary political concerns. Only a few short years later I’d be pouring over books like Thomas Frank’s What’s The Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won The Heart Of America (2004), Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (2006), Christopher Hedges’s American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (2006), and Joe Bageant’s Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches From America’s Class War (2007). None of these are by Marxist writers, but all tried, in their own way, to come to grips with the internal realignment of American politics in the wake of the triumph of counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and the end of Cold War II. They documented the defeats and retreats of the U.S. working class, betrayed by a corrupt labor bureaucracy and ground down by a relentless, bi-partisan neo-liberal campaign that semi-lumpenized millions in America’s abandoned urban rustbelts. This provided the basis for the cynical neo-conservative campaign to focus the discontent of much of the white working-class on the phony Culture War, which became one of the central themes of U.S. politics in the first decades of the twenty-first century.
Larry was born Reuben Dennis Lawrence III in 1950; he grew up in Jackson, Georgia, a small city dominated by textile mills. Throughout his adult life the primary question that concerned him was how revolutionary Marxists could connect with and speak to the working class. Larry became involved in leftist politics in 1970, the year after Students for a Democratic Society (SDS—the hegemonic umbrella organization of the student-based New Left) split into three factions. Larry joined the Worker-Student Alliance wing, aligned with the then-Maoist Progressive Labor Party (PL) and was soon won to the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC) which described itself as “the left opposition in SDS fighting for an aggressive socialist policy in contrast to the narrow social-work approach of the PL-controlled leadership” (RMC Newsletter No. 3, May-June 1970). The RMC, which was openly aligned with the Spartacist League (SL), had more success winning recruits and influence in the South than in any other part of the country. The high-point was probably in early May 1970 when the RMC won a majority at an SDS South-Central regional conference (see: “PL-WSA Walks Out of South-Central SDS Conference—RMC Victory in Memphis!”, RMC Newsletter No. 3).
Larry ended up leading the Athens, Georgia chapter of SDS, where he began to appreciate the critical importance of conscious revolutionary leadership, something that informed his observations about all the political movements he witnessed during his lifetime. He bitterly recalled how many young leftists of his generation were drawn into that graveyard of social struggles, the Democratic Party, by illusions in George McGovern’s “anti-war” campaign for President in 1972. Years later, when he became involved with Occupy Wall Street, Larry rightly insisted that the most important intervention that could be made was to convince the best of the activists involved that program, not process, was paramount because political activity without clarity on objectives could only lead to a blind alley.
The man I met on 20 March 1998 was fast approaching fifty, roughly my father’s age, but somehow seemed older. I imagine Larry was one of those people who always seemed older than they were. While he was slightly disheveled in an absent-minded sort of way, there was much less of an air of bohemianism about him than most of his vintage who I’d encountered on the American far left.
He was articulate, even eloquent in a quaintly old-fashioned way, an impression only amplified by that soothing Southern accent he never lost. Perhaps it’s because I didn’t meet him until he was already middle-aged, but there was always something slightly anachronistic about Larry that made me think of the Old Left more than his contemporaries among the student radicals of the New Left. I can’t remember Larry ever mentioning marijuana or other recreational drugs to me and he in no way represented my youthful impressions about a hedonistic sixties and seventies radical subculture. Occasionally however, he would refer to underground cartoonist Robert Crumb, or quote a Beatle’s lyric or riff on a Monty Python routine, and I’d be reminded that Larry was actually a product of that time.
Still, Larry’s tastes tended to recall a bygone era. His Christmas ritual was popping in a VHS recording of the 1951 Christmas Carol starring Alastair Sim; this epitomized Larry somehow: a bachelor alone on a holiday enjoying sentimental Victorian social criticism as adapted into a movie produced during his childhood. I often felt like he was channeling my grandmother, lamenting how difficult life was for young people today. I remember one long, muggy subway ride back from a rally in Harlem where the crowd had been disappointingly small and old (mostly Larry’s age and older) and our paper sales had been spectacularly underwhelming, with the few youth present either telling us they were broke or never carried cash. Larry attributed this to how hard it was to survive now in comparison to his own youth when any young person could apply and get hired at a factory. In some areas, he told me, jobs were so plentiful that a young militant would quit if they couldn’t get time off for a demonstration or an upcoming political trip and then manage to get hired at another factory the next day. The longing for a lost golden age when any left group could easily “industrialize” their young members was part and parcel of both Larry’s frustration with the present and his faith in the possibility of a better future.
I saw a different side of Larry a year after we were first introduced when he shared the stage with Ossie Davis and others at a large indoor rally at New York City’s Town Hall that demanded freedom for former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal, the victim of a police frame-up and judicial railroading. That night, 26 February 1999, Larry presented the John Brown Society’s Gold Medal to Pam Africa, the leader of MOVE, on behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal, in front of an overflow crowd of more than 1,500. Larry’s remarks were reprinted in their entirety in 1917 No. 211
Reading through back issues of 1917 in the year between our first meeting and the Town Hall speech I’d already learned a little bit about Larry Lawrence and the John Brown Society. In 1917 issue No. 4, I read about the origins of the New York City BT local, and how in 1986, two SL members, Jim C. and David E. were driven out for daring to disagree with the assertion of a leading black comrade, Ed K., that surplus value was a significant component of the Soviet economy. In a cultish test of group-think loyalty, opprobrium was heaped on those two for upholding the standard Trotskyist position, with Chairman James Robertson baselessly insinuating that racism was the likely motivation solely because Jim and Dave were white. There’s a brief reference to Larry in that account: “A third SL cadre—a fifteen year member who is a recognized expert on American and black history—resigned a few weeks later in sympathy.” By then I was coming to appreciate how much respect Larry had earned among John Brown scholars. Louis A. DeCaro Jr., who has written multiple biographies of John Brown, later commented:
“Although Larry is not a biographer, he is perhaps the most well-read student of John Brown, 19th century U.S. history, and the political history of the U.S. that I’ve ever encountered. Larry knows the John Brown literature and its history, and he monitors and studies the academic and cultural developments relating to the Old Man’s story with an eagle eye.”2
In his memorial statement Professor DeCaro opined, “Larry was one of the most historically knowledgeable and politically astute scholars that I have known, and he could easily have been a university professor given his vast knowledge of history and the politics of the left.”3
In the degenerated, cultish SL, Larry’s refusal to go along with the vilification of two members guilty of nothing more than rebutting a mistaken proposition, was responded to with vile personal abuse. Larry was ridiculed as a “Confederate Soldier,” a slanderous insult tossed out casually that wounded him deeply.
Larry, a loyal and self-sacrificing member of the SL, was unusual in that he had the honesty to break with the organization rather than be party to a lie. His tremendous personal integrity meant that there was no place for him in an organization as degenerate as the SL had become by 1986.
After leaving the SL, Larry and his friend Glen Jenkins, another former member, established the “John Brown Society” in 1989. Larry later described the project as follows:
“The John Brown Society is not a contemporary leftist political party. We do not have a program, and do not take positions on current issues that are discussed by the far left in general. I have my views, of course, but I try not to express them through the office of the Chairman of the John Brown Society. We wish to be a cultural and historical portion of a rising far left. We seek to maintain as much political independence as possible in order to facilitate our roles of supporting John Brown, preserving his memory and honoring those who make cultural and political contributions to the cause of racial equality in this country.
“We do have one strong attitude, however. Expressed in our founding rules is a political hatred of both major American parties. No politician of either the Democrats or Republicans is eligible for the Gold Medal of the John Brown Society.”4
The inaugural event was held on 16 October 1991 where a gold medal was presented to Robert F. Williams, who organized armed black self-defense to resist Klan terror in Monroe County, North Carolina in the late 1950s. Williams, who was ultimately forced to flee the United States for a Cuban safe haven, provided an important counterweight to the illusions in non-violent resistance cultivated by Martin Luther King Jr. Another recipient in 1991 was Geronimo ji-Jaga, a Black Panther leader who was the victim of a frame-up, and in 1991 was still behind bars. One of the attendees at the ceremony was Conrad Lynn, a prominent black radical and civil rights attorney.5
I was already familiar with the case of Geronimo ji-Jaga and had made my own, very modest, financial and letter-writing contribution to his defense. I read Williams’s Negroes with Guns, and Conrad Lynn’s There Is a Fountain: The Autobiography of Conrad Lynn and was impressed that Larry had rubbed shoulders with both of them. When Larry subsequently invited me to meet him on Saturday, October 16 1999 at the John Brown Farm in North Elba, New York, near Lake Placid, high in the Adirondack mountains, I happily accepted. It was a crisp golden fall day, and as I made the two-and-a-half-hour drive from my home in Albany, New York I wondered what to expect at the commemoration of the 140th anniversary of Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. Larry had told me that it would be more historically and culturally grounded than most of the political events we usually attended. I was developing an intense interest in the intersection of American Trotskyism and black liberation in the U.S. and was intrigued to learn that Socialist Workers Party cadres had assisted Robert F. Williams’s escape to Cuba. I was also interested in stories about Conrad Lynn having once been close to Max Shachtman’s Workers Party and looked forward to discussing these and other topics with Larry.
As I drove up into the mountains, memories of summers spent with my grandmother in her friend’s cabin in Long Lake, New York and visits to a summer house owned by other friends on Lake Champlain in Westport, New York, came flooding back. I’d passed through the Adirondacks a couple of times en route to Montreal in the intervening years but following the path of the Au Sable River through an evergreen-covered gorge I experienced a serenity in nature that I’d forgotten existed.6
When I arrived and told Larry that I’d forgotten the natural beauty of the region he replied that he had felt much the same when he first set foot on the Farm. He’d arrived in the 1970s during a stressful time in his life and had found solace strolling the same grounds his hero once walked. The Farm was always a sort of sanctuary for Larry. In a 17 May 2017 letter to Members of the John Brown Society Board of Advisors and friends of John Brown, Larry advised, “If you have never been to the Farm you must go there. Fighters for justice for the poor in this country need a haven for contemplation, and the John Brown Farm is such a place.”
Brown is best known as the organizer of the raid on Harpers Ferry and his role in the Kansas-Nebraska wars, and many people don’t know that he owned a farm in the northern Adirondacks which is preserved and run as a state park. The Farm, which was purchased for him by fellow Abolitionist Gerrit Smith, is where Brown’s remains were buried, although he spent little time there. The property, which was used to teach agriculture to freed slaves, doubtless also served as one of the final Underground Railroad stops on the journey to the Canadian border. It was also where Brown’s tiny guerrilla band, which included several of his sons and a few former slaves, prepared for the ill-fated attack on Harpers Ferry.
Frederick Douglass, who declined to participate in the raid, nevertheless recognized that the shots fired at Harpers Ferry, rather than at Fort Sumter, launched the U.S. Civil War which sounded the death knell of slavery in North America. Larry was fond of quoting the conclusion of Douglass’s 30 May 1881 address at Harpers Ferry:
“If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did at least begin the war that ended slavery. If we look over the dates, places and men, for which this honor is claimed, we shall find that not Carolina, but Virginia – not Fort Sumter, but Harpers Ferry and the arsenal – not Col. Anderson, but John Brown, began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic. Until this blow was struck, the prospect for freedom was dim, shadowy and uncertain. The irrepressible conflict was one of words, votes and compromises.
“When John Brown stretched forth his arm the sky was cleared. The time for compromises was gone – the armed hosts of freedom stood face to face over the chasm of a broken Union – and the clash of arms was at hand. The South staked all upon getting possession of the Federal Government, and failing to do that, drew the sword of rebellion and thus made her own, and not Brown’s, the lost cause of the century.”7
Larry, a passionate defender of imprisoned former Black Panthers, enthusiastically greeted the founding of the Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal (LAC) in the Bay Area. Larry regarded the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) West Coast port shutdown to demand Mumia’s freedom on his 45th birthday on April 24, 1999,8 as an exemplary demonstration of the intersection of class-struggle politics and the struggle for black liberation.
In a 13 December 2001 letter to Monica Moorehead, a leading figure in the Workers World Party (WWP) who was then the main spokesperson for the International Action Center (IAC), one of the most active elements involved in Mumia’s defense in New York, Larry proposed that they co-sponsor a meeting for Eliot Grossman, a longtime radical attorney with connections to the LAC who was one of Mumia’s lawyers at the time. Moorehead brushed off Larry’s approach and responded: “The IAC is in constant contact with the International Concerned Family and Friends and the NYC Free Mumia Coalition on any new ideas we may have along with theirs on how best to proceed with broadening and elevating Mumia’s political and legal case especially in the post-September 11th period.”
At the time the left was bitterly divided over Mumia’s decision to fire Leonard Weinglass for several missteps—most egregiously his refusal to attempt to introduce the confession by Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, had killed the police officer who Mumia was convicted of murdering. The Labor Action Committee played a critical role in publicizing the Beverly confession and also supporting Mumia in the difficult transition between legal teams. But there was a great deal of controversy over both issues.
At one defense rally in Philadelphia in 2002, Pam Africa went off on one of our comrades, yelling that he owed MOVE a percentage of any money made from paper sales. Larry intervened and reminded Pam of the presentation of Mumia’s medal two years earlier and calmly told her that we had been active in the defense campaign for years and that he was proud that the paper we were selling had an article on Mumia’s frame-up.
I was visiting New York City on 17 September 2011 and had arranged to meet Larry at a Union Square demonstration to protest the on-going Zionist brutalities against the Palestinians. On my way I noticed a number of flyers promoting Occupy Wall Street, which neither Larry nor I had ever heard of. We decided not to bother going down to Wall Street to investigate because we expected that it was likely dominated by lifestyle anarchists and vegans with more body piercings than politics. Despite our numerous conversations about growing social inequality, the continuing pressures on the working class and the inevitability of fightback, we did not imagine that Occupy Wall Street (OWS) would turn out, briefly, to be a channel for the expression of rising plebeian discontent.
Larry corrected this initial reticence during the following weeks and months when he became one of Occupy’s most active overtly Marxist participants. At Larry’s insistence I was back in New York City on 5 October for a large OWS march in which many unions, including a large contingent of transit workers participated. Our observations at that demonstration provided the basis for a 1 November 2011 statement, “Capitalism Can’t Be Fixed! On The Occupy Movement” which was later reprinted in 1917, No. 34. Larry was pleased with the article and with our comrades’ active interventionist approach across North America which contrasted with the abstentionist attitude of much of left, including the Spartacist League.
Larry had a good friend named “Chuck” who I had met many years earlier. Only after a piece by him on the Democrats’ attempts to coopt Occupy was reprinted by Counterpunch did I realize that “Chuck” was Charles M. Young, a music critic I’d read in the pages of Rolling Stone, which he had written for since the 1970s, profiling Patti Smith, the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, the Butthole Surfers and others. He also wrote much of the political coverage, such as it was, for Rolling Stone, often in an acerbic and entertaining style. When Chuck died of a brain tumor in 2014, Larry was devastated.9
Larry was obsessively concerned about the Occupy protesters being lured into the dead end of the Democratic Party, so when MoveOn flyered his apartment building advertising a “99% Spring” organizing meeting, Larry smelled a Democratic rat. Sure enough, the meeting ended up being chaired by Marc Landis, a lawyer and Democratic district leader, who covered the cost of renting the meeting room at the Goddard Riverside Community Center in Manhattan. Chuck reported on the event:
“. . .I was vaguely hoping that whatever The 99% Spring was, it would start a chapter of Occupy Wall Street on the Upper West Side, conveniently near my abode, and agitate for the Democrats and MoveOn to move left.
“The first clue that my evening might go otherwise was the sign-up table, where there were a bunch of Obama buttons for sale and one sign-up sheet for the oddly named Community Free Democrats (are they free of community?), which is the local Democratic clubhouse. That killed the ‘inspired by Occupy Wall Street’ vibe right there. No piles of literature from a zillion different groups, as there had been in Zuccotti Park. No animated arguments among Marxists, anarchists, progressives, punks, engaged Buddhists, anti-war libertarians and what have you. Just Obama buttons, which didn’t appear to be selling.”
—counterpunch.org, 13 April 2012
Chuck said the crowd resembled “an alumni reunion for the 1966 Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade,” and noted that most attendees were not pleased with the Democrats’ half-baked attempts to move in on Occupy Wall Street. He described:
“an astonishingly simple-minded lecture on the history of American radicalism since the populists. ‘This might be okay for Iowa, but not the Upper West Side,’ said a woman near me.
“That’s an insult to Iowa, but let me explain about the Upper West Side. It used to be a liberal-to-radical neighborhood that was ferocious in its support for civil rights and the anti-war movement. Its nickname was the Upper Left Side, and people here could read three biographies of Leon Trotsky before breakfast. Disastrously, it has become the most desirable living space in Manhattan, and Wall Street/corporate/real estate weenies have been taking over. But a significant radical remnant remains, thanks to rent control laws that Democrats seem to understand are necessary to preserve their voters.”
Chuck’s piece, which was written at Larry’s urging, served as a salient and amusing warning against the Democrats’ appetite to swallow Occupy. Chuck did not share Larry’s politics, but he understood how Occupy’s open-ended lack of program, which gave it so much appeal, also opened it to exploitation by the Democratic Party.
Throughout the winter of 2011-2012 Larry regularly went down to Zuccotti Park two to three times per week and reported to us on the movement’s inevitable decline. One comrade, after talking to Larry, sent an internal report on 15 January 2012:
“Larry tells me that OWS continues to meet daily in smallish focus groups outside at freezing Z. Park and larger ones in an indoor venue. He says that there is considerable and perhaps growing low grade friction between the two with the harder core doing the outside meeting and the other, larger group, chatting over lattes etc. in some sort of corporate atrium. The latter are referred to as ‘Occuposeurs’ by many of the former who are presumably regarded as deranged fundamentalists in turn.”
In talking to his friends and contacts in Occupy, Larry focused on the necessity for a hard break with the Democratic Party. The report continued:
“…some of the core leaders tend to be in the [indoor] chats and that they all swear up and down that they will not be coopted. But [Larry] says that there is pretty clearly a consensus that there should be a July conference–which I think we can probably presume is intended or will at least inevitably end up as an attempt to exert ‘external’ pressure on the Dems. By that time the Republican plans to restore economic health by cutting food to workers and the poor while nuking Iran may well make the desire for a one time only, tactical ‘practical’ activity (vote Dem) overwhelming for many if not most. The 1972 McGovern moment–come clean for Gene [McCarthy, who sought the Democratic presidential nomination as a ‘peace’ candidate] circa 1968 etc.
“Larry also said that he has become aware that the core leaders seem to have a notion that the question of program etc. is subordinate to that of ‘process’ by which they mean finger wiggling, GAs [general assemblies], consensus, blocking, etc. This they seem to think (or hope) can keep the movement together and moving forward where[as] vulgar decisions on political questions are likely to lead to fragmentation (true enough).”
Larry estimated that:
“…few of the participants are really seriously anti-capitalist in the sense of having any alternative project in mind–they are sincerely opposed to the ravages of actually existing capitalism but tend to favor all ‘practical’ steps to reduce or eliminate such features . . . and not ready to be identified as supporting even a generic version of ‘socialism’ or anarcho-utopian classless society or whatever.”
By June, with Occupy in steep decline as funding from rich liberals was drying up, Larry reported that the conference planned for Philadelphia in early July was no longer slated to discuss program or the founding of an ongoing organization but instead focus on getting to know each other.
Larry proposed that we write a clear, simple statement, directed to the core militants in Occupy on the importance of developing a coherent set of politics. He felt that our previous material on Occupy had been pitched above the heads of many of those involved in the movement. He did a draft, which turned into a letter from him to Occupy, in which he identified with us, while advancing a few very basic ideas. We hoped that perhaps this would have some resonance with the various core Occupy militants in New York he had developed relationships with.
Larry and I attended Occupy’s 2012 national convention over the week of the Fourth of July holiday in downtown Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park, a federal historic site, to distribute his letter and sell our paper. I got there at noon and found that there were only about 150 Occupiers, most of whom seemed to be lifestyle anarchists from the hinterlands; the more political NYC contingent arrived somewhat later. There were also a lot of cops—including federal park rangers, Pennsylvania State Troopers, U.S. marshals as well as the Philadelphia riot squad—who were being extremely aggressive and would not let anyone into the park with a table, tent, cooler, sleeping bags or much else. As many participants had shown up without much money and planned to camp out they were understandably reluctant to part with their food and portable shelters. When I started selling papers at the entrance a U.S. Marshall came up and told me to desist on the grounds that I was creating a “hazard.” I didn’t pay too much attention. Later when a park ranger saw me selling to a young couple on the sidewalk, he threatened to issue me a ticket for vending without a license and arrest me for disorderly conduct. I pointed out that the sidewalk was not actually on Park property, to which the ranger replied that he was going to give me the opportunity to argue about it with a judge. He got a bit loud and a few of the Occupy types began to gather around as “witnesses.” Larry saw this, came over and began to vehemently and eloquently discourse on the theme that democracy included the right to free speech and the freedom of assembly. The crowd grew and the ranger, perhaps concerned with the optics, decided to let me off with a warning.
Most people who knew Larry thought of him as someone with one foot in the nineteenth century: he loved the literature and was intimately familiar with the history. His relationship with the twenty-first century, by comparison, sometimes seemed a bit tentative. When Larry finished his Letter to Occupy he snail-mailed a double-spaced typed draft (so there would be room for any editing) to Tom Riley and me. Tom said he was surprised to discover that, “There are people out there whose lives are even less digital than mine,” while comrade Christoph said “now I know why Larry never responds to my emails.”
After our New York City local became defunct, Larry remained our primary New York connection. He’d call Tom and me regularly, to discuss national and international developments and keep us abreast of events in New York City and any notable developments on the left. It was Larry who first alerted us to a piece in Workers Vanguard (WV), “The Bolshevik Tendency and the Pathology of Renegades” which slanderously misrepresented our position on the 11 September 2001 attacks. Larry’s tip enabled us to respond within a few days. In March 2012, Larry told us of the bizarre claim by an unfortunate ex-member in the grip of mental illness, that I had once worked for the Department of Homeland Security, a gross extrapolation based on my civil service job in the mailroom of a New York State department where I was instructed to assist in x-raying some incoming mail. In that case too Larry’s warning allowed us to promptly set the record straight with the New York left.
Larry resigned from the Spartacist League in the 1980s and never formally joined the Bolshevik Tendency, although he shared our worldview and his political positions coincided with ours. I recall a conversation in April 1999 at a Mumia demonstration in Philadelphia when Larry said it seemed to him that the independence struggle in Kosovo was becoming a subordinate auxiliary of NATO imperialism and thus unsupportable. The same weekend, while we were in Philadelphia, the rest of the organization had discussed the question and reached the same conclusion.
One awkward moment in our political relationship came when Larry identified the hand of the U.S. State Department and the role of the fascists in the Maidan protests in the Ukraine. Larry was puzzled by our failure to come out immediately with a statement on this major question. It never occurred to him that any serious Marxist would mistake Putin’s Russia for an imperialist power. In fact, when the Maidan situation came to a head in 2014 we had an international conference looming within a few weeks where we planned to settle the critical question of “Russian imperialism” which had been under discussion internally for six years at that point. It was only after we dissolved the fusion four years later with our erstwhile New Zealand comrades (all of whom considered Russia imperialist) that Larry read the internal documents and came to understand how the exigencies of the faction fight had impeded a timelier statement.
Larry was an inherently forgiving, decent and loyal person, and these qualities allowed him to maintain connections with former supporters of both the Bolshevik Tendency and the Spartacist League as well as various fellow travelers and fixtures of the New York left. I did not live in New York, so I only infrequently participated in the brunches that Larry and company regularly had at a Mexican diner near his apartment on the upper West Side. To say that Larry presided over these gatherings would not be quite right; he was too modest to attempt any sort of salon. But he drew intelligent people to him.
While otherwise generous to a fault, Larry enforced a nearly absolute prohibition against overnight houseguests, which was sometimes a source of irritation for his out-of-town political associates. But, as Larry would point out, he never asked anyone else to put him up.
His apartment mirrored his personality with its slightly disheveled gentility. A few architectural details suggested it had once been respectably middle class during the art deco era, but little besides a few coats of paint (likely all prior to Larry’s occupancy), had been done to rejuvenate it. The apartment reflected Larry’s enthusiasm for his ever-expanding collection of books, printed miscellany and sports memorabilia. His kitchen clearly belonged to someone who ate almost every meal out, as practically every cabinet had been turned into a makeshift bookcase.
When the BT launched a New York City local in 1987,10 the SL responded with a cop-baiting smear entitled “Garbage Doesn’t Walk By Itself–What Makes BT Run?”, (WV, 15 May 1987) complaining of our “unnatural obsessions” with them. Workers Vanguard opined that: “When people quit an organization, they generally don’t want to have anything more to do with it; they have other fish to fry.” But for Larry, and many of the other dedicated revolutionaries that the degenerating SL kicked to the curb at one point or another, the desire to make sense of their experiences and figure out what had gone wrong with the organization to which they had devoted themselves was a testament to their political seriousness. Unlike many former leftists who wrote off involvement with revolutionary politics as a youthful mistake and came to view the communist movement as a “God that Failed,” Larry, as one of the best of his generation, remained committed to the idea of human liberation despite his bitter disappointments. It was because he valued the ideals of Marxism that he was so interested in, and even obsessed by, the question of “Whatever Happened to the Spartacist League?”
In an internal memo sent in 2003, a former BT comrade recalled:
“One of the things Larry tells me is that in his earlier years [when he worked in the SL’s national office, the group’s founder/leader Jim] Robertson was very aware of all his personal limitations, and frequently told him that he was not qualified to be the main leader of a political tendency, and that the job fell to him through the historical accident of him being the most senior comrade with the most experience due to the disintegration of international Trotskyism in the post-war period. That Robertson was hoping someone better would come along and take over. Larry therefore places much blame on Liz Gordon, [Joseph] Seymour etc. for not stepping up to the plate when they had the opportunity, before Robertson’s bureaucratic appetites jelled.”
The reference to Gordon and Seymour et al presumably related to a 1978 incident we described, in our 1982 founding declaration, as the “blow-out” in the WV editorial board. I recall that on several occasions, Larry told me about an incident not long after he had joined the Spartacist League when Robertson, no doubt intoxicated, became suspicious about his then-companion spending too much time alone in a room with Liz Gordon. When Robertson burst in Larry was worried about a possibly violent altercation, so he physically interceded to restrain the SL’s enraged and irrational leader, who subsequently thanked him for intervening. Larry contrasted Robertson’s modest and apologetic behavior in the aftermath of that outburst with his vindictive defensiveness in later years. The cult of Robertsonian infallibility, which developed in lockstep with the SL’s political degeneration, culminated with the wholesale abandonment of core programmatic positions.11
Larry was barely twenty when he joined the Spartacist League and he spent the next decade and a half as a loyal and devoted member, working alongside Jim Robertson with whom he doubtless felt a sort of special bond as a fellow archivist and collector of leftist materials. Larry learned a lot from Robertson, but he also helped him locate many items that ended up in the SL’s Prometheus Research Library. He was therefore particularly wounded by Robertson’s gratuitous slander that he was a “Confederate Soldier.” If Larry’s gentility and good manners in part reflected his Southern upbringing, his conscious and categorical rejection of every aspect of the racism that poisoned so much of the white working class and petty bourgeoisie was a formative and elemental component of his being. That someone he had once had so much respect for could stoop so low, with no regard for the truth, hurt a great deal—more perhaps than it should have after such long exposure to a man of whom we wrote:
“his record is not an honorable one—he was too petty, too self-indulgent, too cynical, and inflicted too much gratuitous pain on many who trusted him. His worst crime was the willful and capricious destruction of dozens of dedicated revolutionary cadres.”
—”James M. Robertson: A Balance Sheet“
Larry and I both appreciated folk music and I long intended, but never got around to, drawing his attention to the Indigo Girls, a lesbian folk duo, who, like Larry, were Georgians who spent a formative moment in Athens. Amy Ray’s song “Become You,” always reminded me of Larry, particularly her reflection on the contempt and hostility she faced from so many of her fellow Southerners:
“Our southern blood my heresy,
Damn that ol’ Confederacy,
It took a long time to
Become the thing, I am to you
And you won’t, tear it apart
Without a fight, without a heart . . ..
The landed aristocracy
Exploiting all your enmity
All your daddies fought in vain
Leave you with the mark of Cain.”
Larry told me once of playing hide-and-seek as a boy in the house of an older relative, perhaps an uncle, when, looking for a place to hide, he opened a closet door and found a Ku Klux Klan robe hanging there. Larry credited his parents, particularly his father, Reuben Dennis Lawrence Jr., for setting him on a different path. There has always been a precious, if rare, sliver of poor and middle-class Southern whites opposed to black oppression. When the movie Free State of Jones came out in 2016, with Matthew McConaughey playing the role of Newton Knight, a white man who led a successful armed revolt against the Confederacy during the Civil War, Larry was ecstatic. He was, however, acutely aware of how unusual this episode had been and how successfully the slavocracy and their bourgeois descendants had inculcated the plebeian whites they demeaned and degraded with the poison of racism which proved powerful enough to subvert class-consciousness. Larry knew that despite the decades of oppression and acute material deprivation which gave the white underclass an objective interest in combatting their oppressors alongside their black sisters and brothers, there had been only isolated and usually unsuccessful attempts at multiracial organizing.
Larry’s father was an educated and liberally-minded man (if I recall correctly, he sold maps, globes and other educational materials to schools). From his father Larry absorbed a sense of compassion for those less fortunate, both black and white. If Larry’s father’s politics never developed into a sophisticated critique of capitalism, he was nonetheless among the more enlightened and tolerant members of Georgia’s white middle-class at the time.
While some neighbors execrated Martin Luther King Jr., in Larry’s home he was seen as an important figure. In a 2006 speech at the grave of John Brown, Larry observed:
“I am a child of the civil rights era. I was born in Georgia in 1950 and grew up with those struggles. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his poetic language of justice had a great influence on the course of my life. He inspired me to associate social struggle with eloquence by the use of such optimistic and powerful phrases as: ‘The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.’”12
I identified with that because when I was very young, my parents, barely out of their teens, lived with my maternal great aunt, a devoutly religious woman and the widow of the youngest son of a Spanish landowner who’d been driven into exile by Franco. A picture of Martin Luther King Jr. hung in her bedroom alongside a garish portrait of Christ. Much to the chagrin of her younger sister, my grandmother, whose brand of Christianity leaned more in the direction of charity beginning at home, my great aunt regularly donated a sizable portion of her meagre widow’s pension to King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I grew up hearing her praise the assassinated clergyman.
Of course, Larry and I shared the Spartacist League’s critique of MLK’s utopian-reformism and embraced the program of revolutionary integration, a position I was initially introduced to as a member of the Revolutionary Workers League (RWL). While the political education I received from the RWL was uneven, I’m glad that they recommended Taylor Branch’s majestic biography of King as an introduction to the Civil Rights movement. The limitations of Taylor’s liberalism are offset by the thoroughness of his research and his affection for his subject. King’s 4 April 1967 speech at the Riverside Church in New York City in which he condemned the war in Vietnam and stepped outside the Democratic Party consensus at the time signaled that he was straining to find a way forward. U.S. liberalism traditionally tolerates some pretty serious social criticism, but draws the line at foreign policy, particularly during a time of war. Larry and I shared the view that despite the limitations imposed by his Gandhian illusions, King was both the preeminent leader of the black masses and moving in an overtly anti-imperialist political direction that the U.S. ruling class considered potentially threatening. While not particularly prone to conspiracy theories, we both took an interest in the work of Dr. William F. Pepper, a lawyer who unsuccessfully defended James Earl Ray, the man convicted of assassinating King in April 1968 in Memphis. Pepper has suggested that the real assassin may have had government support.
Larry’s relationship with the South was a contradictory one: he remained connected to the people and places which had shaped him during his formative years yet chose to live in New York City. He looked forward to his annual trips back home, usually around Easter, and every year he’d call me and let me know he was leaving to enjoy a couple of weeks of the South in the springtime, visit his mother and sisters, and play a few rounds of his beloved game of golf. There are not many pastimes in North America less likely to conjure the image of a Marxist revolutionary than golf, and I sometime found it amusing to contemplate Larry, a red republican of the nineteenth century mold sharing the fairways with Southern red state Republicans, the former Dixiecrats who followed Strom Thurmond into the GOP tent in 1964.
In a June 2017 letter to me Larry explained why he liked political theater, in words that equally apply to his enthusiasm for sports:
“Really fighting for justice has very little to do with the concept of ‘the pursuit of happiness’. It is about deeply felt obligation, and also about strong feelings of anger at social injustice. It involves sacrifice.
“. . . We so often do work that only brings rewards in the future. It is important and crucial work, but it is not usually much fun.
“Fighters for the rights of the poor need recreation. . . . In the years of struggle to come remember to drink the wine of justice. This type of break from the routine of every day organizing will help you make a greater contribution to justice over the long haul.”
Besides golfing, Larry’s other sport was jogging, something we had in common. While my competitive running days were already behind me when we met, I still entered the occasional 5K or half marathon and tried to go jogging three or four days a week. Larry was also plugging away. We never bothered to compare speeds or mileage, but he did give me some good tips on where to run in New York City—his own favorite route was around Central Park reservoir. At some point in the mid-2000s Larry was found unconscious on that path and had to be taken to a nearby hospital. He was semi-incoherent and like most runners not carrying any ID, so it was a while before anyone was contacted. Visiting him in the hospital was the first time I learned that his real first name was Reuben, which meant that his parents did not have the quirky sense of humor I’d previously imagined. It was never clear what had actually happened: it is unlikely that he was mugged as runners seldom carry cash and don’t make particularly attractive targets. He may have slipped on a patch of ice and hit his head or perhaps some undiagnosed ailment caused him to pass out. I don’t know if Larry ever resumed running, as we never discussed it, although we had many conversations about sports.
Larry was widely known both in the New York City left and as a respected autodidact among John Brown scholars. He was also, at least at one point, well-known to sports memorabilia collectors as a vendor, a business sideline that got a boost from the bequest of a fellow boxing enthusiast. Larry told me that not long after breaking into the business he discovered that baseball, basketball and football were over-saturated, so he opted to concentrate on boxing and golf, as well as tennis (which enjoyed a boom in the 1970s and 1980s).
At that time, tennis, a sport in which both men and women competed (sometimes even against each other in mixed doubles), was impacted by the rise of the women’s’ liberation movement and became the only high-profile sport in which professional female athletes could make big money. Larry presumably knew a lot about tennis, but all I can remember him saying was that the market for tennis memorabilia was small and the collectors tended to be well-heeled. During the years when business was good, Larry used his earnings to build his John Brown collection.
Growing up in America, I was keenly aware of the interaction between spectator sports and racism. In the 1930s Jesse Owens allegedly infuriated Hitler by his stellar performance at the Berlin Olympics where he triumphed over members of the supposed master race. While U.S. propaganda celebrated his achievements, his 15 October 1936 observation that U.S. and German politicians shared a racist worldview was not widely publicized. Owens remarked: “Hitler didn’t snub me—it was our president who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram.”13
Larry was well aware of that history and knew that boxing was a blood sport in which poor men, initially European immigrants and then increasingly blacks, were paid to beat each other senseless by wealthy white men who profited by selling tickets and taking bets on the outcome. In James P. Cannon’s Notebook of an Agitator, the founder of American Trotskyism called for banning boxing. Larry did not want to go that far, although he certainly thought that if boxing endured in a socialist society, the rules would need to be overhauled to ensure the safety of participants.
Boxing constitutes an important chapter in the history of racism in the U.S. When Jack Johnson, the first black American heavyweight champion, beat James J. Jeffries (“the Great White Hope”) in 1910, racist pogroms erupted in cities across the U.S., both North and South.14 Three years later Johnson was convicted under the vindictive Mann Act, also known as the “White Slavery” law. Then there’s Joe Louis, the second black heavyweight champion, whose handlers marketed him as a safe, non-threatening black man, in sharp contrast to Jack Johnson’s flashy and transgressive image as the possessor of racing cars and lover of white women. Joe Louis’s first round knockout of Germany’s Max Schmeling in June 1938 was promoted, like Jesse Owens’s Olympic medals had been two years earlier, as an anti-Nazi triumph.15 It was Larry who first told me the rest of Max Schmeling’s story: despite enjoying the protection and patronage of the Nazis, he secretly opposed fascism and risked his life to save some Jewish children. In later years he became friends with Joe Louis and assisted him financially, eventually even paying for his funeral.16 When I was a child, Muhammad Ali was respected by everyone at my virtually all white grade school. Part of Ali’s appeal was his magnificent comeback after he was vindictively deprived of some prime years at the height of his career because of his courageous and principled refusal to fight in Vietnam.17
Larry and I had a couple of road trips to the Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, New York. Larry would attend the collector’s show that accompanied the annual induction ceremony to purchase items and collect autographs; he was well aware how an autograph could boost the price of a book. He told me that this applied not only to signatures by the author or the subject, but also to any athlete or significant figure even tangentially related to the book. I would sometimes help out by standing in line for autographs—I recall getting Carlos Palomino to inscribe a first edition of Nat Fleischer’s 50 Years at Ringside.
On one such trip I recall playing a CD by the Benny Goodman Sextet and extolling the brief collaboration between Goodman and Charlie Christian. Larry once worked at The Strand in New York City (often described as the world’s largest used bookstore) and played an important role in unionizing it. He told me that when he worked there Benny Goodman was a regular customer. At the time, Larry said, jazz seemed to him to be old-fashioned and not particularly interesting, but if he’d known that we would become friends someday he would have got Benny to autograph a book for me.
I remember Larry once proudly showing a group of comrades a copy of one of James P. Cannon’s books, possibly The Struggle for a Proletarian Party, inscribed by the Old Man himself. I was aghast when Larry requested Tom Riley and I to add our signatures: while flattered to be in such close proximity to the founder of American Trotskyism, I rather hoped we weren’t somehow diminishing the book’s value.
When I first knew Larry he would sometimes work the night shift and then take the train to Albany where I’d pick him up. We’d then drive up to the Farm together. Later on, he preferred to take the whole weekend off and stay at the Inn on the Library Lawn, a historic hotel in Westport that he’d discovered, which was owned by a fellow bibliophile who’d converted most of the ground floor into a well-curated bookstore. During one of our early trips to the Farm, Larry surprised me by suggesting that he might like to retire to the Adirondacks. While living in Manhattan for nearly half a century had not affected Larry’s Southern charm nor his Georgian drawl, I had a hard time picturing him, a perpetual pedestrian who couldn’t drive and lived on take-out food from delis and inexpensive Chinese and Mexican restaurants, surviving in the rural woodlands. He may have eventually come to the same conclusion, as his enthusiasm for this project gradually waned over the years until he no longer mentioned it.
As Larry grew older, I could see that working nights as a legal proofreader for the venerable Paul Weiss law firm was becoming increasingly difficult for him. In a 4 May 2021 memorial statement, Bill Logan of the International Bolshevik Tendency mentioned that proofreading Workers Vanguard was one of Larry’s key assignments in the Spartacist League. I had been unaware of this but am not surprised. Until meeting Larry, I had no idea that big commercial law firms employ people around the clock reading briefs from other time zones and overseas firms. Larry worked the night shift so he could be free to do other things during the day. The graveyard shift is notoriously unhealthy and strenuous: I observed the toll working the third shift on the railroad took on my grandfather, on my father who worked nights for the Post Office and my father-in-law who had the same shift at a factory. I’d even experienced the third shift myself when I was young, loading trucks at a UPS hub. I well understood Larry’s frequent complaints about fatigue and how his schedule wreaked havoc with his sleep; I was often alarmed at how worn and tired he’d look, particularly when he entered his sixties.
Retirement was always elusive, somewhere around the corner, after a few more debts were cleared up and a little more money saved. Larry was apparently very respected by his employers who were aware of his anti-capitalist leanings. If anything, this apparently made them feel more comfortable about the fact that from time to time he had access to sensitive corporate legal documents. The senior attorneys at the firm seem to have thought that Larry’s antipathy for big business meant he would be far less likely to try and profit from advance knowledge of takeovers or mergers, something that could severely damage the law firm.
While Larry appreciated the steady work and the benefit package, he loathed the liberal hypocrisy of many of the firm’s “progressive” Clinton and Obama boosters who combined pro bono work for good causes with unhesitating backing for the Democrats and their neo-liberal agenda.
Larry, a gifted amateur historian living in a very expensive city, was compelled to spend far too many hours working, and time that might have been spent working on John Brown was used to sharpen and clarify the words of attorneys who made many times his wages; attorneys who in turn labored for corporations raking in super-profits that rendered even their ample salaries paltry by comparison.
In reviewing reports I wrote of many of the demonstrations and other activities we participated in over the past twenty years I see repeated references to Larry hopping trains after his night shift to meet me somewhere, usually Washington D.C. or Philadelphia, for one event or another. When there was a 9 November 2010 rally outside of a Philadelphia Courthouse in support of Mumia Abu-Jamal, I noted that “Larry worked the nightshift, got on a train, came to Philadelphia, got back on the train and went back the same day for his next night shift, which clearly involved a great deal of effort on his part.” In a description of an Occupy May Day March in 2012, I reported how, after distributing leaflets with me in the morning he was simply unable to participate in the march because he “was exhausted and wanted to go home after working the over-night shift.”
Early in our acquaintance Larry talked about proofreading long enough to pay off some debts and put his sports collectibles business on solid footing. I think at that point he’d just recently closed up his brick-and-mortar location and returned to a strictly mail order model, but the emergence of online shopping put lots of independent book dealers with much deeper pockets than Larry’s out of business. Larry adapted by deciding to work longer in order to maximize his social security benefits and downgrading his expectations about the memorabilia business to merely a supplement to his retirement income.
I’ve already alluded to Larry’s aversion to all things digital. For years, like many used book dealers, he produced photocopied catalogues and mailed them to collectors on his list. Customers who saw something they wanted would respond with a note and a check; if it was still available Larry would mail out the item once the check cleared. If it was no longer available, he’d notify the customer and return the check. The internet made this business model obsolete—most customers were no longer prepared to endure the uncertainty and delay when most things could be obtained with a few clicks online. At the same time prices tended to get pushed down as isolated collectors no longer had to rely on dealers they knew—an international database usually made it possible to find multiple copies of any item. Little guys like Larry could not afford to get discounts by making large-scale purchases. At one point, Larry’s friend Ron P., a former SL member, attempted to help him digitize his collection, but the whole process proved hard to manage. When Ron eventually retired and left New York City, Larry lost his technical support and, I suspect, resigned himself to the idea that his business would never be anything more than an occasionally profitable hobby.
The lack of revenue from his rare books and collectibles sideline made it impossible for Larry to finance the John Brown Society which, to my knowledge, issued awards on only four occasions. What turned out to be the last event was a Silver Medal ceremony on 1 December 2017 which honored two of Larry’s friends: biographer Louis DeCaro, and Norman Thomas Marshall, an actor who performed an inspirational one-man show on John Brown.18
Larry never advertised the fact that he paid for the production of the medals himself. The John Brown Society Board of Advisors, which included Reconstruction scholar and activist Eric Foner, was consulted on nominations, but Larry did all the work and picked up the bills.
For years I came to expect a call around 10pm every couple of weeks from Larry. I understood that I was in a sort of rotation, that every night he’d wake up to get ready for his overnight shift and call one or two friends before leaving his apartment for work. After my daughter was born and I was often sleep deprived, I’m afraid I became a less engaging conversationalist. I got bumped to a Saturday afternoon slot and Larry called less frequently. When we talked it was usually about current events; if there was no burning international issue, we would usually end up discussing the incompetence and senility of the U.S. ruling class and its twin parties or the precarious state of the American economy. Despite his preoccupation with the nineteenth century, Larry remained on top of all major current political developments.
I think his work reviewing financial papers for his job sharpened his hatred of finance capital; he frequently pointed me toward interesting commentary by economists, including liberals like Paul Krugman, and radicals like Doug Henwood. Larry was particularly impressed by Michael Hudson. At the 2017 Left Forum Larry and I attended all three panels in which Michael Hudson was featured as a speaker.
As I mentioned, Larry was well-known among academics as an authority on Brown and as such was approached by documentary filmmaker Ken Burns when he was working on the script for his PBS [Public Broadcasting Service] miniseries, The Civil War. Burns, according to Larry, seemed inordinately interested in interrogating him about his collaboration with Leo Hurwitz, a veteran filmmaker who did documentaries on the Spanish Civil War, and the U.S. labor and civil rights movements. Hurwitz’s sympathetic approach to Brown contrasted sharply with Burns who seemed to view Larry’s hero as little more than a horse thief and a murderer. Larry tried very hard to correct this and may even have had some effect but he was ultimately very disappointed with Burns’s treatment of Brown.19
Larry was similarly incensed by the PBS documentary John Brown’s Holy War which aired as a segment of its American Experience series. Larry, characterizing it as a “travesty of historical justice,”20 wrote:
“In exchange for script input, I offered early on in this project to give advice about the life and politics of Brown. I was afraid of just the kind of attack of Brown that took place, and I wanted to have some impact in preventing it. This offer was not accepted. I would have worked for nothing in exchange for this script input.”
For years after learning that author Russell Banks sold the movie rights to Cloudsplitter, his 1998 novel about John Brown to Martin Scorsese, Larry fretted about the likely result. He was on good terms with Russell Banks, though he had issues with the literary license that Banks took (but always at least acknowledged). Larry worried that in Scorsese’s hands Brown would be portrayed as a bloodthirsty religious fanatic, but his concern eased somewhat after seeing Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, which was broadly sympathetic to nineteenth century New York’s immigrant community.
Larry campaigned against Tony Horwitz, whose Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War (2012), presenting itself as a balanced treatment, took the approach that one person’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist and condemned Brown’s methods, much as Oswald G. Villard’s biography had a century earlier.
After a lifetime of studying John Brown, tracking down his correspondence with his family, followers and allies and digging through contemporary commentary and newspaper coverage of Brown and the debates that raged within the abolitionist movement, Larry observed:
“Brown himself did not write much political material. The bulk of his writing is family/business/religious in nature. The politics are to be often found by reading between the lines. In the 1850s his writing did become more overtly political, but he still wrote in a cryptic manner in order to conceal his actions from hostile eyes.
“Slave liberation movements demanded conspiracy and silence. Brown knew that failure resulted in such matters by talking too much. He developed the style of keeping his own counsel.
“He was above all a man of action.”21
On my first visit to the John Brown Farm in 1999, I recall telling Larry that I’d read W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1909 biography of Brown several years earlier. He replied that I could have done worse but noted that although Du Bois was politically insightful and sympathetic, he had worked hastily without many resources and so had to rely on older secondary sources and as a result, unknowingly repeated or introduced errors. Larry considered that in general the nineteenth century material on Brown was superior to most of what was written in the twentieth century prior to the 1970s. He recommended David Blight’s Race and Redemption: The Civil War in American Memory as a useful overview of the shifting narrative of the Civil War and the defeat of Reconstruction. The Northern victory in the Civil War allowed capitalism to develop freely, but partisans of the Confederacy won a sort of a victory through imposing their version of events in much of the written record.
Leaning forward, almost conspiratorially, Larry then asked me what I thought of “Pottawatomie,” the violent reprisals meted out in May 1856 by Brown and his comrades to pro-slavery elements during the “bleeding Kansas” conflict. For Larry, Pottawatomie was the litmus test; many who would support Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry failed to defend his actions in Kansas. I replied that, as Victor Serge observed in Year One of the Russian Revolution (1930), Red terror is generally considerably less bloody than White terror:
“The toiling masses use terror against classes which are a minority in society. It does no more than complete the work of the newly arisen economic and political forces. When progressive measures have rallied millions of workers to the cause of revolution, the resistance of the privileged minorities is not difficult to break at this stage. White terror, on the other hand, is carried out by these privileged minorities against the laboring masses, whom it has to slaughter, to decimate. The Versaillais [counterrevolutionary opponents of the 1871 Paris Commune] accounted for more victims in a single week than the Cheka killed in three years over the whole of Russia.
“The key victory in civil war is basically the same as that in wars between states. It is a question of annihilating a part–the best part–of the human forces of the enemy and demoralizing and disarming the others. Modern warfare tends increasingly to nullify any distinction between combatants and non-combatants.”22
Brown recognized that to stop slavery taking root in Kansas it was necessary to forcibly suppress pro-slavery terrorism; a position far superior to the pacifism of other abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and most Free Soilers and Republicans.
In a 10 March 2000 open letter to the John Brown Society Larry wrote:
“Brown was Brown because it was clear to many that Garrison had failed by the late 1850s. A large minority of people after Kansas knew that slavery would not end peacefully. Ask yourself the same questions that Brown must have asked himself. What was the U.S. government, and why were they backing the slave owners so completely? In what ways had pacifist abolitionism failed? How had Nat Turner failed, and others, in armed insurrection, and how could it succeed?”
Larry considered that to do justice to John Brown it was necessary to grasp the political fundamentals. While appreciating the poetic eloquence and abolitionist sympathies of James Redpath’s 1860 biography of Brown, Larry was critical of the defensive formulations employed to conceal and falsify what occurred at Pottawatomie. This was presumably at least in part an attempt by Redpath to protect the identity of Brown’s compatriots who were still alive and might face reprisals by relatives of the slain slaveholders or government persecution.
In a similar vein, Larry appreciated the careful research and massive documentary evidence compiled by Oswald G. Villard but considered his book profoundly flawed by his devotion to his grandfather, William Lloyd Garrison, which led him to reiterate many of the pacifist arguments of the abolitionist movement and savage Brown. Larry also resented the fact that Villard had used his considerable influence as the owner of the New York Evening Post and The Nation to promote his book and disparage Du Bois’s politically superior account.
When I first met Larry he advised me that Stephen B. Oates’s To Purge This Land with Blood (1970) and Truman Nelson’s The Old Man: John Brown at Harper’s Ferry (1973) were the best and most accessible biographies. He was very pleased when better accounts were published later, including Jean Libby’s John Brown Mysteries (1999), David Reynolds’s John Brown, Abolitionist (2005) and the works of Louis DeCaro, particularly his full-length popular biography Fire From the Midst of You (2005). DeCaro, a theology professor and civil rights activist interested in the radical strains of Brown’s Christianity, became one of Larry’s closest friends. I believe that Larry helped him select Brown’s letters and speeches for publication. While DeCaro’s work is of course entirely his own, I believe Larry’s insights helped him better understand some aspects of the debates within the Abolitionist movement and the nascent Republican Party.
When I first knew Larry I sometimes imagined I could surprise him with some tidbit about Brown that I had come across, but he was always already aware of my discoveries. One time when I mentioned a comment by Henry David Thoreau in praise of Brown which I imagined was likely pretty obscure, Larry stunned me by reciting it from memory. On one occasion at least the shoe was on the other foot: Larry sent me a photocopy of an article by George Novack from the January 1938 New International entitled “Homage to John Brown” and I was able to inform him that it had appeared in Novack’s anthology America’s Revolutionary Heritage (1976). I was also pleased to be the first to alert him to a wonderful piece on Pottawatomie by the Marxist writer (and anti-Zionist scholar) Lenni Brenner. Brenner excavated an anecdote from the memoirs of August Bondi, an Austrian radical who had moved to the U.S. after the defeat of the 1848 revolution, about how a German Jewish immigrant shopkeeper with an initially pro-slavery tilt changed sides after witnessing both the escalating violence of the pro-slavery faction in Kansas and Brown’s impressive resolve and the quality of his leadership.23
In an 11 January 2017 open letter castigating Barack Obama as he left office, Larry wrote:
“History often plays wonderful tricks with puffed up political figures. The better informed scholars of future times frequently deal harshly with the reputations of politicians once strongly revered.
“Later generations mostly sing a different song about persecuted revolutionaries when their understanding has been elevated. It has been a great source of amusement to the admirers of John Brown as to how he is regarded in relation to the four presidents who occupied the White House during the 1850s. There is more interest in John Brown than in Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan combined! Very few people care at all about these miserable reactionary time servers, but John Brown is admired by fighters for justice all over the world.
. . .
“People who make great sacrifices for the cause of justice for the poor live with the sure knowledge that their lives have not been lived in vain. . . . They sleep in the hearts of the crushed and the poor.”
Larry Lawrence: A Remembrance
A Youtube video produced by Louis DeCaro
Footnotes
⇑ 1. “Mumia Awarded John Brown Medal” 1917 No. 21, box at end of “Labor: Fight to Free Mumia!”
⇑ 2. See the 29 December 2011 blogpost “ The Perennially Unfinished Business of Biography–
Two Responses to Midnight Rising (with comment)”
⇑ 3. See 2 October 2020 “ In Memoriam: Larry Lawrence Remembered (1950-2020)”
⇑ 4. Quoted from Larry’s 16 January 2017 open letter to Members of the John Brown Society Board of Advisors and friends of John Brown.
⇑ 5. 1917 No. 11, “His Truth is Marching On”
⇑ 6. For another account of this particular day see: https://johnbrownlives.org/director-reflects-on-john-brown-lives-at-20/
⇑ 7. I heard Larry quote Frederick Douglass many times over the years and he was exceptionally fond of this passage in particular. Larry used it in a 6 May 2006 speech at Brown’s graveside, the text of which was appended to a 14 May 2006 open letter to Members of the John Brown Society Board of Advisors and friends of John Brown.
⇑ 8. See 1917 No. 21, “Labor: Fight to Free Mumia!” and “Origin of ILWU’S Political Action“
⇑ 9. For more on Chuck see: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/charles-m-young-rock-journalist-who-championed-punk-dies-at-63-178367/
⇑ 10. See 1917 No. 4, “New York BT Launched–The Road Out of Jimstown”
⇑ 11. See Sclerotic Spartacists Unravel–SL Repudiates ‘Capitulation to Imperialism’ and In Defense of (Seymour’s) Marxism–Exposing the ‘Theoretical Framework’ of ICL’s Neo-Pabloist Turn)
⇑ 12. From Larry’s 6 May 2006 speech at Brown’s graveside, which was appended to his 14 May 2006 open letter to Members of the John Brown Society Board of Advisors and friends of John Brown.
⇑ 13. See Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler’s Olympics (2007), Jeremy Schaap, pg 211
⇑ 14. See for instance Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (2006), Geoffrey C. Ward
⇑ 15. Joe Louis: The Great Black Hope (1998), Richard Bak
⇑ 16. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max Schmeling
⇑ 17. See King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero (1999), David Remnick, and Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties (1999), Mike Marqusee
⇑ 18. His 3 December 2017 open letter to Members of the John Brown Society Board of Advisors and friends of John Brown summarizes the event and appends the Award Ceremony Program.
⇑ 19. I heard the story from Larry’s own lips, but am also indebted to the account provided by Louis DeCaro: https://abolitionist-john-brown.blogspot.com/2015/09/
⇑ 20. See Larry’s 10 March 2000 open letter to Members of the John Brown Society Board of Advisors and friends of John Brown.
⇑ 21. From Larry’s notes to a Bibliography of Works Related to John Brown dated 31 March 2000 and appended to his 10 March 2000 open letter to Members of the John Brown Society Board of Advisors and friends of John Brown.
⇑ 22. Victor Serge, Year One of the Russian Revolution, Pluto Press (1992), pp 313-314
⇑ 23. https://www.counterpunch.org/2003/05/23/thin-is-in-but-fat-was-where-it-was-at/, Lenni Brenner, May 2003 (via a 27 May, 2003 email from Howard Keylor)