Peggy Shepard, Co-Founder and Executive Director of We Act for Environmental Justice, will be honored alongside Kelly Metzgar, Founder/Director of the Adirondack/North Country Gender Alliance, and Diane Noiseux, North Country Immigrant Resource Coordinator for the Office of New Americans.

Since 1999 the freedom education and human rights organization John Brown Lives! (JBL!) has carried forth the tradition started in 1922 by leaders of the Philadelphia Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) of pilgrimage to the homestead of abolitionists John and Mary Brown to lay a wreath on John’s grave.

John Brown Lives! is celebrating its 25th anniversary of using the tools of education and the arts, advocacy and activism, to excavate the Black freedom and abolition history of the region and to inform and inspire civic action to address the critical issues of our time.

JBL! is the New York State Friends Group of the John Brown Farm State Historic Site and works to support the preservation, interpretation and public appreciation of the site.

This spring John Brown Lives! also became a member of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, a global network of historic sites, museums and memory initiatives that connects past struggles to today’s movements for human rights, turning memory into action.

The day will feature the presentation of awards and remarks from our honorees and musical performances by Anna Forsman, INDE with their three-person band from Northampton, Mass., and a John Brown Day “people’s choir” all will be invited to join.

In addition:

— Alice Keesey Mecoy, great-great-great granddaughter of John and Mary Brown, and Lewis Sheridan Hughes, whose ancestors John Copeland and his namesake, Lewis Sheridan Leary, fought with Brown at Harpers Ferry, and died, will share personal reflections on the meaning of their forebears’ sacrifice. Being together at John Brown Day will reunite their families for the first time since the1859 Raid.

— At John Brown Day, JBL! will also announce its newest initiative, Loving Our Country, a non-partisan listening project designed to bear witness, chronicle and disseminate the impacts of current GOP policies on individuals, families, communities, businesses, non-profits, and others across NY Congressional District 21, and to repair the ruptures to our social fabric through empathy, active listening, art-making, and grassroots organizing.

“JBL! has been listening and collecting testimonials since February,” said Executive Director Martha Swan, “and we have concluded from these powerful, often emotional encounters that collecting a person’s experience is a task best completed in person, one-by-one and face-to-face.”

“It is in the act of seeing one another, the bearing of witness and being heard,” Swan explained, “that we stand a chance of transforming our politics, transcending social isolation and disaffection and coming together as a caring people pro-actively loving our country.”

Loving Our Country volunteers will be on hand from 11am-1pm to listen and chronicle the impacts people would like to share. To schedule a listening session, please email info@johnbrownlives.org.