Lake Placid, NY---Local officials and citizens will gather at the John Brown Farm State Historic Site on John Brown Road in Lake Placid, Saturday, May 8 from 2 to 4 p.m. to publicly acknowledge the efforts of State Senator Betty Little, Senator Kevin Parker of Brooklyn and Assemblywoman Theresa Sayward to save the iconic state historic site.  The John Brown Farm is one of the state historic sites scheduled for closure in a state budgetary reduction proposal by Governor Patterson that is being hotly contested by the Assembly and Senate, and concerned citizens throughout the state.

Organized by John Brown Lives!, in cooperation with John Brown Coming Home, two regional groups committed to promoting the understanding of famed abolitionist John Brown, John Brown Day 2010 will mark the anniversary of Brown's birthday on May 9, 1800.

Featured as part of the program will be a keynote lecture by Dr. Franny Nudelman, author of John Brown's Body: Slavery, Violence and the Culture of War.  Nudelman, an associate professor in Carleton University's English Department and Institute for the Study of Literature, Art and Culture in Ottawa, Canada, will focus her remarks on racial violence in America at the time of Brown further manifested by the different treatment of the remains of Black and White raiders.

The event will also feature remarks and a wreath laying ceremony led by Brown's great, great, great granddaughter Alice Keesey McCoy and by Brenda Pitts and Dr. Thomas Hopkins, descendents of John A. Copeland, an African-American Harper's Ferry raider.  Copeland was captured during the raid and executed about two weeks after Brown at the age of 25.  His body was dug up and stolen by medical students for dissection and never recovered.  Pitts, who has never visited the farm before, is traveling from Ohio to lay a wreath at the grave in honor of all the raiders and talk about her great, great uncle, his legacy and that of his compatriots.  

The wreath laying ceremony will, additionally, feature the participation Roy Innis, national president of the Congress for Racial Equality, North Elba Town Supervisor Robi Politi, and Lake Placid Mayor Craig Randall.

Also included in the program will be performances by folk singers Kim and Reggie Harris, Ness White and the Frederick Douglass Student Club of Rochester.

"John Brown Day continues a tradition started in the 1930s of honoring Brown and his fellow raiders for their sacrifice to end slavery," said the founder of John Brown Lives, Martha Swan, "and we continue it to keep the purpose for which they gave their lives alive in the mind's of the people of the region, the state and the world.  It is our hope that focusing on this important historic site will result in a deepened commitment to racial justice and to ending slavery in our world today."

John Brown Day is organized annually by John Brown Lives!, in cooperation with John Brown Coming Home, the John Brown Farm Historic Site, the New York State Archives' Partnership Trust, and the Regional Office of Sustainable Tourism.

John Brown Farm is located at the end of the John Brown Road, just off Old Military Road and behind the Intervale Olympic Ski Jump Complex.

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