On an April afternoon in Lawrence, Kansas, where abolitionists and pro-slavery forces clashed over a century and a half earlier, Billy Mills Middle School teacher Tom Barker introduced students to a central figure in that bloody era of local history.
“John Brown. There's a lot of stuff that people say about him,” Barker said, as students scribbled along in their notes. “For some people he's a hero, (for) some people he's a villain.”
Brown, Barker explained, was a radical abolitionist. He moved to the territory of Kansas in 1855 to fight for its admission as a free state. Some modern historians and activists revere Brown as a passionate advocate — not just for emancipation, but for racial equality.
But with his limited class time, Barker was sure to cover a dark spot in Brown’s reputation: the Pottawatomie Massacre. After pro-slavery forces ransacked Lawrence, Brown led a party, including multiple of his sons, that slaughtered five pro-slavery settlers.
“And when I say they killed five people, it's not that they just shot them,” Barker said, pausing for emphasis in the middle of the room. “They hacked them to death.”
The 170th anniversary of the Sacking of Lawrence and the Pottawatomie Massacre comes at a time when U.S. residents are, by some measures, the most divided they’ve been in decades.
In that environment, and as institutions of education have come under political fire, some U.S. history educators say it’s become more difficult to discuss racism and other topics. More than half of K-12 teachers who participated in a September 2025 survey said they had modified curriculum or class conversation topics in the previous year due to political pressure.
Enduring debates over Brown’s legacy bring to the table those who condemn violence no matter the cause, activists who lionize him and educators who view his story as a useful way of discussing modern dilemmas without all of today’s political baggage.
Who was John Brown?
The Kansas-Missouri border was a key flashpoint in the lead-up to the Civil War. Slavery was legal in Missouri, and some partisans there were determined to ensure Kansas followed suit.
Abolitionist Free Staters, many of them based in Lawrence, dug in their heels. There were rival state capitals, constitutions and legislatures. Raids and massacres rocked the territory, continuing into the Civil War.
John Brown and his sons were in the thick of that fight, which later earned the grim moniker of “Bleeding Kansas.” Driven by deep religious conviction, the Connecticut-born man came to Kansas expressly to join and lead the Free Staters.
He and his sons participated in the Underground Railroad, helping enslaved people escape and flee to Canada, and contributed to the bloodshed that would continue to spiral after they left Kansas.
Brown met his end after a botched raid at an armory at Harper's Ferry, now in West Virginia, where he had hoped to spark a nationwide slave rebellion. He was hanged in 1859, before the Civil War officially began.
Since then, Brown’s reputation has oscillated and evolved as if he were still alive.
“John Brown is a very charismatic figure that gets people's attention,” said Kara Heitz, a history lecturer at the Kansas City Art Institute who is producing a documentary and a podcast episode about the time period for her Per Aspera podcast with the Kansas 250 Commission.
Heitz said the continued fixation on Brown, a white man who left useful records for historians, has caused other perspectives to be overlooked — such as those of the enslaved people who fled with him to Canada, at great personal risk.
Still, Brown continues to serve as a useful entry point to historical debates that resonate in modern times, Heitz said.
“There's this whole other history of how John Brown himself has been co-opted for different kinds of causes,” she said.
Hero or Villain?
For the brief time he spent in Kansas, Brown has left an outsized mark on the state’s identity. His name and likeness grace roads, songs, films, monuments and even beer cans — despite his reported religious opposition to alcohol.
He is also immortalized in an iconic mural at the Kansas State Capitol, which depicts a bearded Brown, arms outstretched, brandishing a Bible in one hand and a rifle in the other.
Some modern day leftists view Brown as a mascot, especially in Kansas. One activist invoked his name in February while protesting a planned immigration detention center in Leavenworth.
“What would John Brown do?” he asked members of the city’s planning commission, who ultimately recommended approval of the detention center’s permit and helped pave the way for it to open. “John Brown was an abolitionist and that's our heritage. That's our Kansas heritage.”
In March, a transgender woman from Colorado said she drew inspiration from John Brown when she used a women's restroom in the state capitol — an act of protest against a state law restricting bathroom use by transgender people in publicly owned buildings.
Some conservative Kansans also continue to speak of Brown with reverence. At the outset of the 2025 legislative session, Republican House Majority Leader Chris Croft listed Brown as one of many Kansans who bore a “torch of freedom” passed across generations.
But his legacy is more complicated than a bumper sticker can capture.
Jay Price, who teaches U.S. and Kansas history at Wichita State University, said Brown lacked support even from some Free Staters.
“Just because you're on the abolitionist side, doesn't mean that you are in favor of doing violence,” Price said.
Some abolitionists believed Brown’s actions would backfire, emboldening pro-slavery authorities to crack down even harder.
Brown was still controversial in the late 1930s and early 40s, when artist John Steuart Curry worked on his iconic Statehouse mural with the radical abolitionist at its center.
According to the Kansas Historical Society, the Kansas Council of Women said at the time that Brown did not represent Kansas and constituted one of “the freaks in its history.”
Teaching John Brown
History educators continue to teach about Brown, and the history of racism in the U.S. more broadly, at a time when modern culture war politics have gripped classrooms at every level.
Early in his second term, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that threatened to eliminate federal funding from K-12 schools found to be promoting “gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology.”
President Trump has also ordered reviews of certain historical sites to inspect the way they engage with race and other topics. That includes the site of Brown's Harper’s Ferry raid.
Republican lawmakers in Kansas have pursued similar educational policies at the state level. The state budget passed this year includes a provision that will forbid public universities from focusing on diversity, equity and inclusion in any required classes.
“There's a real fear now about, ‘How do we even talk about this,’” said Price. “Even mentioning the word 'diversity' makes you a target.”
Back at the Lawrence middle school, Barker said his teaching about John Brown has not changed with the political tides. On a personal level, Barker said he believes Brown’s violence wrought more harm than good.
But he tries to let students evaluate Brown on their own.
“I want to prepare students to be able to analyze and look at what's happening around them, to come up with their own conclusions — and not the conclusions somebody else is telling them,” he said.
Zane Irwin reports on politics, campaigns and elections for the Kansas News Service. You can email him at zaneirwin@kcur.org.
The Kansas News Service is a collaboration of KCUR, Kansas Public Radio, KMUW and High Plains Public Radio.
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