“What am I Willing to Burn”? Howard Journalism Professor Calls for Whites to Emulate John Brown
By: Jonathan Turley | October 23, 2025
Stacey Patton, professor of journalism at Howard University, has caused an uproar with her advice to white people who want to oppose this Administration. Patton told them that they had to follow the path of John Brown, who led a bloodbath before the Civil War that included killing white slave owners and pro-slave settlers.
In a blog titled “John Brown Didn’t Ask Enslaved People How to Be a Good White Ally,” Patton told white liberals to stop asking how to be a better “ally” to minorities. She writes:
“It’s a question that always lands heavy. Not because I doubt their sincerity, but because the question itself is still a form of protection that centers the asker’s confusion instead of the target’s danger. It’s a request to be taught, forgiven, and reassured, again and again. It’s another round of homework assigned to the wounded…It’s exhausting as hell because it’s still a form of emotional outsourcing.”
Instead, she tells whites to become modern John Browns and presumably unleash a new era akin to “Bleeding Kansas” and the infamous Pottawatomie massacre.
Brown was a militant slave abolitionist during the pre-Civil War “Bleeding Kansas” period. In 1856, he orchestrated the Pottawatomie massacre. He and fellow abolitionists dragged five Kansas settlers, at least three of whom were pro-slavery sympathizers, out of their homes and executed them.
Brown was eventually captured after his raid on Harpers Ferry and hanged.
Patton wants whites to emulate Brown, who “saw the horror for what it was and decided that ending this racist f*ckery mattered more than being understood.” What clearly makes Brown stand out for Patton is his violence: “So when white allies ask, ‘What can I do?’ here’s the answer: Be like John Brown. Ask yourself, what am I willing to burn so somebody else can breathe?”
Of course, a hanging might be a bit stiff for many liberals longing to be Antifa. So, Patton acknowledges, “If you don’t want to die like John Brown, fine. But understand that somebody always does.”
Not surprisingly, the professor has little time for those who want to embrace the alternative, non-violent lessons of Martin Luther King:
“Now, white liberals love to quote Martin Luther King Jr. because he is a man that can be polished into civility. But John Brown doesn’t fit the script. He was a m’fukin’ gangsta! He didn’t ask for gradual change, or healing, or bipartisan cooperation. He saw a nation addicted to violence and knew that moral persuasion alone couldn’t sober it.”
Patton’s column comes after the controversy involving the John Brown Gun Club, which was connected to flyers appearing on campuses like Georgetown reading “Hey, Fascists! Catch!” The phrase was written on unused bullet casings found after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. It went on to proclaim, “The only political group that celebrates when Nazis die.”
The recent charges against Benjamin Song, an Antifa member, also raised the group. Song was charged with three counts of attempted murder of federal agents in addition to three counts of discharging a firearm stemming from an ambush-style shooting at an ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas. A dozen others were charged in the plot. He was also reportedly a member of the John Brown Gun Club.
Notably, this is a journalism professor in a school that has long been associated with advocacy journalism and the controversial hire of former New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones.
We previously discussed the release of the results of interviews with over 75 media leaders by former executive editor for The Washington Post Leonard Downie Jr. and former CBS News President Andrew Heyward. They concluded that objectivity is now considered reactionary and even harmful. Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle, said it plainly: “Objectivity has got to go.”
Downie recounted how news leaders today.
“Believe that pursuing objectivity can lead to false balance or misleading “bothsidesism” in covering stories about race, the treatment of women, LGBTQ+ rights, income inequality, climate change and many other subjects. And, in today’s diversifying newsrooms, they feel it negates many of their own identities, life experiences and cultural contexts, keeping them from pursuing truth in their work.”
Now, objectivity is virtually synonymous with prejudice. Kathleen Carroll, former executive editor at the Associated Press, declared, “It’s objective by whose standard? … That standard seems to be White, educated, and fairly wealthy.”
Stanford journalism professor Ted Glasser insisted that journalism needed to “free itself from this notion of objectivity to develop a sense of social justice.” He declared that “Journalists need to be overt and candid advocates for social justice, and it’s hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity.”
Lauren Wolfe, the fired freelance editor for the New York Times, has not only gone public to defend her pro-Biden tweet but published a piece titled “I’m a Biased Journalist and I’m Okay With That.”
Former New York Times writer (and now Howard University Journalism Professor) Nikole Hannah-Jones is a leading voice for advocacy journalism.
Indeed, Hannah-Jones has declared, “all journalism is activism.” Her 1619 Project has been challenged as deeply flawed and she has a long record as a journalist of intolerance, controversial positions on rioting, and fostering conspiracy theories. Hannah-Jones would later help lead the effort at the Times to get rid of an editor and apologize for publishing a column from Sen. Tom Cotton as inaccurate and inflammatory.
Yet, Howard saw Hannah-Jones as perfect for a chair in its journalism school.
Professor Patton seems to have left not just neutrality but sanity behind with her implied support for violent action. It is unclear how such views impact her journalism courses at Howard University. However, she has featured prominently in The New York Times, Washington Post, and The Chronicle of Higher Education as well as ABC News, CNN, and MSNBC.
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