$25 includes dinner (reservation required), $5 donation if attending meeting only.  Dinner at 7. Program starts at 8.

For reservation, email [email protected]

Meyer takes us 60 miles upriver from DC to the former arsenal town at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, and flanked by high cliffs on both sides. The view from here, Thomas Jefferson wrote, is “worth a voyage across the Atlantic.” Today, it is certainly worth the hour’s drive up I-270 and U.S. 340.  There the National Park Service has restored many of the buildings to their 1860-era appearance. It would be fought over and change hands repeatedly during the Civil War. But there is much more to the story preceding the battles.

Over the years, Meyer has repeatedly visited and written about Harpers Ferry and the raid that sparked the Civil War. FIVE FOR FREEDOM, The African American Soldiers in John Brown’s Army is the largely untold story of the five African American men who were with John Brown at that fateful time – October 1859 – and have long been overshadowed by their martyred commander. But it is also about the world of chattel slavery into which they were born and raised, their families, their lives and deaths, and the aftermath – including Civil War service by their surviving siblings – down through the generations right up to today.