Martha Swan and actor Charmaine Crowell-White lead a Q&A session following Crowell-White’s one-woman performance as Harriet Tubman on Sept. 14 at the John Brown Farm State Historic Site. (Enterprise photo — Grace McIntyre)

LAKE PLACID — John Brown Lives! celebrates 25 years of education and advocacy with two events focused on abolitionist Harriet Tubman this weekend.

The event begins Saturday with a fall harvest reception at the John Brown Farm Historic Site from 3 to 5 p.m. The reception will include both refreshments and an opportunity to welcome sculptor Wesley Wofford and Tiya Miles, a historian and professor at Harvard University. Both will be visiting the farm for the first time. The celebration continues Sunday with a presentation and signing of Miles’ new book, “Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People.” The events are free and open to all.

This will also be the last weekend to view Wofford’s “Beacon of Hope” statue. The statue of Harriet Tubman, which has been on loan to the farm since July, will be de-installed and moved to Niagara Falls on Oct. 16.

Martha Swan said she was inspired to begin JBL!, the official friends group of the John Brown Farm State Historic Site, when she realized how little she had been taught about the history of slavery and abolition.

“It started with amazement, and a bit of fury and inspiration,” Swan said Thursday.

John Brown was an abolitionist who is known for taking armed action against slavery. However, as Swan learned more, she started to realize that her view of his life was skewed, limited to the bloody images of Brown leading the raid on Harpers Ferry in Virginia, now West Virginia. And despite the fact that he lived in the Adirondacks, she had never really learned about him.

“I was filled with fury that I hadn’t learned this, but also that I had in my imagination that John Brown was a white guy who ran around killing people,” Swan said. “That was where he had lodged himself in my imagination.”

Swan began to question why her view of John Brown was so narrow and made an effort to learn more. A few years later, in 1997, she moved to the Adirondacks and found herself at the doorstep of John Brown’s farm. With the help of local artist and writer Naj Wikoff, she made enough connections at the historic site to form a partnership.

In October 1999, she invited Oswald Sykes to give a presentation at the farm about the English slave ship, the Henrietta Marie. After the Henrietta Marie wreck was discovered in the 1970s, Sykes and his wife Marion worked with the National Association of Black Scuba Divers to memorialize the lives of the African people who died aboard that ship. With this event, the mission to keep John Brown’s legacy alive through education about the 400 years of slavery in the U.S. was born. Their programming covers topics like slavery, the resiliency and contributions of Black Americans to American society, and contemporary social justice issues. These issues range from human trafficking to mass incarceration and climate justice. One question is always the same.

“Are these issues that John Brown would take up?” Swan said. “Issues certainly related to racial justice and freedom, I think he would be on task today. So that’s the guidepost for us.”

The figure of John Brown is intended to be a provocative one. Swan knows the violence John Brown committed in the name of justice is far from black and white.

“What is violence? Whose violence do we condone and reward and mythologize? And what violence do we condemn and shun?” Swan said. “These are really provocative and important questions as a society for us to deal with.”

Ultimately, the goal of JBL!’s programming is to educate students and visitors about history and to invite them to ask those kinds of hard questions. They host many student groups and schools at the farm and provide history content and professional development for teachers. This is some of the most important work they do, Swan said.

“The kids can handle this material if they have the opportunity in a developmentally, age-appropriate way,” Swan said. “They can develop and express empathy.”

Swan wants every student in the North Country to have an opportunity to engage with the history taught by the John Brown Farm. However, she doesn’t want to stop at education. Her goal is to eventually form a human rights team that can tackle issues like injustice in the prison system, human trafficking, migrant justice and climate justice.

“One of my hopes is that we would become the John Brown Center for History and Human Rights — that’s really my long-term goal,” Swan said. “That we would be able to do the work that needs to be done.”