By David Hoffman

Listen to their whispers.  Hear their sighs.  Heed their warnings, in their calls for us to act.  Voices from the 19th century. 

Voices long suppressed by America’s ‘Original Sin’, of Slavery and Racism, and Lynchings and the KKK and Jim Crow and George Wallace and Donald Trump.  Voices still calling out to us today, here and now, in Virginia, as Election Day approaches, swiftly, on Tuesday November 4th. But will we listen? Will we hear?

Those questions were gathered palpably in the room for an event held last week in Dupont Circle  — for the national launch of a new book on the history of America’s pre-Civil War Anti -Slavery ‘Abolitionist’ movement — in Washington DC, at the Woman’s National Democratic Club, the venerable, indeed iconic organization dating from 1922 and the founding suffragists who themselves had struck an earlier blow for liberation, for the ratification in 1920 of the19th Amendment, for the Constitutional right of women to vote. 

Like ghosts haunting us, these voices were clearly spoken — and heard — in the WNDC’s historic mansion home in storied Whittemore House.  

Twenty lost voices!  Men and women, old and young, black and white, from different generations — hovering over the room at the Whittemore House, radiating from the distant past — their voices long suppressed, long buried by casual indifference or worse, deliberate erasure.  As sure as Halloween now approaches —with neighborhood kids trekking door to door with their tricks or treats on Friday October 31 —these once silenced voices (some with wrath, some with woe, some with hope) have issued their warnings and challenges for us, to act today. We are indeed summoned by this trumpet blast of a history book, in their spirit, but in our own time and place, to act ourselves against today’s versions of Jefferson Davis, against today’s Jim Crow, in the pages of the remarkably eloquent book “IN DEFIANCE: 20 Abolitionists You Were Never Taught in School” (One Branch Press: Northampton, Mass., 2025, pp 317).

This book will haunt you.  And it should haunt you.  In a good way.

Listen closely to these astonishing stories you were never taught in school — and discover these untold words still whispered throughout the many long years, and the persistent, insistent dreams of racial justice, their call and our response now alive once again thanks to their echoes in “the fierce urgency of now,” in the resonant words of forner president Barack Obama.

These individuals literally in some cases risked their lives to fight enslavement and then to preserve the history of their efforts. That they so nobly have succeded — in being raised historically like Lazarus from their forgotten graves — is largely today principally due to the detetmined zeal and detective skills of the book’s co-authors Amilcar Shabazz, prolific writer, eminent historian and professor of African American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Tom Weiner, 40 year veteran elementary school teacher at the Smith College lab school in Northampton Massachusetts.

Spoiler alert!  I won’t beat around the book reviewers’ bush. This book is a masterpiece of historical scholarship!  Meticulous in its reseach protoccols and also humane in the fierce beating heart of its passion to restore these 20 lost voices, Shabazz and Weiner have combined to produce this remarkable volume of historical revivalism.  Read it and weep. Read it and cheer. Read it and march. Read it and truly, yes, We Shall Overcome!