In October of 2006 the ku klux klan promised a demonstration at the site of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. About 12 klansmen losers showed up completely surrounded by police and escorted into double barricades. They were shouted down by about a hundred antifascists behind a John Brown Lives! banner. Municipal Adhesives was unable to track down any pictures of the banner at this demonstration.
Antifascists laid in in the grass behind a hill to rush the klansmen returning to their cars, but were thwarted by the cops who drove them back to the parking lot in their squad cars. An antifascist did manage to lob a rock through the back windshield of a klansman’s car on his way out.
In April of 2010 the klan planned a demonstration outside of the South African embassy to protest the murder of a white supremacist settler who refused to pay his black farmworkers. Three middle aged men showed up sans signs, leaflets, or klan regalia to mumble to DC Indymedia, the only press who showed up, about a block away from the embassy. Antifascists showed up at their announced location with the original John Brown Lives banner pictured below:
After the 2016 election of Donald Trump, the klan announced they would stage a victory march through the streets of Pelham, North Carolina on December 3rd. When about a hundred antifascists showed up to this town of 4000 people, most in full black bloc attire and several dragging aluminum bats behind them as they marched behind an updated version of the John Brown Lives! banner, the klan hid inside their houses and changed their plans. Antifascists stomped all over their hometown, and several other area towns trying to find them before declaring victory.
The banner reappeared in downtown Asheboro, NC on December of 2017 in front of antifascists from Silver Valley Redneck Revolt, the Triangle NC IWW, and a local chapter of the Brown Berets. They were brought together to oppose a publicly announced klan cross burning in the city, which fizzled into a secret affair on private land with no onlookers later that evening because of the fierce showing by antifascist demonstrators downtown during the day.
August 20th, 2018 in Chapel Hill, NC was a historic day for one of the US’s oldest public universities and another significant day in the life if the John Brown Lives! banner. The banner accompanied hundreds of students, community members and antifascist demonstrators as they paraded through Chapel Hill before pulling down a century old, 25 foot, long-hated confederate monument at the front stoop of campus.
The sticker and the banner off of which it was designed rely on a rather scathing portrait of John Brown from a mural on the second floor rotunda of the east wing of the Kansas State Capitol in Topeka, KS: Tragic Prelude by John Steuart Curry, pictured below.
Between March 13th 2021 and March 5th 2025, the design didn’t change much from the banner, and we added a second, red, colorway in July 2021.
But we very badly wanted to add John Brown Lives to the stencils we offer! The original sticker design was just not conducive for cutting from mylar, and was a little too busy besides. So we revamped the design in January of 2025, and released the stencil into the wild:
Which then translated easily into a more legible sticker design!
John Brown Lives!
Reads “John Brown Lives! Smash White Supremacy,” alongside a simplified John Brown torn from John Steuart Curry’s Tragic Prelude north wall mural, holding a Sharps rifle in his right hand, and antifascist flags in his left hand. Above his right shoulder, an anarchist circle-A.
John Brown Lives!
Reads: “John Brown Lives! Smash White Supremacy,” cut from 7mil translucent white mylar, alongside a simplified John Brown torn from John Steuart Curry’s Tragic Prelude north wall mural. John Brown stands holding black and red flags in his left hand and a rifle in his right. Over his shoulder, an anarchist circle-A.
Leave a Reply