The Stowe Center is outraged by the murders, brutality, and fear tactics sanctioned by the federal government through ICE. One woman shot in the face after saying “I’m not mad at you.” One man shot in the back ten times after he tried to help a woman pepper sprayed by ICE agents. An elderly man pulled from his bed barely clothed and thrust into the winter streets. Children as young as two and four arrested and taken from their homes. These are the stories we know about because concerned citizens witnessed the atrocities, recorded them on their cell phones, and sent them out so we too could see.
176 years ago, Harriet Beecher Stowe was outraged by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. “The author, a woman who disliked confrontations, who rode over unpleasantness with optimistic goodwill and turned aside anger with humor, found herself, as public opinion brewed over the Fugitive Slave Law, consumed with a rage unlike anything she had ever experienced.” (Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life, Joan Hedrick, p. 202)
What made her so angry? The foundation of her ire was slavery, a reprehensible, repugnant moral wrong. What made her livid was the mild, toothless, conciliatory responses to slavery by men of influence and power—those in politics and in the church. In a letter to her brother Henry Ward Beecher in February 1851 she wrote: “Must we forever keep calm and smile and smile when every sentiment of manliness and humanity is kicked and rolled in the dust and lies trampled and bleeding and make it a merit to be exceedingly cool—I feel as if my heart would burn itself out in grief and shame.” She then encouraged her brother—the one with the male voice, the one with public influence: “Fire away—give them no rest day or night.”
“I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak… I hope every woman who can write will not be silent.”
— Harriet Beecher Stowe
Two years later, perhaps having given up on the influence of law or politics, after learning of more kidnappings and more re-enslavements, again and again and again, Harriet Beecher Stowe made a choice. She wrote: “I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak… I hope every woman who can write will not be silent.” Stowe chose to be a witness and to share what she saw in the most popular way of the 19th century: a novel. And it helped.
The Stowe Center is heartened by the people who are standing up to ICE—blowing their whistles, bearing witness with cameras, and providing the evidence necessary to motivate an entire nation.
“In [Alex] Pretti’s case and in [Renee] Good’s, the proliferation of videos—of “angles”—has begun to blurrily expand what we mean by the words “witness” and “evidence.” People physically close to these brazen displays of brute, fatal force gather crucial seconds of visual proof, and then send them off, like messengers, into the digital world. Before long, all of us are pulled “close,” in a morbid, substitutionary way, to the site of disaster—closer than we’d like to be. It’s never been easier to paint and pass around a picture of a historic event.” (“Witnessing Another Public Killing in Minneapolis: Videos of Alex Pretti’s fatal shooting, rapidly disseminated on social media, reveal a brazen display of brute power.” Vinson Cunninghamm, The New Yorker, January 25, 2026)
The Black Lives Matter movement was fueled by the remarkable courage of Darnella Frazier who recorded the murder of George Floyd on her cell phone then shared it with the public. Frazier, then just 17 years old, not only shared witness, she also testified against the police officers who murdered Floyd and helped to seal their convictions. At the Stowe Center, we honor Frazier as a contemporary literary activist who used digital evidence to viscerally immerse the public into the horror of a reality they might not otherwise have known.
Stowe used the personal accounts of self-liberated Black people woven together with her skills as a persuasive writer to make Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeal powerfully to readers’ compassion. She leaned into American ideals of families—and especially children—as sacrosanct and welcomed white readers to recognize Black people as human beings who love their spouses and their children. Stowe made “the other” not other but “the same.”
We know from the accounts of people such as Josiah Henson, that Stowe did not tell half the atrocities that white people inflicted on Black and Brown people. However, what Stowe did share, mixed with her ability to write to induce change of thought, was enough to turn the tide of public opinion.
The videos that protesters are sharing are enough to turn the tide. “[T]here is no hiding the murder of Renee Good, captured on video by several witnesses as it was. And so the Trump administration is working desperately to smear Good and to convince the public that, contrary to widespread video evidence, the federal agent put in place by the Trump regime shot her in self-defense,” wrote Heather Cox Richardson on January 9, 2026.
The digital witness has proven that the official accounts are lies—they have sparked intense public debate among lawmakers and elected officials. And the crowds protesting brutality have not dispersed despite the risk to their lives.
We must assert—with our words, with our protests, with recorded evidence, with our bodies if need be—that we refuse to accept lawlessness and fear as a governing force.
We must assert that a brutal nation will destroy individuals physically and psychologically and undermine communities with long-term trauma—as our history has proven again and again.
We have had glimpses of the nation we want—one that respects the integrity and rights of human beings. One that honors the responsibilities we have not just for ourselves but also for the good of all. This nation appears again and again thanks to individual courage and collective action.
The Stowe Center shares outrage and sympathy with the families of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. We share our sorrow with ChongLy “Saly Vang” Scott Thao and the families of Liam Conejo Ramos and the two-year-old arrested with their fathers.
The act of witness is working. The administration’s public approval ratings on immigration are at an all-time low according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll, with a majority of Americans saying the plan has gone too far.
Richardson wrote that if the administration loses its base of support it is finished: “as finished as elite southern enslavers were when Harriet Beecher Stowe reminded American mothers of the fragility of their own childrens’ lives to condemn the sale of Black children; as finished as the second Ku Klux Klan was when its leader kidnapped, raped, and murdered 28-year-old Madge Oberholtzer; as finished as the white segregationists were when white supremacists murdered four little girls in church in 1963.”
This is the time to speak out in favor of Democracy, freedom of speech, freedom from fear, freedom to be human beings together, responsible for each other and free to express and work toward our hopes and dreams.
