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What
James Green calls "movement history" is both the substance and the subject
of his new book, Taking History to Heart: The Power of the Past in Building
Social Movements, forthcoming in May from the University of Massachusetts
Press. By "movement history" Green means not simply accounts and analyses
of past events, but the work of "scholars and activists," himself among
them, who are "passionately engaged in the study of social protest for
moral and political reasons, as well as intellectual ones."
Taking History to Heart, says Green, "is about ordinary people doing extraordinary things." It recalls such pivotal moments in the story of American labor as the Haymarket Riot (Chicago, 1886) and the Bread and Roses Strike (Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1912) and traces the ways in which these events have been remembered through the ensuing years. One chapter, titled "Releasing Silent Voices and Uncovering Forgotten Places in the American South," focuses partly on the civil rights movement; another, moving closer to home, considers "the Politics of Class and Race in Boston." The book explores such recent events as the 1989 Pittston Coal strike, and carries readers up to the present in a chapter on the labor union revival of the 1990s. Green himself often appears in the foreground, not only as a commentator but also as a participant&emdash;for example, in chapters on "Making Documentary Films about People in Struggle" at Henry Hampton's Blackside Productions and on his own work as a faculty member at UMass Boston's College of Public and Community Service.
This autobiographical approach is "unorthodox for an academic," says Green, "but not unorthodox at all in literature. I'm very much putting my cards on the table in each chapter, saying 'this is why I wrote this, this is why I care about this.'" Taking History to Heart is "a book about storytelling, and the reader needs to know who the storyteller is."
Who will the reader be? "I think the book will hold up very well to scholarly standards and tests," says Green, "but I'm really going for an audience that I think of as my students and people like them&emdash;working people who are adults involved in the real world, in their communities and in their workplaces. This is a book about them, about their history, about their struggles, but it's also about what I perceive as the social learning they've done. And so I hope, even, that they'll find the book inspiring."
For Green, the nature of storytelling and the role of the storyteller are central concerns. Much of the history in Taking History to Heart is in books, "but what I have been seeking to do is to reach a public that will never buy these books," he says. When he tells a story, "I'm trying to bring my training and my perception as a historian to the telling of that story without losing the inherently dramatic qualities of the story.
"There is a kind of discipline," he adds, "that did not exist in my academic training." This discipline can produce stories "so powerful that whatever meaning you drew from them you would come away saying 'that's quite a story. That moves me, or that upsets me, or that shocks me. And it tells me something about that time, or those people."
But another discipline is also necessary. Great storytelling can inform and inspire its audience, but it can also "cross into the realm of myth, creating romantic images about the past that have more to do with what people wish had been than what was." And so the discipline of history can require the historian to say "no, it's not so simple." As a historian, says Green, "I cannot simply be a celebrant. I'm part of the process of remembering, but I also have to be honest. My job is to seek the truth."
Taking History to Heart will appear just as the CPCS Labor Studies Program, which Green founded, celebrates its twentieth anniversary&emdash;a coincidence that delights him. "This has been an extraordinarily fruitful environment for me to work in, he says. "Almost all the experiments I've attempted have been supported, acknowledged, even rewarded. They're not considered simply volunteer work or political work." He joined the CPCS faculty in 1977.