On Sunday, I took part
on a conference panel at Left Forum organized by Lesley Wood, on the topic of “Oral
History and Movement Building – Strategies and Methodologies.” After consulting with a few of us on
facebook, Wood, one of my favorite social movement scholars and organizers, drew
up the following abstract:
 |
| Amy Starecheski and company at the Left Forum. |
There is
a hunger for radical history – to give credit to past struggles, to learn from
our mistakes and to improve our strategies for the future. Oral histories are a
popular method. This panel brings together people who want to think about the
possibilities, strategies, challenges and implications of movement based oral
history projects. Adam King will talk about the use of oral history as a
methodology, and consider some questions concerning the production of
collective memory, 'reliability', and the social context of narrative and
remembering. His work is on miners and labour struggles in Sudbury, Ontario.
Nate Prier is an organizer of sorts in migrant justice and indigenous
liberation work in Toronto and elsewhere, and is trying to slowly develop a
hopefully useful movement archive for a city that kinda needs one. Benjamin
Shepard will discuss the use of oral histories about the AIDS and global
justice movements to help organizers reflect on the lessons, meanings and
future directions of movements and collective organizing efforts. Lesley Wood
is part of an activist-initiated oral history project of the People’s Global
Action Network. She is thinking through the different ways to make the project
useful to movements.
Adam
King -- adkking@yorku.ca, Lesley Wood -- York University, Benjamin Shephard --
CUNY/NYC College of Technology, Nate Prier -- York University, Amy Starecheski
-- Oral History Program, Columbia University/ Groundswell: Oral History for
Social Change
Left
Forum is the largest annual conference of the broad Left in the United States.
Each spring thousands of conference participants come together to discuss
pressing local, national and global issues; to better understand commonalities
and differences, and alternatives to current predicaments; or to share ideas to
help build social movements to transform the world.
I have
not been at the Left Forum in years. So
it was a great surprise to see how many people and how much energy there was in
the space. Walking in, the socialists
were still peddling their newspapers and a man let me know, “James Earl Ray did
not really shoot MLK.” Upstairs, a sign
declared: “Trotsky lied and thousands died.”
It’s good to see some things do not change in the left.
Walking
up to the session, I met Amy Starecheski, the author of Ours
to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners. We immediately started talking
about the gardens movement and who was where at the
auction of Charas El Bohio Community Services Center. Differing
accounts offer different names and explanations.
Who was not there? And then there are
our memories of these moments. It seemed
the panel had begun before we even got there.
Lesley,
who wrote a wonderful essay with Kelly Moore in our
book From ACT to the WTO, introduced our session, asking us to reflect on
the uses of oral history for movement work.
Starecheski
opened the session discussing what works and does not work with oral history
research. Oral history is an area with tremendous potential and challenges. The
first challenge involves framing what oral history is; it’s a method for
telling stories about the past, long recorded archived interviews. They are retellings of past moments, in the
present, intended for the future. They
are intended to be heard by others. They
are interactive, created by the listening and teller. They are not always consistent. Stories are embellished, with details given and
taken, with each retelling. “I’ve told a
different story every time I’ve been interviewed,” Starecheski confessed. It is a way to learn how to think about the
past going into the future. Good oral
histories mix anecdotes and interpretation, abstraction and thinking, making meaning
of our analysis. For example, she
pointed to the Groundswell
oral history for social change program.
The limits
of the method are many. For example, it
takes a lot of time to interview someone and transcribe the interviews. And it is not as fundable. It produces different findings. It is hard to generalize with these
stories. They produce different
findings. To balance out contradictory
accounts produces complex narratives. They
do not produce sound bites. As Francesca
Polletta points out, oral histories produce complicated stories.
They are
a great tool for building empathy and larger structural forces, forming a
bigger we. They are a great way to learn
from past organizers and build intergenerational knowledge. Yet, claiming the authority of stories is
hard in a world that puts a premium on quantitative knowledge. Numbers and statistics are the currency of
the realm of much of social science and medical research. But there are other ways of knowing, which
oral histories help demonstrate. This is a method that is full of affective
power. It is a great way of learning and
building relationships and consciousness raising.
Starecheski
offered a number a wonderful resources, including upcoming workshops, groups, and
guidelines for exemption for oral history from IRB’s.
http://oralhistory.columbia.edu/upcoming-and-past-events/People/announcing-ohmas-2015-2016-workshop-series-on-oral-history-and-public-dialogue
http://www.oralhistoryforsocialchange.org/
http://www.oralhistoryforsocialchange.org/connect/
Nate Prier
offered a lovely overview of an oral history project around No One is Illegal
in Toronto, trying to build movement history and preserve it. Adam King
reflected on a study he conducted of union members reflecting on a union
campaign in which differing people have strikingly divergent accounts. What happens, he asked? Are we saving face? You have to deal with tensions between
divergent accounts. It is our job to
help make the stories and differing accounts divergent. Memory is socially mediated, he explained. It
is narrated. And this is subject to
power. These stories are not just objects of the past but are social phenomena
that help shape the future.
Throughout the event,
audience members asked wonderful questions about ethics and approaches to
protecting sources and supporting alternative forms of knowledge production,
which favor different kinds of stories and accounts of activists from multiple
points of view. We talked about ways to
include more voices, inviting impacted community members to help identify
questions. Listening, I recalled the
conflicts between narrative and historical truth I first grappled with twenty
years ago in my research. I was going to
go on Studs Terkel’s show in Chicago.
But it did not happen. So I listened
to Studs interview Tennessee Williams, who reflected on Blanche Dubois, who
famously argued, “I do not tell the truth, I tell what ought to have happened,”
in Street Car Named Desire.
Vivien_Leigh_in_Streetcar_Named_Desire_trailer_
It is
our obligation as oral histories and supporters of movements to protect those
who are sharing their stories, remembering people are in jail, and we cannot
create evidence that might keep them there longer. On the other hand, we are not supporters of propaganda.
Instead of sugarcoating, we need to
learn from the past errors, collective dynamics, and contradictions that inform
conflicts. We need to include these contradictions and make sense of them. Oral histories need to happen.
I was the last to
speak at the panel. I recalled some of
the heroes and friends from my quarter century of Oral History research. My first oral history was with
my father about the Beat Generation in which he was a member. That realization that history was everywhere
around us, and we could each play a role, and have an impact, that changed my
life. I began the session recalled the Holocaust
Oral History Project and the Pitzer
History Project which taught me methods during my historiography class
senior year. The rest was and is, as
they say, history.
Oral History and Social Movements, From Chicago to San Francisco and
the world.
Goethe
said there is no past and future as much as an ever flowing present. I think about this when I do organizing. Its
always been my point, through eight books based on oral history methods and a
quarter century of organizing. Throughout these stories, I find through lines
between my life and the movements in which I have been involved. Malcolm X once said you have to know where
you come from to know who you are.
Through oral histories, we participate in some of this process of
collective memory creation, preservation, and myth making.
Martin
(1996: p.8) has attempted to integrate social work and oral history on the
basis of: a) obtaining information where little evidence exists or where
documentation is suspect, b) revising history in which conclusions are suspect;
c) protecting against loss of history; and d) collecting data to paint a
holistic pictutre of biopsychosocial functioning. Each story highlights the integrity of
distinct points of view (Kissinger, 1995).
With each project, I have asked, how does organizing work? What does it do? Why are we doing this? Where do we find ourselves in this work?
My first social work internship at
Chicago Area Project in 1995-6 had helped galvanize the point. As part of my orientation, I learned about
organizers associated with the project dating back to the 1930's. The organization’s founder University of
Chicago sociologist Clifford Shaw collected oral histories of delinquent youth,
documenting their stories to highlight the multiple dimensions of their worlds
and the various impacts on their lives.
The lesson from Shaw’s work was that there is no need to remain detached
when one listens to these stories, especially if one listens carefully with an
eye toward changing social conditions (Shaw, 1930). Reading the stories of
Clifford Shaw and his work with delinquent youth, I was lulled into
participation.
By the second year of my time in
Chicago, I followed Shaw’s calling, interviewing many of the organizers who had
worked with him starting the 1930’s. One
of the first interviews for my oral history was with Billy Brown, a short then
86-year-old African-American women with short - curly brown hair and animated eyes. She explained what she had learned about
neighborhood life from Clifford Shaw.
“I
think Dr. Shaw felt that this was yours.
This was my plot where I belong so I want to make it the nicest part of
my life and the nicest part of my entity to live here. It was just like a castle, like a castle that
belonged to you. And he felt that each
person. Just wherever you went that was
your home. If you were a part of it, you
lived there. Its small neighborhoods, that's what it was, small
neighborhoods. And he felt that you
could organize wherever you went, you could organize. And this organization could be your castle”
(quoted in Shepard, 1997A).
A love for community
was intricately connected with her story.
Brown was not the only member of
CAP to reflect on the group’s neighborhood emphasis.
Another organizer with the group,
Tony Sorrentino, recalled Clifford Shaw's understanding of community:
Shaw's
approach was, sure he wanted to bring about change in the community but he
believed very strongly in the notion that the way you do that is by neighbor
helping neighbor. And so that was his
experience of growing up in a very small town in Indiana in the early days of
industrialization. He would give us such
examples, if somebody's farm or home burned down, the neighbors all
automatically came together, they didn't apply for a grant or call in the
government. They just did it
themselves. Likewise, with the delinquent,
he'd get out of line, they didn't call in juvenile court. They just handled it informally. So he hoped that some of these forces of the
primary community of the rural
small
town could be utilized in efforts to deal with the problems of an urban
community” (quoted in Shepard, 1997A).
Saul Alinski (1989) argued every
campaign begins with an issue which galvanizes those impacted to organize. “I think that Saul Alinski and the Industrial Areas
Foundation did a very, very excellent job of community organizing,” noted
Arthur Brazier, a Pentecostal Minister with of the Apostolic Church of
God and founder of the Woodlawn Organization,
where he worked with Alinski (see Fish,
1973). Noted for successfully organizing a
campaign to push back the development of the University of Chicago in the
Woodlawn Neighborhood of Chicago, Brazier was recognized as one of the most
effective organizers in history when he died in 2010. For Brazier,
organizing is about identifying issue, not enemies. “I think what you do is you identify a series
of injustices. I never did look at the
University of Chicago as enemy. I looked
upon something that they were doing as something that was not beneficial to
this community. And I didn’t look upon
slum landlords as enemies. I looked upon slum landlords as an injustice that
had to be dealt with. As a Christian I
do not want to identify anybody as an enemy.
That creates a lot of animosity in your thinking.” Rather, Brazier viewed issues as the glue,
the passion which brings people together to move a campaign. “Its my view that
organizing does not happen by snapping your fingers. People do not organize just for the sake of
organizing. Unions do not organize just for the sake of organizing. You organize for a reason. The reason does not mean that you are trying
to locate an enemy. The reason is you
are trying to deal with some injustices that are happening. And you want to deal with that. You deal with that better if you organized as
a group rather than trying to deal with it on an individual basis. I worked very closely with Alinski, for
years. I didn’t see the people who we
were opposing as enemies. I saw us
opposing certain objectives to certain kinds of systems that I thought needed
to be changed.”
For me, much of
organizing began in San Francisco with the AIDS movement, in which organizers
were forced to contend with constant losses while moving forward. My first oral history project began there,
busing around town collecting oral histories about the roots of the AIDS
movement, in gay liberation organizing. I wanted to talk about AIDS, but they
wanted to talk about gay liberation and creating a community in the decade
before the epidemic began.
Cleve Jones, who
organized with Harvey Milk and later founded the Names Project, recalled. “So
when I was 17 sort of coincidentally, because the Quakers were grappling with
the whole issue of gay rights, I met a number of the real pioneers in the
movement and then I went back to Phoenix and joined the gay liberation group
there. It was a very repressive
dangerous situation and I was very anxious to move to San Francisco. The spring of '73 was when I hitchhiked up
here. I don't remember the day I met
Harvey, I just know I met him on the street on the corner of 18th and
Castro. He flirted with me and I told him
he wasn't my type. When he started
running for office, I wasn't really into
electoral politics. I was quite the
little radical boy. I lived in a
communal house in the Haight/Ashbury, worked as little as possible and went to
all the clubs. It was an incredibly exciting romantic time because it was brand
new, so everything about gay people was brand new. I am only 40 but I do remember the old
days. I just barely experienced them but
I remember that when I came out of the closet, there were only two gay bars in
Phoenix. One was in the back alley and
there were no windows or doors. It was
just amazing to come here and other gay people were coming here from all over
the country. There was just this
electricity, this knowledge that we were all refugees from other places and
we'd come here to build something that was new.
I'm sure I romanticize it and idealize it but I remember it as a very
happy, remarkable time.
Cleve suggested I talk
with Hank Wilson. He had lots to recall
about the gay liberation years, but he was also deeply involved in working to
house people with HIV in an old, speed infested HRO. He was acutely aware of the losses everyone
was enduring. Of all the losses people endured, it was
the fabric of friendship disappearing which wore at those I interviewed. It was opening a book of photos and seeing
that most of the images of friends from pride parades throughout the years,
from Harvey Milk to the mid-1990s, hundreds of those friends were gone. “All gone,” one interviewee recalled
(Shepard, 1997). Hank Wilson recalled
friends he used to trust when he entered a community meeting:
I see some
incredibly strong people who aren't here. I have a lot of sadness. I have
people that I used to call up at night and we would bullshit and talk. I don't
have people like that now. That was fun and I still remember that. I still
value that. They are a strength. I think I've been very lucky. I've worked with
some incredible people. I remember a group of people who moved this community
forward, who asked the hard questions. They weren't career politicians or
career in the industry. It used to be that I would go to a community meeting
and I would look around and I would see two or three honest ethical people in
there. It didn't matter, you knew if they were present. I still think of them
when I go to a meeting and I want to be powerful. We gave each other support. We're at the
right place at the right time to make history… (Shepard, 1997).
In Wilson’s
narrative, loss extended from friendships to collective memory and practices,
stretching across time, impacting Wilson and his
activism long after death.
I was swept up on that narrative, spending the
next decade or my life steeping in AIDS / queer organizing around halt the
epidemic and the stigmas surrounding it, making friends, getting arrested,
making connections. In my first arrest
ever, I went to jail with Sylvia Rivera, Leslie Feinberg, Charles King and
Keith Cylar of Housing Works.
I became
close friends with Cylar, who was himself HIV positive. He sat for an oral history about friendships.
BS: When did HIV/AIDS first cross the path of your life?
KC: 1984, and ’83, when I was in Boston and a very good friend that I
had met.
I had developed an incredible
network of young black gay professionals, that were my core group of
friends. It was an awesome support group
of people that were gifted and lovely.
In 1983, the first of our group died from some rare blood disease – it
was AIDS, only the world didn’t know it.
As the epidemic began to show its true nature, we became increasingly
uncomfortable. And at some point around
then, we began to count the years of unprotected sex and drug use against the
years of monastic life behavior, knowing all the time that any one of us could
be the next. And one by one they
died. Of that circle, I happen to be, I
believe, one of the last ones still alive, and I’m infected and scared.
In sharing
their stories people are offering gestures of friendship. Here, the interplay between experience
and recollection, narrative and history, interviewer and interviewee helps us
to consider the intangible and often messy subject of friendship and social
change. “Anyone who gives you enough to
talk about himself to you is giving you a form of friendship,” confesses
journalist Lillian Ross (1999, p. 58), in her memoir. “If you spend weeks or months with someone,
not only taking his time and energy, you naturally become his friend. A friend is not to be used abandoned; the
friendship established in writing about someone often continues to grow,”
(p.58). The interviews which form the
backbone of this story serve both the form and content of the larger end of
this ethnography.
Through these stories, we connect
through lines between movements, those who participated in the anti-war movement
and gay liberation who joined act up, who later joined reclaim the streets and
the global justice movement, and Occupy, and Black Lives Matter.
Last week, I
interviewed Andrew Boyd of the Billionaires for Bush or Gore. He talked about his first bust at the
Livermore Laboratories thirty years ago with Daniel Ellsberg and Wavy Gravy,
connecting the anti-war movement, the ludic Yippies and the antics of the
global justice movement in one space.
Friday, I talked with Bertha Lewis,
who organized with ACORN. She recalled
AIDS demonstrations, the theater of the civil rights movement and the millennials
who are taking their passion and running with it.
Yesterday, as
we were getting arrested at the AIM Pipeline, a young seminary student was
busy reading, us stories from, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran pastor, theologian, anti-Nazi dissident, involved
with an assassination plot to kill Hitler.
This activist suggested we all have to live and be part of history,
however we can. Its our obligation.
Through these stories we learn how.
We all have something to learn from
each other, locating our narratives within larger stories of organizing.
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