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Abstract
Oral historians in the United States have adopted a problematic history of our field that erases the contributions of our radical forbearers. By fixating on recording technologies, archives, and academia, we ignore those who have shaped the theories and methodologies we draw upon when we facilitate dialogues grounded in personal experiences and interpretive reflections on the past. This article identifies the direct contributions that popular educators such as Myles Horton, Septima Clark, Ella Baker, and Paolo Freire played in shaping the field of oral history in the United States. Furthermore, it highlights the role that Staughton and Alice Lynd, Helen Lewis, the Massachusetts History Workshop, and the Brass Workers History Project played in translating these popular education practices into current oral history theories and methods.
I would like to thank Teresa Barnett and Kathy Nasstrom for inviting me to revisit my work for this special issue of Oral History Review and being very patient with me throughout the process. Teresa went well out of her way to discover and send old articles I never would have found on my own. I’d also like to thank Denise Meringolo, who first pushed me to start rethinking the genealogy of radical public history practice by inviting me to participate in a working group to that end for the National Council for Public History (NCPH). While Nevins may not have been my oral history grandfather, Linda Shopes most certainly has been my mentor since my earliest forays into the field. Conversations with her as part of that NCPH working group have been tremendously helpful in shaping my ideas.
Notes
1 Myles Horton, The Long Haul (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 136-137.
2 Most notably, I read Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1990); Myles Horton and Paulo Freire, We Make the Road by Walking (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1990); and Augusto Boal, Theater of the Oppressed (New York: Theater Communications Group, 1985).
3 An article I published about this work in Oral History Review in 2003 has since been included in the second and third editions of the Oral History Reader in its section titled “Advocacy and Empowerment.” Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson drew upon my work as an example for how oral history “can play a significant role in movement building.” Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, eds., The Oral History Reader, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1996), 448. For more on my work, see Daniel Kerr, “We Know What the Problem Is,” Oral History Review 30, no. 1 (2003): 27-45; "Countering Corporate Narratives from the Streets: The Cleveland Homeless Oral History Project," in Oral History and Public Memories, ed. Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2008), 231-251; and Derelict Paradise (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011).
4 For one example of how this prehistory is dealt with, see Rebecca Sharpless, “The History of Oral History,” in History of Oral History, ed. Thomas L. Charlton, Lois E. Myers, and Rebecca Sharpless (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2007), 14-16.
5 Sharpless, 12.
6 See Ronald J. Grele, “Reflections on the Practice of Oral History: Retrieving What We Can from an Earlier Critique,” Suomen Antropologi 4 (2007): 11–12.
7 Remarkably similar versions of this narrative of our past can be found in: Donald Ritchie, Doing Oral History, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 5-7; Valerie Yow, Recording Oral History, 3rd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 3; Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, eds., The Oral History Reader, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1998), 2; Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (London: Routledge, 2010), 4-8; Ronald Grele, Envelopes of Sound, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1991), 196-211; Alistair Thomson, “Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History,” Oral History Review 34, no. 1 (2006): 49-70. After the 1980s, the histories of oral history became a bit more muddled as the consensus of what has happened to the field became less clear, other than a general acknowledgement that we have entered a “digital age.”
8 Linda Shopes, “‘Insights and Oversights’: Reflections on the Documentary Tradition and the Theoretical Turn in Oral History,” Oral History Review 41, no. 2 (2014): 260.
9 Joan Sangster, “Politics and Praxis in Canadian Working-Class History,” in Oral History Off the Record, ed. Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 64.
10 The argument draws on Luisa Passerini’s essay, “Mythbiography in Oral History,” in The Myths We Live By, ed. Ralph Samuel and Paul Thompson (London: Routledge, 1990). For an example of how British oral historians tell a very different story about their past, see Alistair Thomson, “Oral History and Community History in Britain,” Oral History 36 (Spring 2008): 95-104. Interestingly, Thomson draws on the established US narrative while drawing a contrast with the British history of oral history. Thomson argues, “By the end of the 1980s community oral history was arguably the dominant presence in the British oral history movement. That contrasts with other countries. In the United States oral history started as an elite and archive-based movement, which then broadened out to include people’s history work in the seventies.” Thomson, “Oral History and Community History in Britain,” 96.
11 Horton, 57.
12 Horton, 44-62.
13 Horton, 86-87, 96-97.
14 Horton, 157.
15 Horton, 147.
16 Horton and Freire, 98.
17 Horton, 100, 102, 104-105.
18 Horton, 100, 104-105; Todd Moye, Ella Baker: Community Organizer of the Civil Rights Movement (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013).
19 Horton, 108-112. For more on the schools, see Charles Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California, 1997).
20 Septima Poinsette Clark, Ready from Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement (Navarro, California: Wild Trees Press, 1986), 77.
21 Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 188.
22 Ransby, 92.
23 Ransby, 242-249.
24 In 1964 another historian, Howard Zinn, introduced Staughton Lynd to the potential of the portable cassette recorder (released in 1963) when Lynd stumbled upon Zinn conducting an interview of two SNCC field secretaries for his book, SNCC: The New Abolitionists (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1964). Andrej Grubacic, ed., From Here to There: The Staughton Lynd Reader (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2010), 120.
25 Carl Mirra, The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945-1970 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2010).
26 Grubacic, 152-158.
27 Alice and Staughton Lynd, eds., Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 7.
28 Alice Lynd and Staughton Lynd, Stepping Stones: Memoir of a Life Together (New York: Lexington Books, 2009), 61-64; Lynd and Lynd, Rank and File, 7.
29 Staughton Lynd, “The Battle Over Radical History,” New Republic, August 4, 2010.
30 Grubacic, 160-62
31 Lynd and Lynd, Rank and File, 7.
32 Grubacic, 161.
33 Alice Hoffman, “Who Are the Elite and What Is a Non-Elitest?” Oral History Review, 4 (1976): 4.
34 Grubacic, 18-20. In his essay, Alessandro Portelli makes a remarkably similar argument: “Field work is meaningful as the encounter of two subjects who recognize each other as subjects, and therefore separate, and seek to build their equality upon their difference in order to work together.” Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 43.
35 James D. Kirylo, Paulo Freire: The Man from Recife (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 50-59.
36 Freire, 33, 52-53, 70-71, 86, 101.
37 Freire, 99, 184, 23-24.
38 Lewis, 5-6, 63, 74-75.
39 Lewis, 142-144. For more on Lewis’s project in Ivanhoe, Virginia, see Mary Ann Hinsdale, Helen Lewis, and Maxine Waller, It Comes From the People: Community Development and Local Theology (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1995).
40 Lewis, 143.
41 Lewis, 144.
42 Ronald Grele, “Whose Public? Whose History? What Is the Goal of a Public Historian?,” Public Historian 3, no. 1 (Winter 1981): 48.
43 Linda Shopes, “Oral History and Community Involvement,” in Presenting the Past, ed. Susan Porter Benson, Stephen Brier, and Roy Rosenzweig (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1986), 254.
44 Green, 81.
45 Green, 54.
46 Green, 64.
47 Green, 31.
48 Green, 54-55, 60. The Massachusetts History Workshop regrouped and learned from these setbacks when it engaged in a clerical workers project in Boston, which more fully embraced collaborative history making. See Green, 65-68.
49 Green, 60.
50 Green, 96.
51 Green, 3.
52 Green, 279.
53 Jeremy Brecher, “How I Learned to Quit Worrying and Love Community History: A ‘Pet Outsider’s’ Report on the Brass Workers History Project,” Radical History Review no. 28-30 (1984): 201.
54 Jeremy Brecher, Banded Together (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), xiv-xv.
55 Brecher, “How I Learned to Quit Worrying,” 199.
56 Jeremy Brecher, Jerry Lombardi, and Jan Stackhouse, eds., Brass Valley: The Story of Working People’s Lives and Struggles in an American Industrial Region (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1982), 275-276.
57 Brecher, “How I Learned to Quit Worrying,” 193.
58 Brecher, Lombardi, Stackhouse, 275.
59 In a review of Brass Valley, Ron Grele referred to the project as “genius” and “so much better than anything yet produced.” Ronald Grele, “Brass Valley: A Review,” Radical America 17, no. 5 (1983): 48, 53.
60 Linda Shopes, “Community Oral History,” Oral History 43, no. 1 (Spring 2015); Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 225-238; John Kuo Wei Tchen and Liz Ševčenko, “The ‘Dialogic Museum’ Revisted,” in Letting Go?, ed. Bill Adair, Benjamin Filene, and Laura Koloski (Philadelphia, PA: The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, 2011), 82.
61 Jeffrey C. Stewart and Faith Davis Ruffins, “A Faithful Witness: Afro-American Public History in Historical Perspective, 1828-1984,” in Presenting the Past, 328-332; Samir Meghelli, “Remixing the Historical Record: Revolutions in Hip Hop Historiography,” The Western Journal of Black Studies 37, no. 2 (2013): 95-97.
62 Sherna Berger Gluck, “What’s So Special about Women,” Frontiers 2, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 5; Sherna Berger Gluck, “Has Feminist Oral History Lost Its Radical/Subversive Edge?,” Oral History 39, no. 2 (Autumn 2011): 64-65.
63 Lisa Duggan, “History’s Gay Ghetto,” in Presenting the Past, 282.
64 Benson, Brier, and Rosenzweig, Presenting the Past, xxvii.
65 Shopes, “Community Oral History,” 105.
66 Tchen and Ševčenko, 86; John Kuo Wei Tchen, “Homeland Insecurities,” Foreseeable Futures 5, Imagining America position paper, 6.
67 Shopes, “Oral History and Community Involvement,” 249-250, 252-253, 260.
68 Benson, Brier, and Rosenweig, xxii-xxiii.
69 Thomson, “Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History,” 56.
70 Thomson, “Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History,” 56; Grele, “Oral History as Evidence,” in the History of Oral History, 45.
71 Judith Stacey, “Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?,” in Women’s Words, ed. Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai (New York: Routledge, 1991), 113-114.
72 Daphne Patai, “U.S. Academics and Third World Women,” in Women’s Words, 137, 142, 144-45, 148.
73 Popular Memory Group, “Popular Memory: Theory, Politics, Method,” in The Oral History Reader, 2nd ed, 52.
74 Karen Olson and Linda Shopes, “Crossing Boundaries, Building Bridges,” in Women’s Words, 196.
75 Frisch, A Shared Authority, xx, xxii; Michael Frisch, “From A Shared Authority to the Digital Kitchen, and Back,” in Letting Go?, 127.
76 Portelli, 44.
77 Groundswell: Oral History for Social Change, “About,” accessed June 11, 2015, http://www.oralhistoryforsocialchange.org/about/.