Say it Forward

A Guide to Social Justice Storytelling

Cliff Mayotte, Claire Kiefer

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781608469581
• eBook ISBN: 9781608469598
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

• This book introduces some of the most crucial questions and concerns that have emerged from the ongoing oral history work of Voice of Witness.
• Since 2005, Voice of Witness, a well-respected nonprofit oral history organization has produced dozens of oral history texts and coordinated hundreds of community events featuring storytellers and educators.
• In 2013 Voice of Witness was honored with the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award.
• There is a market for oral history text books in education, both high school and college courses.
• It will appeal to organizations, students and activists who are pursuing oral history projects and is an essential contribution to the goals of sharing more authentic voices in the struggle for social justice.

PART ONE

ORAL HISTORY PRIMER

HISTORY ON A HUMAN SCALE

Though often overlooked, oral history is a vital form of historical narrative and has been for much of human existence. In fact, for centuries oral history didn’t even need a name. It was simply the primary vehicle for communities and cultures to share common history and create strong intergenerational links. Although the term oral history can feel overly stuffy, given storytelling’s revered position in world culture, it serves the useful purpose of signifying a history that exists in between and underneath “official” history. The very substance of oral history clearly demonstrates that all of us are participants in history. Why? Because we share, interpret, interrogate, and draw conclusions about our individual and collective experience every day. What is that if not history? Our stories don’t need to appear in a textbook or newspaper for us to think of them of as historical. Of course, this idea calls into question the nature of history itself. Who decides what is historical? Oral history can be a powerful reminder that the number of stories that need to be heard is infinite—contrary to the messages we receive from the stingy gatekeepers of history.

There are those who feel that oral history is not real history or not true because it’s not factual. A familiar argument goes, “How can you be sure people are telling the truth or remembering things as they actually happened? We all know how tricky and fallible human memory can be.” This is a faulty argument given that many of the indisputable “facts” of history were originally based on oral reports or testimony that were later written and recorded as fact.

So how has oral history become the poor stepchild of “legitimate” history? The primary reason is oral history has the audacity to be surprising, inconclusive, complex, and a little bit messy—which is, of course, consistent with human experience.

Recently, oral history seems to have gained (or regained) traction as the desire for deeper and more personal versions of history and events has reflected a larger societal need. Some of this has to do with the reductive, superficial sound-bite reporting that has become so prevalent in journalism and media. Much of this style of reporting and storytelling does little more than reinforce existing stereotypes about individuals, communities, and cultures. As writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie rightly points out, “It’s not that stereotypes are untrue, it is that they are incomplete.” Through our intuition and curiosity, we know that there’s more to someone’s story, and we want to know what it is. Oral history has a way of honoring our curiosity.

The resurgence of oral history is also a reaction to the constant shouts and pitches from advertising and mass media, which makes it impossible for accounts of our own personal experiences to be heard above all the noise. As humans, we instinctively seem to know that storytelling is an opportunity for connection and learning, but we’ve been pummeled so relentlessly by language so disconnected from human experience that we’re desperately seeking more reflective and participatory forms of communication.

Oral history helps us bring our history down to a more human scale. It’s easy to forget in the grand gestures of historical reporting that history happens to actual people—people with names, families, and stories. Using the Voice of Witness book series as an example (just one of many), a book like Underground America, which focuses on undocumented immigrants, allows us to look at the issue of immigration from another angle—one that goes beyond familiar arguments such as “They take our jobs” or “They’re bankrupting our public health system.” Through oral history, we have the opportunity to hear the personal story of Lorena, who struggles with maintaining her job while pursuing a college education. She shares her hopes, her fears, and her dreams for the future. We get a more complete snapshot of who she is, which makes it easier for us to relate to Lorena as a human being, thus having our thinking complicated in useful ways. After hearing her story, we realize that Lorena is far more than her ascribed identity as an undocumented American.

To participate in oral history is to palpably experience the human scale of history firsthand. The process puts the storyteller in the driver’s seat, empowering them as teachers, with interviewers (or those who listen) as their willing students. This is history constructed and exchanged between two people, history that invites you into an ongoing conversation, history that you can participate in. Oral history embodies a desire to understand the world and human experience in a personal, emotional way. It includes individual experience and emotional response as part of a critical dialogue about history. Oral history helps us to take history personally, allowing us to place ourselves inside of it, which is the ultimate vantage point for acknowledging our differences and celebrating what connects us.

What Is Oral History and How Does It Relate to Social Justice?

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.

—Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road

According to the Oral History Association (OHA), “Oral History is a field of study and a method of gathering, preserving, and interpreting the voices and memories of people, communities, and participants in past events. Oral history is both the oldest type of historical inquiry, predating the written word, and one of the most modern, initiated with tape recorders in the 1940s and now using 21st-century digital technologies.” While the OHA definition is admirably concise, it only scratches the surface of the many aspects of doing oral history: seeking out storytellers, establishing and adhering to ethical guidelines, conducting and recording interviews, transcribing the interviews verbatim, editing, fact checking, sharing stories through various kinds of media, and storing or archiving the stories for future generations to access. Oral history attracts a diverse group that includes academics, artists, social workers, advocates, teachers, librarians, historians, activists, journalists, and more. Some oral historians pursue formal training, and some do not. What most of them have in common is a desire to explore history in a way that is relatable and engaging. They are also interested in narrowing the wide gaps that exist in our interpretations of history. Beginning and experienced oral historians alike feel an urgency to preserve first-person accounts in order to gain clarity and insight into events that feel incomplete without them. An essential question for many oral historians is, who decides what constitutes “history” and who does not?

The OHA definition clearly articulates a focus on the everyday experiences and memories of individuals, as opposed to larger, more monolithic readings of history and events. It encourages the collection and sharing of first-person accounts that rarely (if ever) have a platform to be heard, let alone be considered historical. Oral history presses for an examination of history without seeking approval from authority to be considered legitimate.

Historian and activist Howard Zinn popularized the practice of “people’s history.” His description creates a useful distinction between top-down history, or “winner’s history,” and underrepresented accounts from individuals whose stories complicate or contradict dominant narratives. Zinn’s term also serves to illustrate that history should include the voices of our friends, families, neighbors, and community members. Oral history seeks to grab the mic from the constantly amplified voices of the powerful and privileged and direct it toward ordinary people with stories that deserve hearing. This impulse is an oral historian’s response to the inequity that results from ignoring or silencing the mosaic of stories that make up any historical event, time period, or social issue. As playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht states in his poem “Questions from a Worker Who Reads”: “Philip of Spain wept when his armada went down. Was he the only one to weep?” Brecht’s lines eloquently capture the intersection of oral history and social justice, asking, how would those who are not in power write history differently?

Applications for Oral History

Most oral history projects are variations on a theme—How can we share stories in a way that reveals the past, illuminates the present, and informs the future? With such an open-ended theme, the applications are limitless. New approaches for oral history are cropping up all the time, and as the world will never run out of unheard stories to listen to, it stands to reason that the variety of ways to utilize oral history also feels infinite. The following applications are only meant to serve as a primer, but they do articulate some of the ways in which Voice of Witness has taught strategies for activating oral history. While the descriptions below share a lot in common, we chose to differentiate them here to illustrate some of the needs and intentions that drive oral history projects.

Family and Cultural History

This oral history application is probably the most time-honored. Long before the written or printed word, this type of storytelling was how communities taught future generations about shared history, tradition, culture, family, and the significant events that shaped them. It remains essential even in the age of digital communication.

Oral history connects generations through the sharing of personal narrative between elders and youth. Teenagers who interview their parents, grandparents, and other community elders are surprised to hear stories of struggle and triumph they’d never heard before. Recording and preserving these intergenerational stories is one of the most basic functions of oral history. The nonprofit organization StoryCorps features many examples of this approach through their website and books such as Listening Is an Act of Love and Ties That Bind.

Whether storyteller and audience identify as family or not, there is usually a sense of urgency behind these oral histories, as elders are often imparting their lived experience before these vital connections to the past are lost.

Historical Memory

This application expands the theme of family history to include personal accounts of broader historical issues and events, such as American labor issues of the 1930s, the women’s rights movement of the late nineteenth century, Negro League baseball, Japanese American internment, and more. Compelling examples of this approach are J. Todd Moye’s Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II and Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide by Donald E. Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller. A more recent example is the publication of Zora Neale Hurston’s long-delayed Barracoon, which features her 1927 interview with Cudjo Lewis, one of the last known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade. In this collection of field reports, the application of preserving historical or cultural memory is represented by Lauren Taylor’s Resilience project, which chronicles the decades-old experiences of New York City elders, and OG Told Me, in which Pendarvis Harshaw collects the advice and stories of elder Black men in Oakland, California.

Community History

This oral history approach is popular with universities, historical societies, libraries, schools, and other community-based institutions. Some of the essential questions that guide this type of project include, What are the stories and events that have shaped our community’s history and identity? What has impacted how we see ourselves? What is our dominant narrative and how does that complement or contradict personal experience? This application has the potential for uncovering dormant stories just below the surface of established narratives, revealing a history many did not think existed or had forgotten. Oral history is particularly adept at connecting a community’s past and present. Studs Terkel’s groundbreaking Division Street is an absorbing survey of Chicago in the sixties and thoughtfully captures the city’s nuances and contradictions. The oral history–based play The Laramie Project, by the Tectonic Theater Project, explores the lives of the residents of Laramie, Wyoming, in the aftermath of the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student. Other examples are found in the work of Vermont Folklife Center, which applies oral history to “strengthen communities by building connections among the diverse peoples of Vermont.” Projects related to this theme in the present collection include Project LRN, Genevra Gallo-Bayiates’s look at the racial past and present of Evanston, Illinois, OG Told Me, Resilience, and the school/community–focused project Our Town, Our Stories.

The Process of “Forcing Space”

Voice of Witness is committed to advancing human rights by amplifying the voices of people impacted by injustice. While there is great value in preserving stories of any people or community, at Voice of Witness we focus solely on the stories of people who have endured deep injustice. Oral history is a medium that gives primary agency to the person whose story is being told, which makes it an ideal form for amplifying the stories of those who have been marginalized, disenfranchised, or harmed. Voice of Witness has described this process as “forcing space” for these marginalized voices to be heard. Titles in our series include Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons and Palestine Speaks: Narratives of Life under Occupation. Another powerful example of this approach is Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich. Field reports in this book that apply oral history to address injustice are “Behind the Wire: Mandatory Detention in Australia,” “Reentry Stories: Life after Prison and Jail,” and “After the Disaster: Rebuilding Lives and Communities in Fukushima.”

Whether or not oral histories are explicitly focused on injustice, they can still serve as meaningful tools in seeking social or political change, as they can offer testimony to problems that require urgent attention. For example, Groundswell: Oral History for Social Change is a national network of oral historians, activists, and others that apply oral history to “support movement building and transformative social change.”

The Student Experience

Empathy is the highest form of critical thinking.

—Katherine Geers, Mission San Jose High School,

Fremont, California

The skills of the oral historian, particularly communication and critical thinking, are vital tools for teaching and learning, and have broad application in educational settings. By their very nature, oral history projects reconstruct history and allow students to grapple with perspectives that are subtle and complex. Oral history has the capacity to nurture empathy and promote critical thought in classrooms and community learning spaces. Oral history inspires students and educators to establish personal relationships and connections to the events and issues. For example, students begin to place themselves inside a narrator’s story and ask themselves, how would I have felt about that? Or, what choices would I have made in that situation? Educators have described oral history as “taking history personally.” These types of experiences, in and out of the classroom, transcend the passive routine of remembering facts, figures, and dates and give teachers and learners a tangible, meaningful point of entry into a history they might otherwise not feel connected to.

Many schools and organizations that engage in service, project-based, or immersion learning harness the power of oral history as a means to develop mutually beneficial community relationships that can deepen the quality of learning. To make active listening a cruc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Making the invisible visible
• Part One: Oral history primer
• Part Two: Oral history field reports
• Part Three: Storytelling and oral history resources
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover