In June of 2024, John Brown Lives! hosted a book talk with Alice Green, author of the recent book Outsider: Stories of Growing Up Black in the Adirondacks (Center for Law and Justice 2023).
Here’s Martha Swan’s tribute to Alice Green:
Like many of you, I suppose, I had heard of Alice before I met her. I was new to the Adirondacks and working for an environmental organization when the state approved many tens of millions of dollars for the construction of a super-max prison. Many Adirondack towns were vying for the facility, environmentalists were fighting to keep it out, and a lone woman in Albany was suing the state to stop it dead in its tracks.
I imagined what a powerful coalition we could create by bringing together people concerned about environmental issues and those working to end the inhumanities of our carceral system. I needed to meet this person but it was several months before that happened.
Earlier this week, while trying to track down an old photo, I pulled a thick manila folder labeled, “Touhey, Alice and Charles,” out of a filing cabinet and found a memo to Alice, written twenty-five years earlier, to the very day, on September 27, 1999.
It must have been my opening salvo, introducing myself to her, as it begins “Happy and Jim Marsh suggested I contact you about the opportunity to bring the traveling exhibition on the slave ship, the Henrietta Marie, to our area.” She responded, and we arranged to meet, together with Charlie, in his office in November.
Thus began a twenty-five-year friendship and formative, empowering, and emboldening alliance. Alice and Charlie were among the very first champions of John Brown Lives!
They put their trust in us to recover the ’scheme of justice and benevolence’ that led Black New Yorkers to settle their own 40 acres in the Adirondacks in pursuit of the right to vote and their own vine and fig tree. They generously and very actively supported our efforts to mount the “Dreaming of Timbuctoo” Exhibition and helped to ensure that this long-buried testament to African American presence and belonging on the Adirondack landscape would become widely known, taught, and appreciated as part of the region’s history and understanding of itself.
This was personal for Alice, having grown up in a predominantly White Adirondack mining town where she never felt accepted as equal because of the color of her skin. She recounted knowing nothing about black people living here, “never mind Timbuctoo and John Brown,” until she was in her fifties and reflected that learning this history as a young Black girl would have helped her navigate her childhood in a White world. She carried that trauma in her small frame but, fortunately for us, she catalyzed that hurt into a towering, loving, lifelong commitment to fighting racism and white supremacy and to healing its wounds — both her own and, collectively, ours.
Our hearts are broken that she is gone. But let us not be mistaken.
Dr. Alice Paden Green Lives!