Taking Their Place Among the Giants: Performing Oral Histories of Pennsylvania’s Black Freedom Struggle

Abstract

Oral history performance is an important tool for making history, but performing oral histories also raises important questions about what kind of history is being made, issues of particular relevance to the performed histories of underrepresented minority groups, such as African Americans. This article focuses on a case study of Another River Flows, an African American oral history performance staged in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley in 2008. It examines the complex creative processes through which this performance came to fruition. More importantly, it analyzes how oral history performance was the creative vehicle through which three small, long-ignored, sometimes internally divided, and mostly quiet African American communities of the urban North came to assert a bold, collective history of struggle and resistance for themselves, one in keeping with heroic tales of the national black freedom struggle.