James Green, a self-described “activist scholar” whose view of organized labor’s violent birth challenged conventional visions of America as a classless society, died on Thursday in Boston. He was 71.
The cause was complications of leukemia, his son, Nicholas, said.
Professor Green taught at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and wrote six books and countless articles, but taking his cue from a Yale mentor, — to pursue history “with a purpose” — he did not confine his interests to the academy.
For decades, he participated in protest politics, including the civil rights movement, and organized community history projects and training programs for labor unions.
“My purpose was to study the past to understand injustice in our society and then to explain how men and women who suffered from injustice gained the will to struggle against it and to strive for a better society,” he wrote in an .
“My goal,” he continued, “was to tell powerful stories of people in struggle, to create narratives that cut against the grain of scholarship that characterized protesters as paranoid fanatics.”
His best-known book, published in 2006, was “Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America,” chronicling what he called the biggest news event since Lincoln’s assassination.
The May 4, 1886, rally at Chicago’s Haymarket Square had been organized to protest the killing of several workers by police the day before during a strike at the McCormick Reaper Works to support an eight-hour day and other demands.
As the police advanced to disperse the peaceful Haymarket rally, somebody tossed a bomb — what Professor Green called a graphic demonstration of how the invention of dynamite had altered the calculus of power. Over the next few decades, other bombings of targets that embodied the establishment were linked to anarchists, labor agitators and leftists.
The bomb and the gunfire that ensued killed seven police officers and several civilians.
“It is impossible to say exactly what might have been different if the police hadn’t killed four strikers at McCormick’s, if the police chief hadn’t decided to break up the Haymarket meeting, if someone hadn’t thrown the bomb,” Professor Green wrote, “but it is clear that, in some sense, we are today living with the legacy of those long-ago events.”
The eight anarchists who were charged in the crime were reviled as murderers and revered as martyrs. The bombing impeded gains for organized labor, besmirched the image of immigrants and radicals, and raised enduring questions about free speech and fair trials.
Professor Green shifted his focus to Appalachia in his 2015 book, “The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia’s Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom.” Here he explored what he called “the largest working-class uprising in the nation’s history.” The book was the basis for “The Mine Wars,” an episode of the PBS series “American Experience.”
He singled out , better known as Mother Jones, for her role in the struggle.
“Acting largely on her own,” he wrote, “one woman had done more than the nation’s top union leaders to alert reformers to the suppression of civil liberties in industrial America.”
James Robert Green was born in Oak Park, Ill., on Nov. 4, 1944. His father, Gerald, was a math teacher and school administrator. His mother, the former Mary Katherine DiVall, was a secretary.
She survives him, as does his daughter, Amanda Green, from his marriage to Carol McLaughlin, which ended in divorce; his wife, Janet Lee Grogan; a brother, Mark; and two sisters, Mary Beth Kress and Nancy Herbert. He lived in Somerville, Mass.
During summer breaks from college, he worked as an intern for Senator Paul H. Douglas, an Illinois Democrat and leading liberal, and considered a career in government himself. He graduated from Northwestern University with a bachelor of arts degree in 1966 and received a doctorate in history from Yale.
Deciding to teach, he joined the faculty at Brandeis University. He began teaching at the University of Massachusetts in 1977, eventually becoming a professor of history and labor studies. He had been an emeritus professor there since 2014.
“Many of us came of professional age in the 1960s, with the hope that we could affect public policy or build movements for social justice,” Professor Green said in an article adapted from his book “Taking History to Heart: The Power of the Past in Building Social Movements” (2000).
He wrote that he had learned “that historical narratives can do more than just redeem the memory of past struggles; they can help people think of themselves as historical figures who, like those who came before them, have crucial moral and political choices to make.
“Sometimes stories of the past provide hope,” Professor Green added, “sometimes guidance.”