LAKE PLACID — A year ago, Essex resident Dr. Alice Paden Green released her memoir, “Outsider: Stories of Growing Up Black in the Adirondacks.”

Green received traction and many requests for talks for her excavation of race, class, gender, and culture from a Black lens as an iron ore miner’s daughter in Witherbee.

The conversation continues Sunday, June 9 at 4 p.m. at the John Brown Farm State Historic Site in Lake Placid when Yunga Webb, founder and director of the TimbukII Initiative introduces Green for a book talk and signing followed by light refreshments.

In an unrelated appearance, Green participates in the Kickass Writers Festival’s Regional Authors Showcase hosted by Christopher Shaw, which features readings by writers Kelsey Francis, Amy Godine, Betsy Kepes, Roger Mitchell, Curt Stager, and Annie Stoltie from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday, June 8, at the Harrietstown Town Hall in Saranac Lake. The event is free. Register at acw.org.

OUTSIDER SYNOPSIS

During the height of the Great Migration, Green’s parents and five siblings — Geraldine, Joan, William, Ralph, Raymond Clyde — relocated from Greenville, South Carolina to the Adirondacks.

Her father, William, an iron ore miner until a debilitating injury, worked for the Republic Steel Corporation.

Prior to his 1948 return to the North Country, a teen, William had followed his brother, Herman, a World War I Veteran to work in the mines in Standish in the early 1920s and returned to South Carolina during the Depression.

William’s wife, Annie Mae, a homemaker and devoutly Christian woman, followed in his wake and left behind the limitations and terror of the Jim Crow South and found an arboreal Shangri-la of sorts within the Blue Line.

Green, executive director of the Center for Law and Justice, an Albany-based civil rights organization she founded in 1985, divides her time between there and Essex.

In the late 20th century, she attended a high school reunion that drew attendees from the ‘50s and ‘60s. In recalling, the “good old days,” there was a disconnect in her white classmates’ memories and her own as a member of only two Black families in Witherbee, and that’s what she explores in her sixth book, which has had a great reception.

“I never really promoted it, but I’ve gotten so many requests for presentations to talk about it,” Green said.

“As a matter of fact, I did one last night with the Adirondack Experience. I did a webinar with them. I’m going to be up in Lake Placid and Saranac Lake this weekend. I’ve gotten lots of requests because people are really getting hip to the topic. I did one thing here with Amy Godine (The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier) because she has her book, and some people think it’s a good idea to do the books together. ‘I’ve gotten responses from people I hadn’t heard from in years. They were really anxious to talk to me more about my perspective of what was going on during that period. They were there, and they feel like they didn’t understand what was happening. That’s what they say.”

Paden, and her husband, Charles Touhey, are planning a summer gathering in Essex.

“I talk about it in relationship now to reparations,” Green said.

“I’m doing a lot of work at the Center because people are interested in talking about those issues. and another thing is that the Legislature just passed a Reparations Commission Bill. It will depend very heavily on people talking about white supremacy, racism and the impact on their lives. So at the Center, we’re developing a project. I got some really great people working on it from the State University and other places talking about this issue in terms of the impact and how do you address that problem because we’ve not really identified it as something that needs to be addressed in terms of the impact of white supremacy and racism on Black people.”

WITHERBEE

In “Outsider,” Green gave readers a glimpse of what she experienced in the North Country in the following passage on Whitherbee:

“Of course, that’s where I grew up. It’s an iron-ore mining town. That was my life surrounded by mountains, which in some ways was very comforting even though I had difficult times growing up there. It’s something about the mountains and grass and everything that made you feel you were safe from the rest of the world as well. We did read about horrible things that were happening in the South. We had heard about Emmett Till and all those terrible things that were happening in the South. In one way, it was comforting. In another, it was a difficult place to grow up because we were the only Black people there, and they considered us outsiders. That’s what one of the white guys that I talked to explained to me. Certainly it was a diverse community because it had all different kinds of Europeans there, but if a Black person came in the other people would be united and saw that newcomer as an outsider and that’s how they treated you as an outsider.”

DIASPORA HISTORY

Now, Green places her experiences in the context of a collective framework.

“I’m talking about the impact of history, of the Middle Passage, enslavement (chattel slavery), Jim Crow (segregation), all of those things of white supremacy on Black people,” she said.

“Then, how do we talk about those issues now because so many people are interested in diversity, equity and inclusion? My argument is that you can’t really talk about those or make any headway until you understand the history of Black people and the oppressive forces, particularly white supremacy, have affected Black people.”

Green embeds her experiences in bigger, more complex issues beyond herself.

“I’m also arguing that people need to learn how to feel and care about these issues because the project that we’re working on is to get people to feel something about the Middle Passage and enslavement because horrible things happened and Blacks never got any kind of therapy to deal with that problem,” she said.

“So we’re looking at the history that we’re now faced with in our community because we haven’t done that.”

The Center’s goal is to have its project developed and replicated by other groups and organizations.

“To start teaching people really about those horrible things that happened to Black people in our history,” Green said.

“So, I’m jumping from my experience in Witherbee to saying that we have to look at the bigger picture.”