We hope to persuade participants in our proposed workshop for the United States Social Forum (USSF) that every activist can and should be a people’s historian and that those of us who study and teach history can contribute to building a movement for systemic transformation. As the South and the wider world become ever more entangled, through investment, immigration, cultural intermixture, cross-border alliances, and other means, it is imperative that we connect the histories that underpin this encounter. Making these connections – both forms of domination from above as well as traditions of struggle from below – can help activists work together and help communities find common ground.

Our proposed workshop involves participants in connecting local and global history and developing ways of combining history and activism. The nine members of our collective will co-facilitate the workshop. We will use popular education methods to foster interaction and dialogue among workshop participants. We will begin with a short introduction, then break into small discussion and exercise groups, each considering a different topic, reassemble for report backs, so that we all learn from each other, and conclude with a discussion of practical action steps we can all take to infuse people’s history into grassroots activism. Our main language will be English, but one collective member is fluent in Spanish, and can facilitate one small group using Spanish-language materials. We can also provide some material in French.

The topics we will prepare for the workshop intersect with the USSF cross-cutting themes of local/global economic justice, (analyzing and challenging) white supremacy and imperialism, and movement building. One of the small group exercises asks participants to visualize the links between various places in the South and the wider world at different historical moments to demonstrate our collective ability to grasp connections. For example, using information that we provide, one group may put the 1881 Atlanta black washerwomen’s strike into the context of labor militancy in the industrial world and popular protest in the colonial world; another group may discuss connections between the black freedom movement in 1960s Atlanta and decolonization around the world; and a third group may consider the parallels between the 2006 Atlanta Latina/o immigrant rights march and the popular upsurge across Latin America. We believe this kind of awareness will promote transnational solidarity, which is of strategic importance in imagining and building another world.

This model of interactive learning can be modified for any topic or region; we will distribute to workshop participants free resources for people’s history that we have developed. We will also share ideas and lessons about some of the initiatives our collective has undertaken over the past year, from producing community radio broadcasts to collectively writing a pamphlet-length people’s history of Atlanta. We hope that our example will inspire participants to produce their own people’s history materials and share them in turn with activists, cultural and media workers, and scholars brought together by the USSF.