Writing Human Rights History

Adam Hochschild loves the history of the underdog, of social movements that apparently come of out nowhere to successfully challenge entrenched ideas and power. We like these stories, too, but often, Hochschild says, they come to us as heroic ventures led by heroic people, who often are members of the upper class elite. Hochschild, a co-founder of Mother Jones magazine who will speak Monday at Duke, writes these histories with a different touch and finds the forgotten characters who played important parts. In King Leopold's Ghost, it was Roger Casement and George Washington Williams who brought the world's attention to Belgium abuses in the Congo.  In his latest book on the British anti-slavery movement, Bury the Chains, he looks beyond the better-known story of aristocrat and abolitionist leader William Wilberforce (told last year in the movie "Amazing Grace") to shed light on lesser-known characters such as Thomas Clarkson and a brilliant ex-slave named Olaudah Equiano.

In an interview last week, Hochschild talked about why these kinds of figures play such an important role in his histories and the success and failures of social movements.

 Q: Why are you attracted to people such as Casement and Clarkson?

Hochschild: I feel like the only way to get people to history is to tell it through a group of characters. When I find a patch of history I want to write about I go looking for characters through whom to tell the story.

They are a mixture of heroes and villains. Few people in real life are heroes in the conventional sense, always doing the right thing; none of us are like that, and none of us are like that in history. People are filled with doubts, they make wrong decisions, and sometimes they change sides.

In particular, I'm interested in people who have some transforming experience. In Bury the Chains, there's the story of James Stevens who was something of a dandy who was completely transformed by watching the trial of slaves and became one of the abolitionist leaders.

Q: Is there a general theme to what you learn from these people?

Hochschild: One of the things that I hope to show is that at any given point in time people make moral choices, even if they don't think they do. The fascinating thing about the British anti-slavery movement is that up to the point that it burst into public life, everyone took slavery for granted. Movements that make people suddenly see something in moral terms for a first time fascinate me.

I hope the readers raise the same questions. You wonder, what will people 200 years from now look back at what we take for granted and think of it as an outrage?

Q. You focus on the grass roots activism that helped power these social movements, but the elites were involved as well. Are both necessary for a movement to be successful?

Hochschild: It's hard to come up with a formula true for all times and places, but for a society to go through a complete revolution, some combination of elite and mass movement is important. There have always been elite sympathizers in movements, but you don't get anywhere unless there is strong pressure from large number of people. But it helps to move things along faster if you are able to appeal across class lines.

The issue is the history of these movements tends to focus on the elites. If you are writing about a long-ago period, the people who kept records for later historians tend to be better educated. For Bury the Chains, I'm lucky that so many of the activists left detailed records. There is the extraordinary Olaudah Equiano who wrote eloquently. But one of the frustrations in King Leopold's Ghost was that there were so few voices of the people of the Congo.

Q. History can be upsetting, and there was a strong reaction in Belgium to King Leopold's Ghost. How did Bury the Chains go over in England?

Hochschild: The book appeared in 2005, and the 200th anniversary of abolition was in 2007. The reaction to the book was very friendly, but the interesting thing was the country's reaction to the anniversary.

I had expected the anniversary to pass without much notice, because in 1907, the 100th anniversary, there hadn't been a single commemorative event. But last year was different. There were more than two dozen specials on abolition on BBC alone. And what pleasantly surprised me was not only did they celebrate the history, they celebrated in the terms I wrote about it, giving attention to the popular movement, rather than just focusing on Wilberforce and his friends.

What I think happened is now there is such a large population from the Caribbean in England, these people weren't going to sit back and see the abolitionist story told in the traditional way. They wanted to see their voices in it as well.