Alice Green (Photo provided)

In a place like the Adirondacks, it’s easy to feel alone or alienated when you look around and don’t see many people who look like you. Without a connection to the history of those who came before you, that isolation is all the more poignant.

Dr. Alice Green, a staunch civil rights advocate who grew up in the Essex County hamlet of Witherbee, described this experience in her memoir “Outsider: Stories of Growing Up Black in the Adirondacks.” She also spoke about it over and over again in interviews throughout her lifetime, giving a voice to other Black Adirondackers whose similar experiences may have otherwise gone unwritten.

Green died on Tuesday after going into cardiac arrest at a hospital in Albany, the Albany Times Union reported this week. She was 84.

The legacy she leaves behind is immense. Her impact has touched not just the Adirondacks, but the state as a whole. She was the legislative director for the New York Civil Liberties Union in the early 1980s and founded the Center for Law and Justice in Albany in 1985, an organization that educates communities about civil rights and criminal justice. She was appointed the deputy commissioner of the state Division of Probation and Correctional Alternatives by Gov. Mario Cuomo in 1986. In 1998, she ran for lieutenant governor on the Green Party ticket with Al Lewis, raising the profile of the party in New York.

Still, ever since her family first stepped off a train to the Adirondacks on Aug. 13, 1948 — relocating from Greenville, South Carolina during the Great Migration — she continued to return here and retain a residence here until her death. She established the Paden Institute and Retreat for Writers of Color in 1997, bringing up to three writers a year to Essex to write here free of charge.

“She was a legendary champion of civil rights, a fierce advocate for justice who fought for national causes and for individual families,” said Peter Slocum, president of the Essex County Historical Society and Adirondack History Museum. “She was also an incredibly important Adirondack historian, having grown up in southern Essex County mining country. Her memoir … was published last year, and helped bring to light often-overlooked realities of Adirondack life.”

Amy Godine, author of “The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier,” remembers first meeting Green when she was invited to attend Green’s family reunion in Witherbee many years ago. She was touched that though the family had fanned out across the country, they still claimed this place as their home.

“That moved me very much to see that sense of investment and love for the region,” she said.

“She was tough, she was very outspoken and very blunt and fierce in her perspective and her vision of the region,” Godine added.

When they appeared on panels together, they were “sometimes on the same page, often not at all,” she added. Godine’s view of the Adirondacks was informed by being a “lay historian,” while Green’s was deeply rooted in her own experience.

In a 2019 interview with the Enterprise, Green described growing up in Witherbee during the Civil Rights Movement. She experienced social segregation — white residents were friendly, but Black families were not really accepted into the social fabric of the community. Friendships with white friends didn’t go far; oftentimes white friends would not visit her home.

“We were totally shunned by our closest friends while their brother was in town,” Green wrote in an afterword in Sally E. Svenson’s 2017 book “Blacks in the Adirondacks.”

“As we grew older, we expressed our disappointment and hurt, but their behavior never changed even into adulthood,” she wrote. “We felt hopelessly locked out of the white world and confined to our own, which lacked a critical mass of black peers to sustain our need for honest and meaningful social interactions.”

In a January review of Godine’s book in the Adirondack Almanack, Green wrote that knowing the history of Black settlers would have changed how she viewed the place she grew up in.

“It would have been inspirational and important for my psychological and social development if I had known that Blacks had ventured into the Adirondacks long before my family went there seeking a good life,” she wrote. “My siblings and I were convinced that we were the first Blacks to settle in the area. We did not know because no one around us knew.”

Through her writings, Green has probed her own upbringing, uncovering new findings and connecting the dots between her experiences and how they impacted her.

“She was an eyewitness to her own upbringing,” Godine said.

“She was something fierce. I’m going to miss that. I already miss it,” Godine added. “There’s no one like her. No activist, Black or white, speaking to justice who had her passion and investment and had her focus and her serenity, too. She had a kind of calm about her, even when she was really calling out an audience for racism.”

After the state allocated funding in 2019 through the Environmental Protection Fund to help increase the diversity of the Adirondacks, Green told the Enterprise that simply raising numbers can only do so much. Diversity is great, but inclusion is necessary, she said.

Green wrote in the afterward of Svenson’s book that inclusion is “undoubtedly a complex and uncomfortable process.”

“It calls upon white people to learn about and embrace the true history and culture of others and to examine their own implicit biases and unearned privileges. In addition, it demands that whites accept change that can disturb their comfort level, such as having a person of color move next door to them, and to think about and treat them as equals.”

Central to feeling a sense of belonging is having a connection to the history of those who came before you.

It wasn’t long ago that the history of Black settlers in the Adirondacks, this region’s connection to the abolitionist movement and its ties to the Underground Railroad were largely unknown to most people living here. John Brown Lives! — the friends group for John Brown Farm– wasn’t established until 1999. The North Star Underground Railroad Museum in Chesterfield opened in 2011.

Uncovering a history that was, as Green called it, “long buried and forgotten,” has taken a concentrated effort by historians like Godine. That work still continues today.

Taking that history and educating communities about it is another feat. Organizations like the Adirondack Diversity Initiative have taken up that mantle.

“Dr. Alice Green was no less than the best of us,” said ADI Director Tiffany Rea-Fisher. “She used her time on this Earth to fight for the rights of the disenfranchised while creating space for artists to dream and play. Our Adirondack community is definitely a bit dimmer now that she is no longer physically with us. Just two weeks ago, she gathered people in her home for discussions about art and reparations. Speaking as a next generation Black Adirondacker hoping to make an impact, her kindness was clear.

“She always picked up the phone when I called and provided guidance when asked with ease and care,” she added. “She will be so deeply missed and never replicated. However, how she lived her life is a beautiful road map of how to have a positive impact on community for those of us following in her footsteps.”

As Green wrote in the Adirondack Almanack in January, the work is far from done.

“While there are new and encouraging initiatives taking place in the Adirondacks that are dedicated to achieving such goals, it is difficult to discern their impact on reducing racial injustice,” she wrote.

Green pointed out that many communities here are still approximately 95% white. (The village of Saranac Lake, as of the 2020 census, is 89% white. Lake Placid is 93% white; Tupper Lake, 94%.)

“Seventy percent of the Adirondack’s small Black population is imprisoned under conditions reminiscent of chattel slavery, a system that denied millions of Blacks the right to vote and exploited their labor, ensuring that many of them would remain in poverty long after emancipation,” she wrote.

Green’s death is an immeasurable loss for the Adirondacks, but her legacy will live on through the efforts of local civil rights advocates and organizations in the name of equality and justice.

“Change is undoubtedly hard, and even well-meaning people will have to struggle to implement it,” Green wrote in her afterword. “But it must start somewhere.”