A Historian Finds his Calling: Harvey Schwartz

by Odile Sullivan-Tarazi

(Ed. note: Odile Sullivan-Tarazi sits on the board of Independent Publishers of New England (IPNE), a sister organization of BAIPA, where she chairs the book awards program. She’s sharing this profile of one author, Harvey Schwartz, his work, and his experience with the awards program.)

As a boy, history was for him all about kings and generals and military battles.

And when in college Harvey Schwartz majored in history, it was largely with the same focus, albeit now the grown-up academic version. It wasn’t until he was sent to the American South in the early to mid-1960s, during his stint in the army, that he came to understand history differently. “At its core,” he says, “it’s really about the struggles of people to survive, to overcome hardship and oppression, and to achieve some measure of dignity and social justice.” 

In the town where he was stationed, he saw the daily indignities and belittlement suffered by people of color, and unthinkable brutality as well. It’s not that racism was absent in other parts of the country, he says. It’s that here, it was so blatant, so openly vicious. So accepted. 1963 was no time to be in the South if you weren’t white.

It was his experience in the army that led Harvey to think seriously of becoming a historian, of documenting history as it unfolded — or before it was lost. He joined the Civil Rights Movement and returned to graduate school, where he deepened and diversified his study. 

With his interest awakened in the struggles of people to survive and to thrive, to achieve social justice, it’s no wonder that he and the labor movement found each other, and Harvey found his purpose. This was to be his contribution to helping bring social justice to underserved and maligned communities. “Want better wages, safer work, more humane hours, protection from discrimination, representation if you get charged with this or that, and dignity on the job?” he asks. “Try joining a labor union. Does every union practice the highest level of union democracy and provide truly solid representation? Maybe not. But being in a union is generally far better than the alternative. Despite its ups and downs and missteps, the labor movement offers most Americans their best chance at a dignified life.” 

Harvey’s been sought out and thanked many times over the years by those grateful for his work. At one union march, a member approached him to thank him for an oral history of their union that Harvey had recently completed. “You collected all these interviews for us and made sense out of them,” he said. “Well, someone had to do it,” Harvey responded. “No,” the man replied, “All that stuff might have just disappeared. You saved it.” Historians of the distant past, Harvey says, or historians not working close to their subjects, just don’t have experiences like that. Experiences he savors.

Harvey has made oral histories something of a specialty. His book Labor Under Siege is another oral history, one that picks up in terms of timeline where an earlier book, Solidarity Stories, left off. Both books cover the history of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) in the workers’ own words. Our judges called this second volume clear and informative, a worthy cause and timely reminder. The individual voices, resonant and compelling. The overarching narrative, providing just the right background to place the individual accounts into perspective.

Labor Under Siege has taken four awards. “I’d say I’ve been a bit lucky there,” Harvey remarks. “Maybe the timing was right. Maybe 2023 was just ‘labor’s year’ with the organizing drives of Solidarity Summer in the recent background. Regardless, I am very appreciative of these awards. The IPNE award is especially gratifying. The folks at IPNE have been incredibly gracious and interested in what I’ve tried to do.” 

Harvey’s recipe for a rich and happy life is to find what you love, what you are supposed to do with your time on this planet, and then to go for it “with everything you can muster.” We are fortunate that what he chose to do with his time is to shine a light on the history of workers’ rights: their struggles, their triumphs, the collective benefit they bequeath to all of us.