Documentary cites Philly couple for work with coal miners in W.Va., immigrants, and Black youth in Harlem

The colorful paintings on the walls of David and Janet Wells Greene’s West Philadelphia condo tell the stories of their 50 years of work as activists and organizers.

For most of their adult lives, the couple worked in “freedom schools” teaching labor law and employee rights to working-class people in West Virginia whose jobs in coal mining and auto factories sometimes cost them their lives, their health, or serious injury.

A recent film by Mary E. Lutz and Peter Kinoy about the couple’s work, Revolutionary Hearts, was shown at the Athens International Film + Video Festival last year and is expected to be shown at a film festival in Italy this summer. , In it, Greene is quoted saying:

“I’d been working with people who were trying to organize together, including myself, to get some justice out of this economic and political system.”

A trailer of the film can be seen here:

The film shows the Greenes — David is 78 and Janet is 77 — taking David’s paintings to a garden art exhibit at the House of Umoja in 2021, where the paintings were hung outside on a chain-link fence.

Anthony Bannister Fattah, the grandson of Queen Mother Falaka Fattah, met the couple when they moved into the building on Pine Street near 46th. He is a maintenance supervisor at the condo apartments.

After seeing the paintings, Fattah suggested the art exhibit.

“I saw the message [of the paintings] was about helping people,” Fattah said. “One of the people he painted [Steven Smith, a community activist in Ohio] had gotten framed and put in jail for something he didn’t do. He’s immortalizing common people.”

Janet and David Greene met when she came to work for the Southern Appalachian Labor School in 1979. David helped start the school, which taught workers from a number of unions understand their labor contracts and their rights.

They married in 1980. Within five years, Janet said, much of the federal funding for the education programs they had worked for ended. At the same time, unions lost workers as technology and expansion overseas eliminated jobs in the coal, steel, and other heavy industries.

After 20 years in West Virginia, the couple moved briefly to Ohio. Then, in 1987, they moved to New York, where David had been born. In New York, both went back to school to get certified to teach and Janet earned a doctorate in labor history. David taught adults literacy skills at the Young Adult Literacy Academy (YALA) in East Harlem.

He took part in massive protests against then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s budget cuts to the City University of New York and helped immigrants learn English.

In 2009, they moved back to Newark, Ohio, where they taught people who had lost their jobs due to factory closings how to fight evictions in landlord-tenant court.

In the film, Janet Greene described this as a period of “economic dislocation,” when they had to scramble to find jobs to survive: “We became internal migrants.”

The couple moved to Philadelphia in 2019 to be closer to their daughter and her family and to be near medical facilities in Philadelphia. After his first diagnosis of lymphoma in 2009, David was treated for thyroid cancer, and is currently diagnosed with chronic leukemia and also heart failure due to previous cancer treatments.

The couple not only taught miners and factory workers. In hard times, David worked in the coal mines and at an auto factory in West Virginia and at a fiberglass factory in Ohio. Janet stood in food lines at a pantry serving the unemployed.

“He came home [from the fiberglass factory] covered in white powder,” Janet said. “They didn’t have any protective equipment when they were working.” Today, the couple say they have no doubt that his work contributed to his illnesses.

Only weeks after returning to Ohio from New York in 2009, David fell ill; he lost a lot of weight and couldn’t eat. Two months after that, he was diagnosed with lymphoma.

Too sick to continue his work as an organizer and educator, David later began taking art classes at a senior center in Newark when he was 73.

“My classmates were mostly older women, and they were painting pictures of flowers and kittens,” David said in a recent interview. “I thought they were pretty, but I wanted to paint something that was more meaningful to me.

“The first painting I made was of a coal mining camp in West Virginia where Janet was born.”

Greene said he patterned his work after the Mexican muralism movement, in which artists were commissioned to paint pictures teaching the pre-colonial history of Mexico and its revolutions to the masses, who were largely illiterate.

“David has always been a fierce person who believes people need to understand more about the world than what’s right in front of them,” Janet said about David’s paintings.

When he moved to Philadelphia, David continued taking art lessons at the Fleisher Art Memorial. Fleisher also made a short film interview, Art Sparks with David Greene, here:

One of the paintings in the Greenes’ home shows three women, who appear to be Black, white and Brown, with booklets in their hands. They were leaders of the West Virginia Welfare Rights Organization. In it, they are telling striking coal miners how to apply for food stamps.

In the film, David said this scene represented “a change in roles. The usual roles that are societally promoted are that the workers work. They’re diligent, they’re hard-working, they’re honest, and the people who are on public assistance are the refuse, like the welfare mothers’ mythology or the ignorant hillbilly kind of notion. There’s lots of these stereotypes that separate the working class one part from another.”

There’s also a painting of David with Calvin Miles, an “unsung hero,” who left North Carolina, where he had worked as a sharecropper, at age 18. But he had never gone to school there. In New York, Miles was 39 when he learned to read. Miles became a teacher in the leadership development classes with David. The men raised money to travel to Venezuela and Cuba to look at the literacy programs in those countries.

Two weeks after they returned to New York, Miles died from a stroke.

The large painting over the fireplace is a portrait of Charlie Clayburn, a Black man who spent 50 years working in the coal mines. He later worked for the Black Lung Association, helping retired coal miners get benefits.

The painting shows Clayburn bringing his huge hands together in front.

David said, Clayburn would start each meeting with the coal miners clasping his hands together, fingers interlocked, and saying “the poor and working class in this county need to come together as one in order to fight this system.”