A VOICE SILENCED
Activist, politician Jim Green dies after battling cancer.
Jim Green, the gruff, gravelly voiced former city councillor who made it his life’s work to act for disenfranchised and marginalized residents of Vancouver, died early Tuesday morning. He was 68.
Green used his deep and abiding social activism to sway the city’s development over the last four decades, first as an organizer for the Downtown Eastside Residents Association and later as a politician and social housing developer.
His accomplishments run from the revitalized Woodward’s building complex to efforts to teach at- risk native youth about their heritage to break the cycle of drug and alcohol abuse.
“Jim was a great doer, a builder. He liked taking ideas, challenging ideas, and building things that would help people’s lives,” said Vancouver East MP Libby Davies, who with Jean Swanson first hired him as an organizer at DERA in 1980. “He was a man of big ideas in a city that could use them.”
Green was presented with the Freedom of the City, Vancouver’s highest award for civic contributions, on Sunday during a private celebration of his life where he was feted by longtime friends.
Green, who died of advanced lung cancer, was aware of his condition; when Mayor Gregor Robertson told him the Freedom of the City award came with free parking, his last public words were: “Is it transferable?”
Green told the invitationonly group that he was proud of what his city had become.
“I find this to be a remarkable, remarkable place where people can take all kinds of bad ideas and somehow have them turn around,” he told the group at the
Jim was a great doer, a builder. He liked taking ideas, challenging ideas, and building things that would help people’s lives.
LIBBY DAVIES
VANCOUVER EAST MP
East Vancouver Cultural Centre. “We were told for decades that you could not mix social housing with market housing, that it could not work, would not work. Look at Woodward’s. People are coming from all over the world to see something we were told was impossible.”
In a statement, Robertson said Green’s record “was one of consistent and tireless activism for social justice, democracy, the arts and the shaping of a fair, inclusive and sustainable city.
Born into a poor military family in Birmingham, Ala., on May 25, 1943, Green suffered under an abusive and alcoholic father who moved the family around a lot.
“Thank God I had a dysfunctional family because if I’d had a loving, caring family, I probably would have been left in South Carolina surrounded by bigotry and be part of it myself,” he told a reporter in 2005.
In 1968, facing the Vietnam draft, Green broke with his family and moved to Vancouver. It was a seminal moment in his life, but it also cost him. His brother, a Vietnam vet, refused to talk to him for more than 20 years.
But even before he arrived in Vancouver, Green was developing an activist streak.
He first began registering black voters in the American South just as desegregation was moving forward. He organized for the United Farmworkers in Colorado, and after arriving in Vancouver worked as a union shop steward during his years as a longshoreman on the docks. The entrenched political discrimination against the Canadian Seamen’s Union led him to write a massive history of the union in 1980.
Green rose up with a number of other activists in the Downtown Eastside, including Davies, her husband Bruce Eriksen, lawyer Harry Rankin and MLA Emery Barnes. All but Davies are gone now. His strong political views, particularly about the state of housing and poverty in the Downtown Eastside, made him both a hero and a target.
“Jim was a tremendous man who taught me a lot about serving the city,” said Coun. Heather Deal. “He was hugely active in the arts, he cared about his fellow man, and he didn’t believe in doing anything by half measure.”
Former premier Gordon Campbell, a legendary political foe who twice defeated Green at the polling booth and differed with him on many issues, called him “a great defender of and contributor to the city he loved.
“One thing you could say about him was that he believed in what he did and he never let you forget that,” Campbell said in a telephone call from London, where he is Canada’s High Commissioner.
Campbell defeated Green in a run for the mayor’s chair in 1990 and for the provincial seat of Point Grey in 1996.
After Green left DERA in 1992, he worked as a community developer for the New Democratic Party government. In 1994, he helped found Blade-runners, a youth empowerment and employment program that targets at- risk youth. He later turned his efforts full- time to building more social housing, and most recently was working with the Holborn Group on the massive redevelopment at Little Mountain.
Funeral service arrangements have yet to be finalized.