From U.S. foreign policy, civil disobedience, terrorism and war to the actions of Boston University Chancellor John Silber, world-renowned historian and social-activist Howard Zinn has never been one to keep his mouth shut. From his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War protests to selling more than one million copies of his National-Book-Award-nominated A People’s History of the United States, the BU professor emeritus, you could say, has a history of history.
Despite the fine lines that crease his face, the white hair on top of his head and the 80 years behind him, Zinn’s energy and vigor have continued to captivate audiences and unite activists throughout the decades.
Just this past month alone, the Auburndale, Mass. resident has traveled throughout the United States, spending his days in what seems to be a frenzy, speaking at high schools and colleges about his opposition to the current war in Iraq.
“I draw upon the history of American foreign policy, the history of America’s wars, and I find certain patterns,” Zinn said. “I find a pattern of deceit. I believe that what we’ve been doing – what the [Bush] administration has been doing – is pulling what you might call an ‘iron curtain’ around Iraq so that we see nothing else. We’re all focused on Saddam Hussein as the one tyrant in the world, focused on Iraq as the one major place in the world, and if we don’t look anywhere else, then we might actually believe that.”
Widely known for his anti-war sentiments and open condemnation of the Bush administration, Zinn has been called everything from a radical to a pacifist to a humanitarian. But whatever his title, his recognition and accomplishment transcends labels. In addition to BU, Zinn has taught at Spelman College in Atlanta, has been a history fellow at Harvard University and a visiting professor at both the University of Paris and the University of Bologna, Italy.
The author of more than 20 books and plays and countless articles and editorials, Zinn has also won various prestigious awards, including the Thomas Merton Award, the Eugene V. Debs Award, the Upton Sinclair Award, the Lannan Literary Award and the Sacco-Vanzetti Award for Social Justice. When Zinn speaks, people listen.
As novelist Alice Walker, a student of Zinn’s at Spelman during the 1950s, wrote, “What can I say that will in any way convey the love, respect and admiration I feel for this unassuming hero who was my teacher and mentor, this radical historian and people-loving troublemaker, this man who has stood and suffered with us? Howard Zinn was the best teacher I ever had, and the funniest.”
The son of European Jewish immigrants, Zinn grew up in the slums of Brooklyn, working in a shipyard from the age of 18 to 21. These early years would prove to be a foreshadowing of his active future – as he began rallying the shipyard workers, describing himself as “a young labor organizer.” In 1943, he enlisted in the U.S. Army as a bombardier – an experience he has said drove him toward a new understanding of the horrible nature of war and eventually led to his consistent involvement in the anti-war movement. Upon his return from the World War II, he attended Columbia University under the auspices of the G.I. Bill, earning a doctorate in history in 1956.
“I wanted to study something that would enable me to be politically active and, at the same time, to do something that I enjoyed doing more than working in a shipyard,” Zinn recalled, explaining that being a lawyer was out of the question for anyone with radical views during this time. “I decided on history because history was basic. You need a historical background for everything.”
A historical background proved to suit him well. Upon graduation, Zinn was offered a teaching position at Atlanta’s Spelman College, an black women’s school that would soon be at the center of Civil Rights protest – with Zinn fully immersed.
Although his involvement in the movement would later contribute to his termination from Spelman in 1963 for “insubordination,” looking back, Zinn says it remains the personal achievement he is most proud of today.
“Being involved in struggles in Atlanta and Albany, Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi, that was a defining moment and an educational experience for me, and it was an important moment in the nation’s history,” he said.
Zinn began teaching in the Political Science Department at BU in 1964 – a campus on which his name remains a legacy. A vocal social critic who spoke candidly against war, Zinn was no stranger to political protest. He became involved in the anti-Vietnam activism that pervaded the BU campus during the late 1960s – demonstrations that became so intense in the spring of 1970 that the administration was forced to cancel that year’s commencement and final exams.
Those were the crucial years, Zinn says, when BU became a center for antiwar agitation. BU served as a haven for rallies, demonstrations, march-ins, walkouts and progressive political thought. In the fall of 1968, Raymond Kroll, a deserter from the U.S. Army, took sanctuary in Marsh Chapel and was surrounded by thousands of students “symbolically protecting him” before he was led away by the agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation five days later to face his sentence, Zinn said.
Always at the heart of the fury, Zinn participated in all-night teach-ins and demonstrations, openly speaking out against the Vietnam War.
“I’m against war, but I don’t call myself a pacifist,” he says now. “You don’t want to rule out the theoretical possibility that there might be some circumstance where some small show of force would prevent an enormous tragedy … But war is just the opposite – it’s not the focused small use of force against some large disaster, but war is an enormous use of force, unfocused, indiscriminate, with dubious results … So what you’re left with when you contemplate war is this principle: that the means are horrible and certain, and the end is uncertain. And when you confront a situation like that – of certain horrible means or uncertain ends – then war cannot be justified.”
When controversial long-time BU president and current chancellor John Silber took his post at the university in 1971, Zinn’s outspoken politics, he said, almost cost him his job.
“John Silber came to BU in 1971 and almost immediately established himself as a ‘law and order’ man,” Zinn explained. “[He was] a man who did not like demonstrations, a man who called the police at the first sign of a demonstration and who stood by and watched while his students were being arrested and enjoyed it … He created an atmosphere of fear in the sense that if a teacher didn’t have tenure, a teacher didn’t want to speak out.”
In 1979, Zinn, along with four other tenured professors – the so-called “BU Five” – were charged by the university with violating Article 21 of their faculty union contract, a no-strike provision, by refusing to cross the picket line of striking secretaries. Instead, they held their classes out on Commonwealth Avenue, with Silber deeming the actions of the five professors “not adult or morally responsible behavior,” according to a 1979 article in The Daily Free Press.
“Our situation became a cause not only in the city, but in the country and abroad,” Zinn recounted. “We received letters from a professor in France, there were editorials in The [Boston] Globe, we had poetry fundraisers … and finally, in one of his rare acceptances of defeat, Silber [and the university] dropped the charges against us.”
Not only has Zinn received global recognition for his activism at BU, but also for his best-selling alternative history text, A People’s History of the United States.
The book, which begins with Columbus’ landing in America from the perspective of the American Indians, came out a year after the BU Five incident and has sold over a million copies. As an educator, Zinn said, the book’s huge success is promising.
“[Selling over a million copies] indicates to me that there are a million people in the country, maybe more, who are looking for a different view of American society and American history, and it’s encouraging,” he said. “As an educator, of course you want to have an influence. By writing that book and reaching so many people I feel that I’ve had an influence, which is an achievement I feel good about.”