Wednesday, January 27, 2010--Professor Howard Zinn, the Peoples' Historian, died of a heart attack today in Santa Monica, CA, where he was vacationing and preparing for his next round of public speaking engagements. At the age of 87, Zinn was one of the most recognizable names of the American left and a fixture in a wide array of struggles: from the women's liberation and civil rights movements to gay and lesbian rights and marriage equality, the anti-war and student movements, anti-imperialism/anti-colonialism, and the ongoing struggles of organized labor; wherever and whenever he was asked to go, Zinn was there.
Born into a family of working-class Jewish immigrants in New York City, 1922, Howard Zinn lived many of the struggles which he chronicled. As a young man Zinn worked at the Brooklyn Navy Shipyards and participated in some of the early struggles of organized labor in the 20th century. With the outbreak of World War II, Zinn joined the armed forces and served as a bombardier, where he witnessed firsthand the horrors and futility of war and leading him to forever-after reject the notions of "good war" and nationalism.
After the war Zinn attended New York University on the GI Bill. Upon graduation in 1956 he took a job teaching at Spelman College, Atlanta's historically black women's college, until he was fired for his personal involvement in the civil rights movement. Zinn was hired as an associate professor at Boston University in 1964, where he taught until his retirement in 1988, and became deeply invested in the anti-war movement, wrote his books on People's History, sought to unionize the university and entered into a long and storied conflict with then-Boston U President John Silber. Howard Zinn not only survived Silber's politically motivated sabotage and public smear campaign, but went on to re-write the narrative of American history.
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Howard Zinn was best-known as the author of A Peoples' History of the United States and was responsible for preserving and teaching two generations of young Americans the proud history and traditions of working class struggle, militancy and protest, radicalism and rebellion and resistance to all forms of oppression. In A Peoples' History Zinn plainly rejects the "Great Man" theory of history and instead used the actual history of the United States - a history so often ignored, buried or slandered by the ruling class - to show how REAL change comes from below, from the organization of everyday people who stood tall and stood together to confront power, to say no to exploitation and death.
A Peoples' History has been and continues to be a resounding success, inspiring a broad array of Peoples' History related projects and spin-offs, such as Zinn's A Young People's History of the United States, Chris Harman's A People's History of the World, and sports writer Dave Zirin's A People's History of Sports in the United States. In 2008 Zinn teamed up with fellow radical historian and lecturer Paul Buhle and labor cartoonist Mike Konopacki to produce A People's History of American Empire, a graphic adaptation of Zinns most famous work, in which a new generation can discover the history of struggle brought to life by a rich and vibrant visual narrative which makes the content feel more like current events to new readers.
Perhaps one of Howard Zinn's greatest achievements was bringing his narrative and the message of A People's History and its companion volume, Voices of A People's History of the United States, into the homes of millions of Americans this past December when the History Channel aired the two-hour special The People Speak. This groundbreaking program -- which ought to be taught in each and every school where American history is taught -- featured some of the most talented actors, musicians and poets in the country reading and performing selections from Voices, as well as songs of protest and the everyday hardships of those who've lived, fought and all-too often died for a better world.
This amazing project, which brought the TRUE radical history of the United States to life in the mainstream media, survived one far-rightwing attack after another from such conservative talking-heads as Matt Drudge and Patrick Courrielche, who petitioned to have the special broadcast cancelled and sought to smear The People Speak and Zinn's name; since they could not dispute the actual historic content and the words once spoken and written by such historic American icons as Muhammad Ali, Eugene V. Debs, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Mother Jones and Dr. Martin Luther King. Regardless, the broadcast of The People Speak is a historic event in that it validates the very history which the capitalist ruling class and their bourgeoisie media tools have gone to great lengths to ignore and trivialize.
To truly understand Howard Zinn one must look-not only to his work preserving and sharing the People's History, but also Zinn's intent in doing so. This was no simple man of the past, this People's Historian; Zinn's grasped the importance of preserving the memory of struggle, even when the class conflict seemed insurmountably stacked against the oppressed, and applying the lessons to be learned from those past struggles, victories and defeats to build greater class-consciousness in our struggles today. From Zinn's autobiography, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train, in his own words:
"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places -- and there are so many -- where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of the world in a different direction."
But perhaps it was Howard Zinn's hope and vision for the future that most clearly defined him. Once, in a Q&A with David Zirin, a leftist sports writer and columnist for The Nation, Zinn said:
"Let's talk about socialism... I think it's very important to bring back the idea of socialism into the national discussion to where it was at the turn of the [last] century... Socialism had a good name in this country. Socialism had Eugene Debs. It had Clarence Darrow. It had Mother Jones... It had several million people reading socialist newspapers around the country...
Socialism basically said, hey, lets have a kinder, gentler society. Let's share things. Let's have an economic system that produces things not because they're profitable for some corporation, but produces things that people need. People should not be retreating from the word socialism, because you have to go beyond capitalism."
Howard Zinn and the work he so sincerely and completely dedicated his life to touched the lives and inspired the work and struggles of countless individuals for the past two generations. Though the death of this courageous man who struggled against all injustice and selflessly made himself a voice of the voiceless, both of the past and today, is a terrible loss to all of us on the left; we ought to remember Howard Zinn not only for his ideas, but also for the way he lived his life. Zinn was a humble titan of the movement of the oppressed and exploited everywhere, a prolific author and exceptionally authentic and approachable public figure, a great orator, an artist and playwright, and a dedicated and loving husband and father. Zinn was a shining example of the newly-resurgent motto and axiom "be the change". He was an inspiration to us all.
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