- Howard Zinn (1922-2010), Historian as Story Teller
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There are only a few modern historians whose work has reached millions and whose appeals for a different kind of society, embedded in their work, have changed lives. In my lifetime and experience with English-language scholars, these come down to three men: W. E. B. DuBois, E. P. Thompson, C. L. R. James and Howard Zinn. They were all notable [End Page 293] activists and institution-builders as well as scholars, speakers who could hold crowds or small groups of students in seminar rooms with the same extraordinary skill and commitment to interaction.
I was lucky enough to know three of them pretty well, to become an authorized biographer of one and a comic-arts adaptor of another, not to mention being an ordinary fan in crowds listening with rapt attention and some awe to those same three speaking at various times. To point now to the specialness of Zinn takes nothing away from the others. Indeed, his passing is like the close of an age in which the passing of colonialism and capitalism could be assumed, the great leftwing orator/historian an enlightener whose memory had offered up a lamp in the darkness yielding to light of a better day.
How and why was Zinn so special? His memoir, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train (1994), was modest but helped in putting the picture together. The proposal to inject his life story as part of the narrative was perhaps my best contribution to A People's History of American Empire (Howard Zinn, Paul Buhle, Mike Konopacki, 2008), the comic adaptation of his earlier best-seller A People's History of the United States (1980).1 Zinn was never separated from his origins and, you might say, grew as slowly into himself as the son of a Trinidad schoolteacher who foreclosed early on upward mobility by hanging around the cricket field — C. L. R. James.
Although Zinn's impoverished Jewish parents, Edward Zinn and Jennie Rabinowitz Zinn, in Brooklyn, mourned anarchist martyrs Sacco and Vanzetti when they were executed in 1927, and although he found himself in the middle of a 1930s demonstration in New York's Union Square (without quite knowing what a Communist might be), it was his experiences as a bombadier in the antifascist war which fundamentally shaped his politics — not so unlike E. P. Thompson. After his wartime service a GI scholarship and part-time work enabled him to go to New York University, then on to Columbia for graduate studies in history. A serious young scholar, he wrote a prize-winning biographical study of Depression-era, left-leaning Fiorello LaGuardia (La Guardia in Congress (1959). In 1956 he went as Chair of History to Spelman College in Atlanta, a college for black female students. Among those he taught was novelist Alice Walker, who has called him 'the best teacher I ever had'. He was soon involved in the growing civil rights movement and served on the committee of the Student National Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC). Encouraging his students, who included some rising civil rights leaders at Spelman and its male counterpart, Morehouse, seemed to him a simple matter of justice, but his increasingly radical reputation did not please the authorities and he was, of course, cashiered for his efforts. One wonders what his life as a writer and lecturer might have become if he had not been expelled from teaching in an all-black college.
SNCC: the New Abolitionists, published in 1965, was a different kind of history, a narrative of a kind which had arguably not been seen in the US [End Page 294] since the 1930s and forties, nor could have been. This was a current history of a radical organization on the rise which embodied the advance both of African-Americans and also of a broader radical spirit. A year earlier, C. L. R. James and his followers had issued a pamphlet, Negro Americans Take the Lead, whose pregnant title captures the spirit of the movement and of Zinn's work as well...