From
1956 through
1963, Zinn chaired the
Department of
History and social sciences at
Spelman College. He participated in the
Civil Rights Movement and lobbied with historian August Meier "to end the practice of the
Southern Historical Association of holding meetings at segregated hotels".
While at Spelman, Zinn served as an adviser to the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (
SNCC) and wrote about sit-ins and other actions by SNCC for
The Nation and
Harper's. In
1964,
Beacon Press published his book SNCC:
The New Abolitionists.
Zinn collaborated with historian
Staughton Lynd mentoring student activists, among them
Alice Walker, who would later write
The Color Purple; and
Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the
Children's Defense Fund. Edelman identified Zinn as a major influence in her life and, in that same journal article, tells of his accompanying students to a sit-in at the segregated white section of the
Georgia state legislature.
Although Zinn was a tenured professor, he was dismissed in June 1963 after siding with students in the struggle against segregation. As Zinn described[32] in The Nation, though Spelman administrators prided themselves for turning out refined "young ladies," its students were likely to be found on the picket line, or in jail for participating in the greater effort to break down segregation in public places in
Atlanta. Zinn's years at Spelman are recounted in his autobiography
You Can't Be
Neutral on a
Moving Train: A
Personal History of
Our Times. His seven years at Spelman College, Zinn said, "are probably the most interesting, exciting, most educational years for me. I learned more from my students than my students learned from me."[33]
While living in
Georgia, Zinn wrote that he observed 30 violations of the
First and Fourteenth amendments to the
United States Constitution in
Albany, Georgia, including the rights to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and equal protection under the law. In an article on the civil rights movement in
Albany, Zinn described the people who participated in the
Freedom Rides to end segregation, and the reluctance of
President John F. Kennedy to enforce the law.[34] Zinn has also pointed out that the
Justice Department under
Robert F. Kennedy and the
Federal Bureau of Investigation, headed by
J. Edgar Hoover, did little or nothing to stop the segregationists from brutalizing civil rights workers.[35]
Zinn wrote about the struggle for civil rights, as both participant and historian.[36] His second book,
The Southern Mystique[37] was published in 1964, the same year as his SNCC: The New Abolitionists in which he describes how the sit-ins against segregation were initiated by students and, in that sense, were independent of the efforts of the older, more established civil rights organizations.
In
2005, forty-one years after his firing, Zinn returned to Spelman where he was given an honorary
Doctor of Humane Letters and delivered the commencement address[38][39] where he said in part, during his speech titled, "
Against Discouragement," that "the lesson of that history is that you must not despair, that if you are right, and you persist, things will change.
The government may try to deceive the people, and the newspapers and television may do the same, but the truth has a way of coming out. The truth has a power greater than a hundred lies."[40]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_zinn
- published: 19 Nov 2013
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