In 1963, Howard Zinn was fired from Spelman College, where he was chair of the History Department, because of his support for students’ civil rights activism. In 2005, he was invited back by President Beverly Daniel Tatum to give the commencement address.…
Chapter 6 in Zinn's biography You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train • Beacon Press • Sept. 1994; Sept. 2002
Mrs. [Fannie Lou] Hamer told me that a few months earlier she and five other movement people had been returning to Greenwood from a meeting in South Carolina. The bus stopped briefly in Winona, Mississippi, and some of them went into the “white” waiting room. They were all arrested, taken to jail, separated from one another. Annelle Ponder, a graduate of Clark College in Atlanta (her younger sister was a student of mine at Spelman), was beaten to the point where her face was so swollen she could barely speak. Mrs. Hamer was beaten with blackjacks all over her body.
Civil Rights Movement
Against Discouragement
Posted: May 15, 2005 by Howard Zinn Website
Category: Articles & Interviews, Articles about Howard Zinn Tags: Activism, Civil Rights Movement, Democracy, Essays and Speeches, In the South, Nationalism, Optimism, Possibility, Spelman College
Freedom Day in Hattiesburg, Mississippi
Posted: September 1, 1994 by Howard Zinn Website
Category: Articles & Interviews, Articles about Howard Zinn Tags: Activism, Civil Rights Movement, Democracy, In the South, Zinn Education Project