This year is the 60th anniversary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Howard Zinn wrote about SNCC’s participation at the 1963 March on Washington. “...the youngest speaker on the platform, John Lewis...lashed out in anger, not only at the Dixiecrats, but at the Kennedy Administration, which had been successful up to that moment in directing the indignation of 200,000 people at everyone but itself.”
By Howard Zinn • The Nation • August 6, 1960 and republished March 23, 2015
One afternoon some weeks ago, with the dogwood on the Spelman College campus newly bloomed and the grass close-cropped and fragrant, an attractive, tawny-skinned girl crossed the lawn to her dormitory to put a notice on the bulletin board. It read: Young Ladies Who Can Picket Please Sign Below.
The notice revealed, in its own quaint language, that within the dramatic revolt of Negro college students in the South today another phenomenon has been developing. This is the upsurge of the young, educated Negro woman against the generations-old advice of her elders: be nice, be well-mannered and ladylike, don’t speak loudly, and don’t get into trouble. On the campus of the nation’s leading college for Negro young women—pious, sedate, encrusted with the traditions of gentility and moderation—these exhortations, for the first time, are being firmly rejected.
Published in The Progressive • November 7, 2008
Reading Edward Rothstein’s sour commentary on Studs Terkel in the New York Times on November 2, I was surprised that Rothstein, presumably a sophisticated thinker, seems to believe one can separate one’s political views from a historical narrative, even from oral history.
“It is, in fact, impossible to separate Mr. Terkel’s political vision from the contours of his oral history,” he wrote.
Published in The Nation • October 28, 2008
It is sad to see both major parties agree to spend $700 billion of taxpayer money to bail out huge financial institutions that are notable for two characteristics: incompetence and greed. There is a much better solution to the financial crisis. But it would require discarding what has been conventional wisdom for too long: that government intervention in the economy ("big government") must be avoided like the plague, because the "free market" can be depended on to guide the economy toward growth and justice. Surely the sight of Wall Street begging for government aid is almost comic in light of its long devotion to a "free market" unregulated by government.
Published in The Nation • April 7, 2008
We might wonder why no Democratic Party contender for the presidency has invoked the memory of the New Deal and its unprecedented series of laws aimed at helping people in need. The New Deal was tentative, cautious, bold enough to shake the pillars of the system but not to replace them.
Published by ZCommunications • September 30, 2004; The Nation • September 20, 2004
In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy?
I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played.
The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world.
Published in The Nation • February 2, 2002
Every day for several months, the New York Times did what should always be done when a tragedy is summed up in a statistic: It gave us miniature portraits of the human beings who died on September 11—their names, photos, glimmers of their personalities, their idiosyncrasies, how friends and loved ones remember them.
As the director of the New York Historical Society said: "The peculiar genius of it was to put a human face on numbers that are unimaginable to most of us.... It's so obvious that every one of them was a person who deserved to live a full and successful and happy life. You see what was lost."
I was deeply moved, reading those intimate sketches—"A Poet of Bensonhurst...A Friend, A Sister...Someone to Lean On...Laughter, Win or Lose..." I thought: Those who celebrated the grisly deaths of the people in the twin towers and the Pentagon as a blow to symbols of American dominance in the world—what if, instead of symbols, they could see, up close, the faces of those who lost their lives? I wonder if they would have second thoughts, second feelings.
Then it occurred to me: What if all those Americans who declare their support for Bush's "war on terrorism" could see, instead of those elusive symbols—Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda—the real human beings who have died under our bombs? I do believe they would have second thoughts.
The Nation
SNCC: The Battle-Scarred Youngsters
Updated on October 11, 2020 by Howard Zinn Website
Category: Articles & Interviews, Articles by Howard Zinn Tags: Activism, Civil Rights Movement, In the South, SNCC, The Nation
When Respectability Was No Longer Respectable, and Virtue Required Acting Out, Not Leaning In
Updated on October 10, 2020 by Howard Zinn Website
One afternoon some weeks ago, with the dogwood on the Spelman College campus newly bloomed and the grass close-cropped and fragrant, an attractive, tawny-skinned girl crossed the lawn to her dormitory to put a notice on the bulletin board. It read: Young Ladies Who Can Picket Please Sign Below. The notice revealed, in its own quaint language, that within the dramatic revolt of Negro college students in the South today another phenomenon has been developing. This is the upsurge of the young, educated Negro woman against the generations-old advice of her elders: be nice, be well-mannered and ladylike, don’t speak loudly, and don’t get into trouble. On the campus of the nation’s leading college for Negro young women—pious, sedate, encrusted with the traditions of gentility and moderation—these exhortations, for the first time, are being firmly rejected.
Category: Articles & Interviews, Articles by Howard Zinn, News Tags: Activism, In the South, Spelman College, Student Activism, The Nation
Who’s Afraid of Radical History?
Updated on October 11, 2020 by Howard Zinn Website
Mitch Daniels’s covert war on Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.
Category: News Tags: Articles about Howard Zinn, The Nation
Howard Zinn Defends Studs Terkel from Red-Baiting in the Times
Updated on May 27, 2019 by Howard Zinn Website
Category: Articles & Interviews, Articles by Howard Zinn Tags: Activist, Essays and Speeches, The Nation, The Progressive
Spend the Bailout Money on the Middle Class
Updated on April 25, 2015 by Howard Zinn Website
Category: Articles & Interviews, Articles by Howard Zinn Tags: Economics, The Nation
Beyond the New Deal
Updated on April 10, 2015 by Howard Zinn Website
Category: Articles & Interviews, Articles by Howard Zinn Tags: New Deal, Politics, The Nation
The Optimism of Uncertainty
Updated on March 8, 2016 by Howard Zinn Website
Category: Articles & Interviews, Articles by Howard Zinn Tags: American Empire, Essays and Speeches, Optimism, Possibility, The Nation, ZCommunications
The Others
Updated on February 3, 2020 by Howard Zinn Website
Category: Articles & Interviews, Articles by Howard Zinn Tags: 9/11, American Empire, Iraq, The Nation, War