A Note on the Passing of Howard Zinn

There are too many good people passing away recently. I just participated in a memorial for my colleague Tim Costello yesterday, and now I find myself sitting down to write a brief note about famed historian and progressive activist Howard Zinn. I took his Spring 1986 class at Boston University ... and, let me tell you, it was quite a circus. His seminal work, A People's History of the United States, had only been published a few years previous and between that notoriety and his existing reputation as a great teacher his classes had to be held in the biggest theater in the old Nickelodeon Cinema next to the Mass Pike - both because he didn't turn away students so 300 person attendance was the norm and because BU's conservative president John Silber didn't much like him. I couldn't tell you the name of the class at this point. Doesn't matter anyway since I recall everyone on campus calling whatever course he taught "Zinn's class." He would basically mix up history, political science, sociology and a number of other social sciences into a wild stew and do what amounted to stand-up comedy every week for a couple of hours. We used a variety of texts including his People's History, and interesting ancillary material as well.

But what made the class really special was his belief in allowing real extended debates to happen between his students. Since the leaders of both the left and right wings would take the his courses, and since BU at the time was run like a "small South American dictatorship" (as I remain fond of typifying it) by Silber - and free speech and expression were crushed wherever possible - it was basically the main open forum on campus for serious debates on issues of the day. And Zinn definitely saw history as something alive that always had relevance for current events. As such, we were constantly relating things that had gone before to contemporary hot button issues. Zinn didn't interfere too much with student debates that burst out almost every week, but when he did his responses were very funny and devastating to the right-wing students.

Although left-wing students like myself didn't need any help. We were already used to hard debating since Silber everywhere elevated right-wing students to positions of authority while denying left-wing students access to the most basic resources. Be it student government or the supposedly independent campus daily student newspaper The Daily Free Press, the campus left was mocked, derided, defunded, and suppressed. But in Zinn's class we were free to hold forth without arbitrary authority interfering.

And we stomped the living bejeezus out of the right-wing students in open debate. Since this occurred in front of a large weekly crowd, the class played no small role in ensuring that progressive organizations on campus managed to survive and sometimes thrive. Word got out from Zinn's students about what was what and who was who.

The big issue at BU on 1986 - and all over the U.S. at that time - was university investments in the then-racist state of South Africa. That nation's system of allowing its white minority to politically and economically oppress its black majority was called apartheid. Which literally means "apartness" in Afrikaans, the language of the descendants of South Africa's original Dutch colonists. For some years a movement had been building worldwide - spearheaded by the South African liberation movement under the leadership of the African National Congress - to push corporations, governments and universities to pull their investments out South Africa until they capitulated and ended apartheid.

The previous year, the City of Boston had divested its holdings in South Africa as had dozens of major American corporations and universities. But Silber would have none of it. BU's leadership refused to divest. A student-led movement protested it. I was heavily involved in that movement - and by the time I was in Zinn's class, I was co-coordinator of a rally being run by a 35-campus coalition called New England Students Against Apartheid. Several of us went on hunger strike at BU even while organizing the 1000-student NESAA action on Boston Common that April. [Organizing on that scale without any sustenance but water, juice and soda for what in my case ended up being 8 days (including an overnight jail stay) is not something I can recommend to student activists today, incidentally. But we were nothing if not earnest.]

In typical fashion, Zinn gave us control of his class while on the hunger strike and allowed us to make the case for BU disinvesting from South Africa and encourage students to go to the rally. As a result of that and our other outreach activities, we got 200 students to participate that weekend - 1/5 of the 1000 attendees. More than any other college or high school.

There's a lot more I could say about that period, but I wanted folks to know how Howard Zinn never let the enforced decorum of academia stop him from having the courage of his convictions. He did what he believed was right even when it was doubtless difficult for him to do so at many points in his life. What he did for my friends and I during the anti-apartheid movement in 1986 was hardly his biggest contribution to popular movements for equality, democracy and social justice. But I think it's a fine example of the life and work of a fine human being.

Not to mention in how much I learned from him in that one semester. Even though I never completed the course, since Silber and his administrative minions expelled me from school and suspended several fellow student activists that June. After having campus police arrest 11 progressive students for the "crime" of putting up a shack in front of the "Campus" (formerly Student) Union building to represent the living conditions for black South Africans in government controlled areas called bantustans. Our trespassing case was quickly dismissed in District Court later that year, but a kangaroo court of Silber's administration, faculty and student supporters found us "guilty" the moment summer break started and our student supporters were too dispersed all over the world to come to our aid.

I saw Zinn a few more times over the years. He was a supporter of the progressive wire service, New Liberation News Service, I ran for the left press in the early 1990s. He would call me out for special favor if he saw me in the crowd in places as far flung as the Student Environmental Action Coalition conference at Colorado University at Boulder in 1991. More recently, he gave a highly-successful fundraising talk for the Boston Social Forum 2004 and was quite kind to my fellow organizers and I in praise of our efforts. He didn't have to help out grassroots progressive activists as his fame grew. But he always did. And I'll always honor his memory for that.

Howard Zinn was a stand up guy and a man of the left. We need a thousand more like him. But I'm sanguine that his lifelong efforts as an educator, historian, philosopher and activist have already done more to grow the ranks of progressive movement than any other individual I can think of. His humor, humility and sense of justice and decency has shown brightly through his popular and accessible scholarship - and through his acts - grabbed thousands of kids by the shoulders, stood them up and pointed them towards good works in the service of humankind. I fully expect his words and tales of his deeds will continue to inspire people for generations to come.

I shall miss him.