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
No comments:
Post a Comment