Mid-Shore Life

By Dwayne Eutsey

Someone I admired very much, activist historian Howard Zinn, died recently at age 87.

You may know Zinn from a book he wrote in 1980 called A People’s History of the United States. With over 1 million copies sold since its publication, this landmark (and controversial) volume retells American history from the point of view of “common people” often not included in our official historical narrative—Native Americans, slaves, workers, the poor, women, pacifists, anarchists, unionizers.

Last month, the History Channel broadcast “The People Speak”, a documentary co-produced, incidentally, by Easton native Chris Moore and his friend, actor Matt Damon. With Zinn narrating, the film featured the likes of Morgan Freeman, Marisa Tormei, and Bruce Springsteen reading and singing words from the original letters, songs, diaries, and speeches that Zinn used to write A People’s History and other works. (http://www.history.com/content/people-speak)

Coming from a working-class background myself, I am forever in debt to Zinn for showing me how this often marginalized group is actually an integral strand among many other strands that together make up our national history. His inclusive view of American identity is true to our country’s unofficial motto, E pluribus unum: “Out of many, one.”

I don’t know what Zinn’s personal religious views were, but based on his passionate dedication to a real flesh-and-blood form of democracy (as opposed to one that is lifeless and abstract), I suspect he would have felt at home in most Unitarian Universalist congregations.

Among the principles that this diverse, liberal-minded denomination (to which I belong) promotes is “the right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large.” (http://www.uua.org/visitors/6798.shtml)

Throughout his life and writings, Zinn was the living, breathing embodiment of this principle.

Raised in a working-class family in Brooklyn, he worked in a shipyard before enlisting in the Air Force as a bombardier to fight fascism in Europe during World War II. After the war, the decorated combat veteran went to college under the GI Bill and earned a PhD in history from Columbia University. However, he didn’t see his degree as a ticket for escaping into a rarefied academic Ivory Tower.

“From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history,” he wrote. “I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than ‘objectivity’; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble.”

And trouble was the dish this recipe served up. As a professor of history at Spelman College, the historically black women’s school in Atlanta, Zinn was fired in 1963 for participating in the growing civil rights movement in the South. Undeterred, he joined the political science department at Boston University a year later, where he became an early and outspoken opponent of the war in Vietnam.

Seeing dissent as the highest form of patriotism, Zinn remained tirelessly active in grassroots movements working for peace, civil liberties, and social justice right up until his death last week. While deeply skeptical of political parties and ideological systems of all stripes, he was a small “d” democrat who put his political faith in what ordinary people can accomplish when they come together to demand and begin building a better world.

“I think our first step is to organize ourselves and protest against the existing order—against war, against economic and sexual exploitation, against racism, etc.,” Zinn said. “But to organize ourselves in such a way that (the) means correspond to the ends, and to organize ourselves in such a way as to create the kind of human relationship that should exist in future society.”

According to Zinn, organizing ourselves in this way “would mean to organize ourselves without centralized authority, without a charismatic leader, (and) in a way that represents in miniature the ideal of the future egalitarian society.”

Like Gandhi, Zinn believed that it’s up to each of us right here and now to be the change we want to see in the world.

This is no easy path, however. In fact, Zinn was always struggling against the strong mainstream current that floods our consciousness with the interests of official power. As frustrating as that struggle can be, he never lost his faith in the transformative and liberating power of simple democracy to resist and even change the direction of that current. His study of history contributed to an unfaltering belief “that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.”

Continually drawing inspiration from that history, Zinn showed us that if “we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

“And if we do act, in however small a way,” he went on, “we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

Thank you, Howard, for showing us that such a marvelous victory is possible. May your example inspire us to continue fighting the good fight in defiance of all the bad we find around us.