Dr. Howard Zinn (1922-2010)

It is with great sadness that we learned last Wednesday of the passing of Dr. Howard Zinn at age 87.

Zinn died of a heart attack during a trip to California to visit friends. He was in Santa Monica at the time of his passing.

Zinn was from the third wave of radical intellectuals that emerged in the American political landscape in the 20th century. More than that, though, he was one of the few who remained overtly radical throughout his entire life.

Born in New York City into a working-class Jewish immigrant family. His father, Edward, was a waiter and his mother, Jennie, was a housewife. Before entering New York University at 27, he had worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and in many of the warehouses that lined the shores of New York at the time.

During the Second World War, Zinn served in the Army Air Force as a bombardier on B-17 and B-24 planes.

He received his bachelor’s degree in history from NYU, and his master’s and doctorate from Columbia University.

Zinn first became known after becoming chair of the history department at Spelman College, an historically African American women’s college in Atlanta. It was there that Zinn became politically active, participating in the non-violent civil rights movement.

In 1964, Zinn became a professor at Boston University, where he taught until his retirement from teaching in 1988.

During that time, Zinn was active in the movement against the Vietnam War, as well as in local labor and social struggles. It was also during this time that he began writing a number of books.

From 1959 to 1990, Zinn wrote a number of books about politics and history. By far, though, his most well-known and enduring book is A People’s History of the United States. Published first in 1980, and in numerous editions since, People’s History represents a microcosm of Zinn as an historian and political thinker.

Zinn sought to provide readers with what fellow historian John Henrik Clarke called the “other half of history” — the part you don’t get from the “official” textbooks and monographs.

While People’s History at times does this by bending the stick too far in the opposite direction of his “official” colleagues, Zinn’s book remains required reading for anyone who wants to know more about that “other half of history.”

But Zinn, as someone of working-class origins cast into the world of “middle class” academia, also knew his audience. More to the point, he knew the class character of those who would most likely be reading his books and attending his lectures, and he did not shy away from calling them what they were: the “guards” of the capitalist system.

His own class instincts told him where the “middle class” was in American capitalist society. And whether it was naiveté or wishful thinking, Zinn pleaded with them to consider carefully and consciously their future directions — to ask themselves which side they are on.

But now the man who sought to bring his love of history to future generations of his class and society as a whole is at one with his medium. He belongs to the history he was so passionate about, cared for so deeply and, most of all, understood is not something to passively watch, but rather is something we as human beings make through our actions.

We lower our banners in honor of someone many of us were privileged to call comrade and friend, colleague and teacher. And the one thing we can do most to honor his memory is to make good on the historic promise of a better future made by working-class people.