Howard Zinn obituary


Victoria Brittain: Howard Zinn's lesson to us all
Howard Zinn in 2006 Photograph: Dima Gavrysh/AP

Howard Zinn, who has died of a heart attack aged 87, was a much-loved and much-vituperated icon of the American left. He was an activist and historian, and later a dramatist, but always a courageous and articulate campaigner for his vision of a just and peaceful America.

As a white teacher at the black Spelman College for women in Atlanta, Georgia, he was a mentor to and later the historian of the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC), the radical student wing of the civil rights movement. In 1963 he was dismissed from Spelman for advocating a less "ladylike" concept of women's education, and moved to Boston University, where he taught political science for 24 years.

In 1980 he published A People's History of the United States, an account that stressed injustices and oppression and resurrected forgotten voices, which has sold more than 1m copies.

Zinn always said he was not a pacifist, because he thought it was too absolute a position. But he was a passionate and highly articulate critic of the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. As a bombardier during the second world war, he was involved in the first use of napalm as a weapon, and could never quite forgive himself for what he regarded as a crime against German soldiers, as well as French civilians.

Zinn's parents were Jewish immigrants to the US, with very limited education, who settled in Brooklyn, New York, and worked in factories. His father came from Austria-Hungary and his mother from Irkutsk in Siberia. There were no books in the house when he was growing up, until his father bought him a 25-cent edition of the works of Dickens, an offer from an evening newspaper.

Zinn worked in a shipyard after high school and was involved in demonstrations against fascism in the 1930s. He joined the US Army Air Force and during the war, flew from bases in England over France, Germany and his father's native Hungary. The napalm incident, involving petroleum jelly that causes terrible burns, was over Royan in western France.


Under the GI Bill, Zinn studied history at New York University. He then went to Columbia, where he earned an MA in 1952 with a thesis about a famous coalminers' strike in Colorado, then obtained his PhD with a dissertation about the career in Congress of Fiorello LaGuardia, the reforming mayor of New York. He studied at Columbia under Henry Steele Commager and Richard Hofstadter. From Hofstadter he learned, as he said later, that American liberals were not as liberal as the word implied, and that the two threads that ran through all American history were nationalism and capitalism.

Zinn went to Spelman in 1956. Among his students were Maria Wright Edelman, the campaigner for children's rights, and the future novelist Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple.

He soon became involved with the SNCC and Martin Luther King's civil rights campaign. In 1964 he published SNCC: The New Abolitionists. The book ends with a statement of his creed. What made SNCC a threat to the establishment, he wrote, was "its rejection of authority; its fearlessness in the face of overwhelming power; its indifference to respectability". Its radicalism, he went on, "is not an ideology but a mood. Moods are harder to define. They are also harder to imprison."

Zinn became involved in a conflict with the authorities at Spelman over his insistence that its students should not be trained to be ladies, but should be actively involved in politics. Although he theoretically had tenure, he was fired. At Boston University his course on civil liberties was immensely popular.

He was soon involved in the campaign against the Vietnam war. When Daniel Ellsberg, a previously gung-ho John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson administration official, came out against the war, he gave one copy of the Pentagon Papers (officially titled United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense, the government's secret history of the war) to Zinn and his wife, Roslyn. Zinn and Noam Chomsky edited what became known as the Mike Gravel edition, published in Boston in 1971-72 by the Beacon Press.

While the war was still raging, Zinn travelled to Hanoi with the Rev Daniel Berrigan – one of the two Berrigan brothers, priests jailed for their anti-war activities – and successfully negotiated the release of three captured US airmen.

For decades, he poured out articles attacking war and government secrecy. His energy and generosity extended to writing introductions to more than 30 books by other writers.

When President Ronald Reagan bombed Tripoli in 1986, Zinn wrote: "There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people for a purpose which is unattainable." He denounced the invasion of Iraq and also criticised President Barack Obama's intensification of the war in Afghanistan. He was sharply attacked in Israel and by many of his fellow American Jews for saying that war was morally the equivalent of terrorism.

Not surprisingly, he drew fierce criticism from conservatives. And although his People's History was hugely popular among students, as well as the general public, even liberal historians were critical of its relentless castigation of the darker side of American history. In the New York Times, for example, Eric Foner called it "a deeply pessimistic vision of the American experience" and pointed out that "blacks, Indians, women and labourers appear either as rebels or as victims. Less dramatic but more typical lives – people struggling to survive with dignity in difficult circumstances – receive little attention." Michael Kammen, himself a historian of American radicalism, said the book was not a success.

What few could deny was the tenacity of Zinn's commitment to his core belief – that people should stand up for their rights and their vision of the good society. "Where progress has been made," he wrote near the end of his life, "wherever any kind of injustice has been overturned, it's been because people acted as citizens, and not as politicians. They didn't just moan. They worked, they acted, they organised, they rioted if necessary to bring their situation to the attention of people in power. And that's what we have to do today."

Roslyn died in 2008. Zinn is survived by a daughter and a son.

George Binette writes: By the time I reached Boston University in September 1978 as an undergraduate, Howard Zinn had already lectured there for 14 years and become a local legend. The mere mention of his name polarised opinion among students and staff alike.

At first I found his lectures disorganised, bordering on the chaotic. But I soon came to appreciate that through subtly weaving considerable erudition with personal reminiscence, he was challenging the received and often cherished assumptions about US history among young people.

In person Zinn frequently projected a Zen-like calm. He seemed to possess exceptional patience, both for naive admirers and stridently reactionary critics, though he never concealed a zealous passion against injustice. And in contrast to many left-leaning academics, he combined his classroom stance with practical action.

As an officer of the Boston lecturers' union, Zinn was one of the leaders of a spring 1979 strike against the college administration. After the lecturers had suspended their action, low-paid administrative and clerical workers mounted their own strike. Along with four other lecturers, Zinn refused to cross their picket lines, thus risking suspension. But he continued to teach, inviting students to join him on a college lawn. He struggled to be heard over the traffic din on Commonwealth Avenue, but ultimately delivered an inspiring talk that placed the administrative workers' fight in the context of the American labour movement's often bloody history.

Howard Zinn, historian and activist, born 24 August 1922; died 27 January 2010