Howard Zinn: An Appreciation

Just knowing that he’s not there, we will miss him.  He was one of us; offering insight, support, perspective, the will and determination to resist — not to, as he wrote, “divorce law from politics” or “elevate technique and craft over [our awareness of] power.”

How poetic that Howard died on the anniversary week of one of his favorite examples of grassroots democracy – Shays’ Rebellion.  When, as “The People’s Historian,” Zinn testified for the defense in civil disobedience cases, he talked about this ragtag group of Western Massachusetts farmers who surrounded courthouses and prevented judges (despite the admonition of PBS darling John Adams) from confiscating farmers’ property to pay their debts.  Shays and cohorts served as an example to juries as to why people sat-in at lunch counters, burned draft files, “disarmed” nuclear missiles, blocked access to nuclear power plants, and surrounded federal buildings in protest of neo-colonialist interventions in Central America or the Middle East.  Howard Zinn, the tenement dweller, Brooklyn ship worker, World War II bombardier and civil rights activist, was always available, humble and had that knowing smile which always reminded us and our friends/comrades/clients that we were doing the right thing.

Of course, by his actions, Howard did “the right thing” in his own career.  As recounted in his 1994 memoir You Can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train, despite having tenure as head of the History Department at Spellman College in Atlanta, he was fired for “insubordination” for supporting his students’ civil rights activism and in their protest against a “tyrannical and patronizing” administration.  Speaking of tyrants (Boston variety), he also outlasted John Silber at Boston University, if not in longevity, then certainly in power and influence.  Howard was an ardent opponent of the Vietnam war, and joined his students in protests.  He was also a staunch supporter of the BU Faculty Union, and twice organized votes urging Silber’s ouster.

After he became “Historian to the Stars,” a status for which I good naturedly rebuked him and which he tried to disavow, I promised to bring him to an old-fashioned eviction blocking by City Life.   I wanted to talk to him about recent legislation drafted by local Guild members working with the Massachusetts Alliance Against Predatory Lending to allow foreclosed homeowners to stay in their houses.  I was thinking about what he wrote about “Law and Justice” in his book Declaration of Independence:

[T]he system of laws, to maintain its standing in the eyes of the citizenry and to provide safety valves by which the discontented can let off steam, must keep up the appearance of fairness.  And so the law itself provides for change.  When the pressure of discontentment becomes great, laws are passed to satisfy some part of the grievance…. The modern system of the rule of law is something like roulette.  Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose….What is the structure of society’s roulette wheel that ensures you will, in the end, lose?   [T]he great disparities in wealth…[and] the system of ‘checks and balances’ in which bold new reforms (try free medical care for all or sweeping protections for the environment) can be buried in committee, vetoed by one legislative chamber or by the president, interpreted to death by the Supreme Court, or passed by Congress and unenforced by the President…

In this system, the occasional victories may ease some of the pain of economic injustice.  They also reveal the usefulness of protest and pressure, suggest even greater possibilities for the future.

I wanted Howard’s approval, to show him a victory, and wanted him to see recent history as a “possibility for the future.”  I never got the chance.

Howard’s work and life give us the strength, together, to carry on. He wrote, “the future is not certain, but it is possible.” In speaking recently about his legacy, see www.bigthink.com, Howard wanted to be remembered as someone who “gave people a feeling of hope and power that they didn’t have before.”

Howard, we remember you.  We love you.  We have hope for the future.

Lee Goldstein is a partner at the Guild firm of Goldstein & Feuer.