Howard Zinn and the History the Textbooks Wouldn't Print

The letter Spelman College sent Howard Zinn in June 1963 gave no reason. It read only that the college had decided his services would not be required for the 1963-1964 academic year, though Zinn chaired the history department and was five years into a tenured contract. He had spent seven years at Spelman backing students who sat in at Atlanta lunch counters, and he was an adult adviser to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Forty-two years later the same college gave him an honorary degree and had him deliver its commencement address. In between, Zinn flew bombing runs over France, wrote a bestselling history book a sitting governor later tried to get out of his state’s schools, and kept finding the documents the official record left out, including, eventually, the ones about his own firing.

Brooklyn to the Navy Yard

Zinn was born in Brooklyn, New York, on August 24, 1922, the son of Jewish immigrants. His father worked factory jobs, dug ditches, washed windows, and eventually ran a candy store to keep the family fed. Zinn finished at Thomas Jefferson High School and in 1940, at eighteen, apprenticed as a ship fitter at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In a 2008 oral history interview, he remembered exactly where the union stopped: the skilled tradesmen, who alone could join, looked at the apprentices doing the yard’s dirtiest and most dangerous work, split further by race, and said, in Zinn’s retelling, “We’re the skilled workers who belong to the union. These are the unwashed, unskilled, interlopers.” He earned fourteen dollars a week and gave ten of it to his parents. He organized the apprentices into their own association instead, his first organizing, and later called it the most rewarding part of a job that was, by his own account, “not a satisfying experience.” He also watched a coworker crushed to death when a bulkhead door closed on him, one more fact of the union shop the yard did not put on a recruiting poster.

A napalm raid, and the paperwork after

In 1943 Zinn left the Navy Yard for the Army Air Forces and trained as a bombardier, the crewman who aims and releases the bombs from a B-17’s Plexiglas nose. He married Roslyn Shechter, whom he called Roz, that October, then flew combat missions over Europe. His last one, in mid-April 1945, about three weeks before Germany surrendered, sent his squadron over Royan, a French resort town on the Atlantic coast where a few thousand German troops sat out the war’s end in a coastal pocket the Allies had otherwise bypassed. The bombers carried canisters of jellied gasoline, napalm, used on a European target for the first time. Zinn’s biographer, Dave Zirin, puts the toll at 3,000 civilians against 23 German soldiers killed, a lopsided ratio whose precise count historians still dispute.

Zinn did not ask why at the time. Twenty-two years later, in 1967, he and Roz drove from Paris to the rebuilt town, interviewed survivors, and read the paperwork himself:

We found an additional motive for that senseless slaughter , the need of both the French and the American military for one more victory before the war ended.

He wrote that in his 1994 memoir, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, by which point he had spent decades making a habit of exactly this: checking the file, then printing what it actually said. Elsewhere in the same book he described mustering out and packing his Air Medal, his ribbons, and his old navigation logs into a folder. Without thinking, he wrote two words on it: “Never again.”

The seven years that got him fired

Zinn joined Spelman College in Atlanta in 1956 as chair of its history and social sciences department, teaching at the historically Black women’s college through the years the Civil Rights Movement built its Southern base. His students included Marian Wright Edelman, later founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, and the young Alice Walker. He advised the group alongside Ella Baker, tipped off reporters ahead of student sit-ins, and let students meet in his living room.

The letter came anyway. Zinn had earned what employment law calls de facto tenure, and no misconduct sat on his record; the American Association of University Professors took up his case and agreed the college had violated its own rules, but the inquiry stalled and Zinn never got his job back. He moved to Boston University the following year and taught political science until he retired in 1988, leaving his last class early to join a nursing school picket line. At Boston University he found a second version of the same fight: university president John Silber called him an example of the professors who would “poison the well of academe,” and when the campus struck in 1979, Zinn stayed on the picket line side of the door.

Spelman did not apologize, exactly. In 2005, forty-two years after firing him, the college’s faculty and trustees voted to invite Zinn back, and on May 15 he received an honorary doctor of humane letters and delivered the commencement address.

The people’s history

Zinn spent the years between activism writing: a first history of SNCC in 1964, a case against the Vietnam War in 1967, and, in January 1968, during the Tet Offensive, a trip to Hanoi with the Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan to receive three American airmen, the first US prisoners of war North Vietnam released. Then, in 1980, came the book that outlasted all of it. A People’s History of the United States opened with an argument about method, not a chronology:

I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees … of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills … of the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem.

Harper and Row published it as a footnoted history book for general readers, and it became a classroom fixture anyway. A 2004 documentary about Zinn’s life, narrated by Matt Damon, borrowed its title from a line Zinn used on his students for decades: you can’t be neutral on a moving train. By its publisher’s count, A People’s History has sold more than four million copies since.

The book they tried to pull after he died

Zinn died of a heart attack in a swimming pool in Santa Monica, California, on January 27, 2010, at eighty-seven. Less than two weeks later, on February 9, 2010, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels emailed his state’s top education officials with a request. “This terrible anti-American academic has finally passed away,” Daniels wrote, calling A People’s History “a truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page,” and asking, “Can someone assure me that it is not in use anywhere in Indiana? If it is, how do we get rid of it before more young people are force-fed a totally false version of our history?” The emails went to state superintendent Tony Bennett and stayed private for three years, until the Associated Press pried them loose in July 2013, turning an attempted book ban into public record itself.

Zinn spent his career arguing that the documents historians get to keep usually survive because someone with power wanted them kept. Daniels’s emails survived because Indiana’s records law made them survive, over his own evident preference, which is the exact kind of paperwork accident Zinn spent a lifetime tracking down.