In September 2020, several months after the police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd sparked protests across the country, then-President Donald Trump issued Executive Order 13950. This order barred federal agencies from conducting staff trainings on systemic racism, sexism, or gender identity because, as the Administration saw it, such instruction perpetuated the “false belief that America is an irredeemably racist and sexist country.”
That same month, the first White House Conference on American History brought together conservative activists to decry the Movement for Black Lives. Attendees were thrilled to hear Trump denounce what he termed “decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools” and to call for “our sons and daughters to know that they are citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world.”
“We will reclaim our history and our country,” Trump declared, and pledged that the nation would steer clear of books, films, and videos, “like those of Howard Zinn, that try to make students ashamed of their own history.”
“Zinn consistently elevated the role of ordinary people to make change and organize to improve their lives”—Deborah Menkart
The fact that historian and activist Howard Zinn (1922-2010) was called out by name did not surprise Deborah Menkart. Menkart is a co-director of the fifteen-year-old Zinn Education Project (ZEP), a grassroots group coordinated by two progressive educational entities, Teaching for Change and Rethinking Schools that are committed to teaching accurate accounts of U.S. history alongside the presentation of truthful material about race, climate change, gender identity, the continuing impact of chattel slavery, and ongoing struggles to win human and civil rights both domestically and abroad.
“Zinn consistently elevated the role of ordinary people to make change and organize to improve their lives,” Menkart tells The Progressive. “This is threatening to the status quo.”
Indeed, Zinn has been a rightwing target since his most popular book, A People’s History of the United States, was first published in 1980; it has now been reprinted more than 150 times in at least a dozen languages and has sold more than two million copies. But that has not convinced the right of the book’s merit: Harvard history professor and Nixon supporter Oscar Handlin (1915-2011), writing in The American Scholar shortly after the book’s release, called it “deranged” and “a fairy tale.” Likewise, students at Virginia Tech who were affiliated with Accuracy in Academia, a spinoff of the conservative watchdog group Accuracy in Media, called for the book to be banned from history classes.
These are but two early examples.
The flurry of opposition to A People’s History has been near-constant for the forty-three years since its publication. As sales of the book skyrocketed throughout the 1980s, reactionary pundits weighed in. Thomas Sowell characterized the book as “unAmerican” while Mary Graber’s 2019 Debunking Howard Zinn demonized him as “a corrupt teacher, a fraudulent historian, and an anti-American agitator.”
And Zinn, of course, is not the only historian to be deemed nettlesome by the right. Although his work continues to be called out, recent targets have included the 1619 Project, developed by Nikole Hannah-Jones and writers at The New York Times, and any and all programs—from kindergarten through graduate school in all fifty states—that teach unvarnished accounts of America’s racial history. The latter concern, shorthanded as the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT), has made public schools and public libraries sites of contentious battles over curricula, teaching materials, age-appropriate readings, and course content.
Harper Collins Publishers
Howard Zinn: A Peoples History of the United States.
This isn’t new, but groups like Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education have been extremely vocal since 2020 and have garnered a great deal of media attention. This has enabled them to win financial support from deep-pocketed donors who want to privatize education—something Zinn strongly opposed—and to restrict schools from becoming sites of community engagement.
They’ve had some significant wins.
According to U.S News and World Report, within a year of Trump’s Executive Order 13950, 250 measures were introduced at the federal, state, and local levels to outlaw the teaching of CRT. These measures have largely remained in place despite Joe Biden’s revocation of the Order immediately after taking office. Ninety percent of them have focused on K-12 classrooms.
But the right did not stop at the schoolhouse door, and legislation watchers report that these measures dovetailed with efforts to ban books and get conservative activists elected to school and library boards.
While electoral results have been mixed, conservatives have made headway on censorship; since the fall of 2021, PEN America has tracked more than 4,000 efforts to ban books—including several by Zinn—dealing with race, gender identity, and sexuality from libraries and schoolrooms. Moreover, PEN reports that a total of 874 distinct titles came under fire during the first half of the 2022-2023 academic year, with the majority of bans taking effect in Florida, Missouri, South Carolina, Texas, and Utah.
But progressives are also mobilizing and groups including the Zinn Education Project, Red, Wine and Blue, PEN America, the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the American Library Association, and Honest Education Action and Leadership Together/Race Forward, are pushing back and organizing teach-ins, teacher trainings, and study groups in support of academic freedom and public education. Organizations and institutions are also circulating banned books—the Brooklyn Public Library, for one, now provides free, online access to censored materials for all students, regardless of where they live. Some of these groups are also supporting Katie Rinderle and Melissa Tempel, teachers who have been fired for teaching prohibited texts.
Many progressive organizations are calling out the bias, racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia of the right amid these battles over public education as well.
Jesse Hagopian, coeditor of the books Teaching for Black Lives and Black Lives Matter at School and an editor at Rethinking Schools, sees the rightwing push to censor books and limit instructional content as resurgent McCarthyism.
“Teachers are being fired for teaching the truth about race and sexual identity,” Hagopian tells The Progressive. “The Zinn Education Project has organized hundreds of study groups for teachers so that they can discuss the history they did not learn in high school or college. The groups also give them a way to form support networks for themselves as educators. The people who join these groups self-select and are committed to teaching the truth about Black history, LGBTQ+ identity, and people’s history. They commit to teaching lessons that focus on people who’ve been left out of traditional textbooks and teaching materials.”
In addition, an annual ZEP-sponsored Teach Truth Day of Action gives teachers, parents, students, and progressive activists an opportunity to publicly denounce the rightwing’s educational vision and put forward a plan that celebrates diversity, equity, and inclusion. The day of action also allows participants to plan and coordinate attendance at school board meetings, public hearings, and other events.
“While we have to struggle for many things in our quest for social justice, we have to know our history. That’s something I learned from Howard Zinn.”—Jesse Hagopian
Knowing history is key in planning a successful fightback, Hagopian explains: “The right’s attacks follow a playbook developed during the McCarthy Red and Lavender Scares of the 1950s. In that period, the right began by attacking people as Communists. Then they went after people who were organizing for labor rights or racial justice. This was followed by a Lavender Scare and people lost jobs if they were gay. Today the rightwing is going after anti-racist educators and zeroing in on gender identity, calling people child abusers or groomers if they support trans kids or LGBTQ+ acceptance. While we have to struggle for many things in our quest for social justice, we have to know our history. That’s something I learned from Howard Zinn.”
Hagopian is far from the only person who has taken Zinn’s message to heart.
Zinn’s influence continues to motivate resistance and serves as an example to other writers of People’s Histories—of sports, of empire, of Indigenous people, of civilization—all of whom have modeled their books on A People’s History of the United States. Likewise, authors and historians—Anthony Arnove, Heather McGhee, Robyn Spencer, and Jeanne Theoharis, to name just a few—have written books and delivered lectures that, like Zinn, center regular folks in their accounts of events and social policies.
Historian and activist Howard Zinn (August 24, 1922 - January 27, 2010).
So let’s toast the lasting impact of the great Howard Zinn on his upcoming 101st birthday; may his memory continue to inspire, and may his family and friends lift a glass on August 24 to celebrate his enduring example.