Howard Zinn in New York City, May 2008.
Howard Zinn in New York City, May 2008.
The Progressive has a long history of grand columnists, but for me, one stands alone: the people’s historian, Howard Zinn. I just finished writing a biography of Zinn, to be published next year [August 2026], a project I worked on for five years. During my research, I was drawn to the fact that this first-generation American—who was born in Brooklyn, New York, and deeply identified with Boston, Massachusetts—had lived with his family in Atlanta, Georgia.
How did Zinn end up in the Deep South? You can thank the Red Scare for that. In 1945, having just returned from World War II, Zinn was already married to Roslyn, his wife of sixty-four years. Howard and Roz, as she was known, decided that after the war, they would continue fighting fascism. Imagine that. Zinn would become a leading advocate for military veterans being mistreated upon returning home from the war, which meant J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI would be watching. Hoover took a particular interest in the Zinns, and Howard was accosted on the street and questioned by the Feds numerous times.
Despite being an honored doctoral student at Columbia University, he received only one job offer, which, in 1956, sent him and his family to Spelman College, the famed historically Black college for women in Atlanta. Unbeknownst to him, he now had a front-row seat to civil rights history.
In 1960, he wrote for The Nation about seeing his Spelman students transform from “perfect ladies” to frontline freedom fighters in the Civil Rights Movement. The piece was published as “Finishing School for Pickets.”
It starts with Zinn describing a sign on a Spelman bulletin board that read: “Young Ladies Who Can Picket Please Sign Below.”
From there, Zinn was off to the races. “The notice revealed, in its own quaint language,” he wrote, “that within the dramatic revolt of Negro college students in the South today another phenomenon has been developing. This is the upsurge of the young, educated Negro woman against the generations-old advice of her elders: Be nice, be well-mannered and ladylike, don’t speak loudly, and don’t get into trouble . . . .
“Spelman College girls are still ‘nice’ but not enough to keep them from walking up and down, carrying picket signs, in front of two supermarkets in the heart of Atlanta. They are well-mannered, but this is somewhat tempered by a recent declaration that they will use every method short of violence to end segregation. As for staying out of trouble, they were doing fine until this spring, when fourteen of them were arrested and jailed by Atlanta police. The staid New England women missionaries who helped found Spelman College back in the 1880s would probably be distressed at this turn of events, and present-day conservatives in the administration and faculty are rather upset. But respectability is no longer respectable among young Negro women attending college today . . . .
“It would be an exaggeration to say: ‘You can always tell a Spelman girl—she’s under arrest.’ But the statement has a measure of truth . . . .
“What is the source of this new spirit . . . ? There is something fundamental at work which is setting free for the first time the anger pent up in generations of quiet; well-bred Negro college women, not only at Spelman College, but at . . . other institutions throughout the South. The same warm currents which are loosening the iceblocks of the status quo throughout the world are drifting into the South.”
That class of 1960 chose to dedicate their yearbook to their beloved Professor Zinn.
This was just the opening salvo to Zinn’s civil rights journey, one that took him to Selma, Alabama, and all over the Jim Crow South, and put him in close contact with historic figures of the struggle.
Of course, Zinn would go on to do so much more in his outsized life, but it was this period that served him for decades to come. In reflecting upon his experience with Spelman students in those early days of the mass challenge to Jim Crow, he wrote, “The power of tyranny is overestimated (not in the short run, but in the long run), and can be overcome by the unity and the determination of apparently powerless people.” We would do very well to remember those words today.