SOURCE: Zinn, Howard, and David Barsamian. “Howard Zinn.” Progressive 61, no. 7 (July 1997): 37-40.

[In the following interview, Barsamian questions the 75-year-old Zinn about his social and political activism, his teaching career, and his writings.]

Howard Zinn is a model of the activist scholar. His classic work, A People's History of the United States, has sold more than half a million copies and is widely used in college and university classrooms. A project to develop A People's History into a TV series is under way.

Zinn grew up class-conscious in a poor immigrant family. “We were always,” he recalls, “one step ahead of the landlord.” There were no books or magazines at home. The first book he remembers reading was Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar. He found it in the street, the first ten pages ripped out. But it didn't matter to him. When his parents discovered his interest in books, they took advantage of a newspaper offer and ordered the complete works of Charles Dickens. Later they got him a used Underwood No. 5 typewriter. The rest is history.

Even though he earned a Ph.D. from Columbia. Zinn learned of the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado only by hearing a Woody Guthrie song about the event. That omission in his education taught him a lot about what is included and excluded in conventional textbooks.

Zinn is an excavator and memory retriever. He recovers valuable and hidden aspects of the past. The lessons inform us, and they inspire us to social action.

He also has a keen interest in the arts. His play Emma, on the life of Emma Goldman, has been performed in New York, Boston, London, Edinburgh, and Tokyo. His most recent play is Marx in Soho.

At seventy-five, Zinn is as active as ever. The professor emeritus at Boston University is in great demand as a speaker all over the country. But in characteristic fashion, he doesn't just speak. He acts as well. He recently was arrested in Everett, Massachusetts, in support of Salvadoran women workers at a curtain factory.

Zinn is one of the most beloved figures in the progressive movement. And he's proof that you can be radical and have a sense of humor. I talked with him in the offices of the Harvard Trade Union Program in Cambridge.

[Barsamian]: In your memoir, you write of an incident in Times Square that had a big political impact on you.

[Howard Zinn]: I was a seventeen-year-old kid living in the slums of Brooklyn. Living on the same block were these young communists who were older than I and seemed very politically sophisticated. They asked me to come to a demonstration at Times Square. I had never been to a demonstration, and going to Times Square sounded very exciting. I went along.

It seemed like nothing was going on. But my friend said, “Wait.” The clock on The New York Times building said ten. Suddenly, banners unfurled all around me. People started marching down the street. It was very exciting. I wasn't even sure what it was all about, except that vaguely I thought that it was against war.

At some point there were two women in front of us carrying banners. This was before the age of feminist consciousness, even among leftists. My friends said, “We mustn't let these two women carry this banner. You take one end. I'll take the other end.” It was like Charlie Chaplin picking up that red flag, a railroad signal flag, and suddenly there's this army of unemployed people marching behind him in this demonstration.

Then I heard these sirens. I thought there must be a fire somewhere around. But no. The mounted police arrived, driving their horses into the crowd, beating the people. It was a wild scene. Before I knew it, I was spun around by the shoulder, hit, and knocked unconscious.

I woke up, I don't know how much later, in a doorway. Times Square was back as it was before. It was very eerie, as if nothing had happened. My friend was gone. The demonstration was over. The police were gone.

I was nursing not only a hurt head, but hurt feelings about our country. All the things these radicals had been saying were true. The state is not neutral, but on the side of the powerful; there really is no freedom of speech in this country if you're a radical. That was brought home to me, because these people were engaging in a nonviolent demonstration, presumably protected by the Constitution and—zoom!—the police are there beating heads and breaking up the demonstration.

The title of your memoir is You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train. Why did you pick a title like that?

To confuse people, so that everybody who introduces me at a lecture gets it all wrong, like, You Can't Be Training in a Neutral Place. The title came out of my classroom teaching, where I would start off my classes explaining to my students—because I didn't want to deceive them—that I would be taking stands on everything. They would hear my point of view in this course, that this would not be a neutral course. My point to them was that in fact it was impossible to be neutral. You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train means that the world is already moving in certain directions. Things are already happening. Wars are taking place. Children are going hungry. In a world like this—already moving in certain, often terrible directions—to be neutral or to stand by is to collaborate with what is happening. I didn't want to be a collaborator, and I didn't want to invite my students to be collaborators.

Was your job at Spelman College in Atlanta a radicalizing experience for you? I presume you lived in a black neighborhood near the college.

Actually, the first year we were there, 1956, we lived in a white, working-class neighborhood on the edge of Atlanta, which was an interesting experience in itself. We weren't far from Stone Mountain, which is a Ku Klux Klan gathering place. One of the first things that happened when we were there is we heard all this noise. We went outside. There was a main street about a block from our house. There was a parade of people with white hoods. KKK, marching to Stone Mountain.

We moved to the Spelman College campus, which was surrounded by a black community. We lived in the black community for the next six years. Probably that time at Spelman College was the most intense experience of learning in my life. Talk about social change: I could see social change happening all around me. I was writing about it, observing it, participating in it. My Spelman College students—especially young black women—were being trained to take their obedient places in the segregated society. Trained to pour tea and wear white gloves and march into and out of chapel.

Then suddenly I saw them break away from this after they watched the sit-ins taking place in Greensboro and Rock Hill and Nashville, and I saw them getting together and planning the first sit-ins in the spring of 1960 in Atlanta.

This was remarkable—this growth of courage and getting arrested, going to jail. I saw my students literally leaping over that stone wall that surrounded Spelman College campus and doing what they weren't supposed to do.

I saw Marian Wright Edelman, my student at Spelman, go to jail. A photo of her appeared in the newspapers the next day showing this very studious Spelman student behind bars reading a book which she brought along with her so she wouldn't miss her homework.

I participated in sit-ins, and I saw the atmosphere around us in Rich's department store suddenly change from friendly to hostile when four of us—two black and two white, my wife and I and two black students from Spelman—sat down at this lunch counter. Suddenly it was as if a bomb had been dropped or a plague had been visited on it. The people gathering around us were shouting and cursing. I got an inkling of what it is to be black and be subject all your life to the thought that if you step one foot out of line you'll be surrounded by people who are threatening you.

I saw the South change in that time. White Southerners getting used to the idea that the South was going to change and accepting it.

I learned a lot about teaching, too. I learned that the most important thing about teaching is not what you do in the classroom but what you do outside of the classroom. You go outside the classroom yourself, bring your students outside, or have them bring you outside the classroom, because very often they do it first and you say, “I can't hang back. I'm their teacher. I have to be there with them.” And you learn that the best kind of teaching makes this connection between social action and book learning.

Do you miss teaching?

I miss the classroom and the encounter with students. But I'm not completely divorced from that situation, because now that I'm not teaching in a formal way, I do go around the country and speak to groups of young people, and do a kind of teaching. I love to speak to high-school students. As a result, I don't miss teaching as much as I might have if I simply retired from teaching and played tennis.

Why do you think so many of your colleagues want to just busy themselves with their scholarship and churn out papers and attend conferences? I'm not saying that doesn't have any value. But when it comes to being “out there,” to being engaged with what's happening in the streets, in society, they don't feel it's appropriate.

In our society, there's a powerful drive for safety and security. Everybody is vulnerable because we are all part of a hierarchy of power. Unless we're at the very, very top, unless we're billionaires, unless we're the President of the United States, unless we're the boss, and very few of us are bosses, we are somewhere on some lower rung in the hierarchy of power. If somebody has power over us, somebody has the power to fire us, to withhold a raise, to punish us in some way.

Here in this rich country, so prideful of the economic system, the most clear-cut thing you can say is that everybody is insecure. Everybody is nervous. Even if you're doing well, you're nervous. Something will happen to you. In fact, the people who are doing fairly well, the middle class, are more nervous than the people at the bottom, who know what to expect. The academic world has its own special culture of conformity and being professional. Being professional means not being committed.

It's unprofessional to be a teacher who goes out on picket lines, or who invites students out on picket lines, unprofessional to be a teacher who says to students, “Look, instead of giving you a final exam of multiple-choice questions asking you who was President during the Mexican War, your assignment is to go out into the community and work with some organization that you believe in and then do a report on that.”

And you will stand out. You will stick out if the stuff you write is not written for scholarly journals but is written for everybody. Certainly the stuff written for scholarly journals is deliberately written in such a way that very few people can read it. So if you write stuff that an ordinary person can read, you're suspect. They'll say you're not a scholar, you're a journalist. Or you're not a scholar, you're a propagandist, because you have a point of view. Of course, scholarly articles have a point of view. They have an agenda. But they may not even know they have an agenda. The agenda is obedience. The agenda is silence. The agenda is safety. The agenda is, “Don't rock the boat.”

Have you noticed any changes in your profession, history?

No question there have been changes. Not changes enough to say that the teaching of history has changed. But obviously enough changes to alarm the right wing in this country, to alarm the American Legion, to alarm Senators, to alarm Lynne Cheney, Robert Dole, William Bennett, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and to alarm all these people who are holding on to the old history.

The story of Columbus has changed now, not in the majority of schools around the country, but in thousands. This is alarming. What? Young kids are going to begin to think of Columbus as not just an adventurer, but as a predator, a kidnapper, an enslaver, a torturer, a bad person, and think maybe that conquest and expansion are not good things and that the search for gold is not something to be welcomed? Kids, be happy! Gold has been found!

And maybe, let's take a look at the Indian societies Columbus came upon. How did they live? How did they treat one another? Columbus stories told in the schools don't usually tell about how the Indians were living on this continent.

Somebody sent me a letter reminding me of the work of William Brandon. He has done research for decades about Indians and their communities in this hemisphere before Columbus came and after. It's an amazing story, and one that would make anybody question capitalism, greed, competition, disparate wealth, hierarchy. To start to hint about that, telling a new kind of Columbus story, a new kind of Native American story, is subversive.

Also, the Reconstruction period is being told in a new way. Eric Foner's book Reconstruction is marvelous. It's very different treatment of Reconstruction than when I was going to graduate school in the 1950s, where incidentally they did not put on my reading list W. E. B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction, which is a vital predecessor to Eric Foner's book.

So a lot of history teaching has changed. Not enough. But just enough to frighten the keepers of the old.

Some years ago, speaking to a gathering of university presidents. John Silber, the chancellor of Boston University, talked darkly about those teachers who “poison the well of academe.” His two chief examples? Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn.

I guess Silber thinks that there is some kind of pure well, then along come people like Chomsky and me and ruin it. That is the kind of accusation now being made in a larger sense about education by the right wing in this country, who claim that education was wonderful before the multiculturalists came in, before we had feminist studies and black studies and Native American studies and Chicano studies. The well was pure before students had to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X alongside Thomas Hardy, before they were given I, Rigoberta Menchú alongside Tolstoy and Rousseau.

But it was not a very pure well. It was pure only in the sense of the racial purity that was so talked about during the fascist years—a well that I would argue was itself poisonous. It perpetuated an education that left out large numbers of the world's people.

Here's an easy one: How does social change happen?

Thanks, David. I can deal with that in thirty seconds. You think I know? What I try to do is look at historical situations and extrapolate. You see change happening when there has been an accumulation of grievance until it reaches a boiling point. Then something happens. What happened in the South in the 1950s and 1960s? It's not that suddenly black people were put back into slavery. It's not as if there was some precipitating thing that suddenly pushed them back. They were, as the Southern white ruling class was eager to say, making progress. It was glacial progress, extremely slow. But they were making progress. But the ideal in the minds of the black people was. “We have to be equal. We have to be treated as equals.” The progress that was being made in the South was far from that. The recognition of that gap—between what should be and what is—existed for a long time but waited for a moment when a spark would be lit.

You never know what spark is going to really result in a conflagration. After all, before the Montgomery bus boycotts there had been other boycotts. Before the sit-ins of the 1960s, there had been sit-ins in sixteen different cities between 1955 and 1960 that nobody paid any attention to and that did not ignite a movement.

But then in Greensboro, on February 1, 1960, these four college kids sit in, and everything goes haywire. Then things are never the same.

I think this is an encouragement to people who do things not knowing whether they will result in anything. You do things again and again, and nothing happens. You have to do things, do things, do things; you have to light that match, light that match, light that match, not knowing how often it's going to sputter and go out and at what point it's going to take hold. That's what happened in the civil-rights movement, and that's what happens in other movements. Things take a long time. It requires patience, but not a passive patience—the patience of activism.

When I was in South Africa in 1982, it was very, very interesting. We know about books being banned; there, people were banned. They couldn't speak. They couldn't go here or there. The secret police were everywhere. Just before I arrived at the University of Capetown, the secret police of South Africa had broken into the offices of the student newspaper at the University of Capetown and made off with all of their stuff. It was the kind of thing that happened all the time. There was an atmosphere of terror. You would think, perhaps, that nothing is going to happen here. But having come from that experience in the South, I was aware that underneath the surface of total control things were simmering; things were going on. I didn't know when it would break through, but we saw it break through not long ago. Suddenly Mandela comes out of Robben's Island and becomes president of the new South Africa.

We should be encouraged by historical examples of social change, by how surprising changes take place suddenly, when you least expect it, not because of a miracle from on high, but because people have labored patiently for a long time.

When people get discouraged because they do something and nothing happens, they should really understand that the only way things will happen is if people get over the notion that they must see immediate success. If they get over that notion and persist, then they will see things happen before they even realize it.

Let's talk about the American left and its values. What are left values to you?

When I think of left values I think of socialism—not in the Soviet sense, not in the bureaucratic sense, not in the Bolshevik sense, but socialism in the sense of Eugene Debs and Mother Jones and Emma Goldman and anarchist socialists. Left values are fundamentally egalitarian values. If I had to say what is at the center of left values, it's the idea that everyone has a fundamental right to the good things in life, to the necessary things of life, that there should be no disproportions in the world.

It doesn't mean perfect equality; we can't possibly achieve that. I notice that your sweater is better than mine. But we both have a sweater, which is something.

The Declaration of Independence—the idea that everybody has an equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—to me is a remarkable statement of left values. Of course, in the Declaration of Independence it was all men. It had to be extended as the feminists of 1848 did when they created a new Declaration that added “women” to it. Now it has to be extended internationally.

One of the crucial values that the left must embrace is a value of international solidarity and equality across national lines. That's very important, because it changes everything if you begin to understand that the lives of children in other countries are equivalent to the lives of children in our country. Then war is impossible.

Just speaking around the country, presenting what I think are left values, I talk about the equal right of everybody to these things and about extending the principles of the Declaration of Independence all over the world. I find that people everywhere I go—and these are not captive audiences of just leftwing people; these are assemblies of people, a thousand high-school students who are assembled forcibly to hear me—they agree with this. It makes sense. It seems right. It seems moral.

They find themselves then accepting what they didn't accept before, for instance, the fact that you might say the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima can be a controversial issue within the limits of discussion that have generally been set in our society. But if you change those limits by simply introducing the idea that the children of Japan have an equal right to life with the children of the United States, then suddenly it is impossible to drop a bomb in Hiroshima, just as it would be impossible to drop a bomb on the children of New York, even in order to end World War II faster.

Talk about the idea of equality of opportunity, which is a big theme, versus equality of condition and then the outcome.

The conservatives, and sometimes the liberals, make a big thing of, “Oh, well, what we just want to give people is equality of opportunity. We'll give them an education, and we'll send them out into the world and see what happens.” Basically that's it. “We've done our best. And now let the fittest survive.” It's a Darwinian idea. Our values should be that people should have health care and housing and work and food and an education, the fundamental things they need, and that should be guaranteed. To say we're giving people opportunity consigns to poverty those people who don't have, let's say, moneymaking skills, moneymaking intelligence: the special kind of qualities that enable some people to become millionaires. These people may be poets or musicians, or they may just be decent people, or they may be carpenters, and so on. But they won't have a chance. So it's very important to rid ourselves of the notion that it's sufficient to give people so-called equality of opportunity.

You've said, “We can't go on with the present polarization of wealth and poverty.” Why not?

I don't know how long we can go on, but I know we can't go on indefinitely. That growing, growing gap between wealth and poverty is a recipe for trouble, for disaster, for conflict, for explosion. Here's the Dow Jones average going up, up, up, and there are the lives of people in the city. The Dow Jones average in the last fifteen years has gone up 400 percent. In the same period, the wages of the working population have gone down 15 percent. Now the richest 1 percent of the population owns 43, 44 percent of the wealth. Up from the usual maybe 28 percent, 30 percent, 32 percent, which is bad enough and which has been a constant throughout American history. When they did studies of the tax rolls in Boston in the seventeenth century, they concluded that 1 percent of the population owned 33 percent of the wealth. If you look at the statistics all through American history, you see that figure, a little more, a little less, around the same. Now it's worse and worse. Something's got to give.

So despite what the pundits are telling us about the population being passive and quiescent, you think there's an audience there for dissidence?

Absolutely. Five hundred people come to hear me in Duluth, Minnesota. They're not people who are already aficionados of the left and of radical messages. They come maybe out of curiosity. Their interest has been piqued by an article in the newspaper or whatever, and they come to hear me.

Then I deliver what I believe is a radical message: This is what's wrong with our economic system. This is what's wrong with our political system. It's fundamental. We need to redistribute the wealth in this country. We need to use it in a rational way. We need to take this enormous arms budget and not just cut it slightly but dismantle it because we have to make up our minds we're not going to war anymore. We're not going to intervene militarily anymore. If we're not going to go to war any more, then we have ＄250 billion. We don't have to worry about Medicare, Social Security, child care, universal health care, education. We can have a better society.

I say things which, if you mentioned them on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, they would say, “That's a little too much for our listeners.” It's not too much. You tell people what makes common sense. It makes common sense that if you're a very, very rich country that nobody should be hungry. Nobody should be homeless. Nobody should be without health care. The richest country in the world. Nobody should be without these things. We have the resources but they're being wasted or given somewhere to somebody. It's common sense. So there are people all over this country, millions of people, who would listen to such a message and say, “Yes, yes, yes.”