[In the following review, Duberman contends that Zinn's two 1964 books on the civil rights movement are informed by his dual roles as scholar and active participant in the events being covered.]

Now, boy, you go to writing and write up a new day.

—Mama Dollie, Lee County, Georgia

Radicalism is returning to American life. It owes its initial rebirth to the civil rights movement, but men like Bayard Rustin and others less well-known, are now moving beyond the race problem to broad social criticism. These new radicals increasingly see racism as but one symptom of our social malaise, a symptom which itself can never disappear until a broader attack is launched against the value structure which maintains it—against the preference for order, compromise and cliché over justice, principle and reality, against all that has turned us from a revolutionary outpost into a conservative bulwark.

The new radicals do not pretend to have any long-range strategy or detailed ideology; they are undogmatic, unsentimental and unhysterical. Despite their anger and disgust at the banalities and evasions of American life, their tone is one of quiet confidence. They are optimistic not only about the country's potential, but—and this is perhaps basic to any reform impulse—they are optimistic also about the ability of individuals to ascertain and manipulate reality. In this sense, the new movement marks a restoration of human confidence, the flowering of post-Freudian homiletics: neither our individual nor our collective past need determine our present goals: neither biology nor history is enough to prevent our planning rationally and acting boldly. We are far more free—and thus far more responsible—than the determinists have told us. The new radicals insist, in short, that we may choose what to make of ourselves and our world.

Though the radicals in our midst are few and exert little power, at least they do once more exist, and their influence might yet lead us out of the post-New Deal morass. If so, we will owe much to those activists in the civil rights movement who first pointed the way, and to those intellectuals (often activists themselves) who first saw and schematized the broader possibilities of the movement. In this last group the preeminent publicists have been Michael Harrington and Nat Hentoff. Now there is Howard Zinn.

Zinn represents an emerging breed of scholar-activists. In his early forties, he has behind him a Beveridge Prize for his first book, La-Guardia in Congress, seven years of teaching history at a Negro college—Spelman, in Atlanta—and extensive involvement as adviser and participant in civil rights activities, especially those of SNCC. His two new books combine a scholar's knowledge and an activist's experience, which are used to inform his theme, not to exhibit himself. Thus both books are personal without being egotistical, are authoritative but free of pedantry, and are passionate without being suspiciously agitated. The common theme of the two books—a theme which is rationale and emblem for the whole new movement of social criticism—is that it is within our power to move with high speed towards social justice. The Southern Mystique outlines the reasons for this optimistic belief; SNCC: The New Abolitionists gives us the concrete experiences of those who have carried the belief into action.

Zinn's optimism, it must be emphasized, is not about what has been done, or even what necessarily will be done, but only about what could be done were we to become aware of the rich possibilities for change and determined to utilize them. This qualified optimism rests on both theoretical and specific considerations. Zinn draws the theoretical testimony from a variety of post-Freudian commentators—Kurt Lewin, Dorwin Cartwright, Harry Stack Sullivan, Gardner Murphy—all of whom believe in the transcending power of the immediate. Habitual behavior, according to these social psychologists, can be radically and drastically changed, even when deeply rooted. No determinant, be it instinctual or traditional, need preclude the alteration of behavior. And behavioral transformations, moreover, need not be preceded by intellectual ones. The opposite is often true: forcing changes (through legal or extra-legal pressures) in the way people act, can, by transforming the personal and social environment, produce changes in the way people think.

When Zinn applies this body of theory specifically to the race problem in the South, his optimism is supported by many specific examples of changes already wrought in that region. Though the white Southerner, Zinn tells us, does care about segregation, he cares about other things more—about his job, staying out of jail, the approval of his neighbors, community peace, keeping educational and entertainment facilities open. Furthermore, the mystique which sees the South as utterly different from the rest of the nation, is mistaken. The South may be racist, provincial, conservative, fundamentalist, nativist, violent, conformist and militarist, but these are national not merely regional qualities, American not Southern genes. Sectional differences, in other words, are differences of degree not kind.

Zinn argues this position brilliantly and with solid evidence. Only one reluctant reservation is necessary. That is, whether his optimistic diagnosis is applicable everywhere in the South. When he says the white Southerner has “no special encumbrances that cannot be thrust aside,” I doubt if this is equally true for all Southerners. Perhaps Atlantans have “no special encumbrances,” but can the same be said about the whites in Plaquemines or Sunflower Counties? In such places the devotion to segregation may be so intransigent that it does take precedence over all other values—including money, education and peace—just as the commitment to fundamentalism, nativism, et al., may be so fanatical that it is not susceptible to any but the most gradual inroads (which is not to say that the assault should be gradual). If the attitudes in such areas are variations on common national themes, they are so pronounced as to be almost new tunes.

None of this is exactly news to Howard Zinn. Knowing the South as he does from first-hand experience, he is well aware of the bitter inflexibility of certain areas within it. If he underplays this side of the picture, therefore, he does so knowingly, for a deliberate purpose. And that purpose is to encourage us to act. Too much has been said about the difficulty of producing change in the South (and in the nation) and not enough about its feasibility. Zinn deliberately stresses positive opportunities in order to counteract that mystique of intractability which for too long has served as rationale for pessimism and apathy. Zinn is here the true activist: he emphasizes those aspects of social reality best calculated to encourage involvement. He knows that the hope for significant change in this country is tenuous; he also knows that significant change will be impossible if we continue to dwell on the obstacles and to downgrade the possibilities. We are never in short supply of gainsayers, those eager to justify their complacency by magnifying the obstacles on the path to change. Zinn wants to prevent the number of these gloom-and-doomers from becoming so large that they will turn into self-fulfilling prophets.

Zinn does more than tell us that a new day is possible; he also shows us something of what it might consist of. His second book, SNCC, along with being a history of the organization, is also a history of those enrolled in its ranks. The everyday joy and terror of these SNCC workers in the South are taking on dimensions larger than the life most of us live. Certainly the joy is enviable—a warm, purposeful camaraderie—and even the terror suggests a self-confrontation most of us would welcome were the price not so high.

It is difficult, as Zinn says, not to romanticize these young adults. Yet there is no need to embroider. In their depth of feeling for each other and for their cause, in their simplicity and courage, they stand out against a purposeless, sterile backdrop in something truly like heroic outline, showing us what might be hoped for when the barriers that artificially separate people are broken down. They have lived under field conditions, of course, which by everyday standards are themselves artificial. Intimacy among them has been allowed to ripen through constant contact and mutual reliance, and has been further intensified by common dangers and goals. Then, too, they have had the rare fulfillment of knowing that their energies are employed in meaningful work.

As our society is now constituted, such conditions cannot be widely reproduced. The “new day” is for most of us still beyond reach. But thanks to Howard Zinn we have caught a glimpse of its splendors. Mama Dollie spoke to the right man.