Howard Zinn, historian who challenged status quo, dies at 87

(Rochester & Genesee Valley Area Labor Federation)Howard Zinn, historian who challenged status quo, dies at 87
January 27, 2010 05:40 PM
By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff

Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist  
who was an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam and a leading  
faculty critic of BU president John Silber, died of a heart attack  
today in Santa Monica, Calif, where he was traveling, his family said.  
He was 87.

“His writings have changed the consciousness of a generation, and  
helped open new paths to understanding and its crucial meaning for our  
lives,” Noam Chomsky, the left-wing activist and MIT professor, once  
wrote of Dr. Zinn. “When action has been called for, one could always  
be confident that he would be on the front lines, an example and  
trustworthy guide.”

For Dr. Zinn, activism was a natural extension of the revisionist  
brand of history he taught. Dr. Zinn’s best-known book, “A People’s  
History of the United States” (1980), had for its heroes not the  
Founding Fathers — many of them slaveholders and deeply attached to  
the status quo, as Dr. Zinn was quick to point out — but rather the  
farmers of Shays’ Rebellion and the union organizers of the 1930s.

As he wrote in his autobiography, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving  
Train” (1994), “From the start, my teaching was infused with my own  
history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted  
more than ‘objectivity’; I wanted students to leave my classes not  
just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of  
silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever  
they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble.”

Certainly, it was a recipe for rancor between Dr. Zinn and Silber. Dr.  
Zinn twice helped lead faculty votes to oust the BU president, who in  
turn once accused Dr. Zinn of arson (a charge he quickly retracted)  
and cited him as a prime example of teachers “who poison the well of  
academe.”

Dr. Zinn was a cochairman of the strike committee when BU professors  
walked out in 1979. After the strike was settled, he and four  
colleagues were charged with violating their contract when they  
refused to cross a picket line of striking secretaries. The charges  
against “the BU Five” were soon dropped, however.

Dr. Zinn was born in New York City on Aug. 24, 1922, the son of Jewish  
immigrants, Edward Zinn, a waiter, and Jennie (Rabinowitz) Zinn, a  
housewife. He attended New York public schools and worked in the  
Brooklyn Navy Yard before joining the Army Air Force during World War  
II. Serving as a bombardier in the Eighth Air Force, he won the Air  
Medal and attained the rank of second lieutenant.

After the war, Dr. Zinn worked at a series of menial jobs until  
entering New York University as a 27-year-old freshman on the GI Bill.  
Professor Zinn, who had married Roslyn Shechter in 1944, worked nights  
in a warehouse loading trucks to support his studies. He received his  
bachelor’s degree from NYU, followed by master’s and doctoral degrees  
in history from Columbia University.

Dr. Zinn was an instructor at Upsala College and lecturer at Brooklyn  
College before joining the faculty of Spelman College in Atlanta, in  
1956. He served at the historically black women’s institution as  
chairman of the history department. Among his students were the  
novelist Alice Walker, who called him “the best teacher I ever had,”  
and Marian Wright Edelman, future head of the Children’s Defense Fund.

During this time, Dr. Zinn became active in the civil rights movement.  
He served on the executive committee of the Student Nonviolent  
Coordinating Committee, the most aggressive civil rights organization  
of the time, and participated in numerous demonstrations.

Dr. Zinn became an associate professor of political science at BU in  
1964 and was named full professor in 1966.

The focus of his activism now became the Vietnam War. Dr. Zinn spoke  
at countless rallies and teach-ins and drew national attention when he  
and another leading antiwar activist, Rev. Daniel Berrigan, went to  
Hanoi in 1968 to receive three prisoners released by the North  
Vietnamese.

Dr. Zinn’s involvement in the antiwar movement led to his publishing  
two books: “Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal” (1967) and “Disobedience  
and Democracy” (1968). He had previously published “LaGuardia in  
Congress” (1959), which had won the American Historical Association’s  
Albert J. Beveridge Prize; “SNCC: The New Abolitionists” (1964); “The  
Southern Mystique” (1964); and “New Deal Thought” (1966).
Dr. Zinn was also the author of “The Politics of History” (1970);  
“Postwar America” (1973); “Justice in Everyday Life” (1974); and  
“Declarations of Independence” (1990).

In 1988, Dr. Zinn took early retirement so as to concentrate on  
speaking and writing. The latter activity included writing for the  
stage. Dr. Zinn had two plays produced: “Emma,” about the anarchist  
leader Emma Goldman, and “Daughter of Venus.”

Dr. Zinn, or his writing, made a cameo appearance in the 1997 film  
‘‘Good Will Hunting.’’ The title characters, played by Matt Damon,  
lauds ‘‘A People’s History’’ and urges Robin Williams’s character to  
read it. Damon, who co-wrote the script, was a neighbor of the Zinns  
growing up.

Damon was later involved in a television version of the book, ‘‘The  
People Speak,’’ which ran on the History Channel in 2009. Damon was  
the narrator of a 2004 biographical documentary, ‘‘Howard Zinn: You  
Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.’’

On his last day at BU, Dr. Zinn ended class 30 minutes early so he  
could join a picket line and urged the 500 students attending his  
lecture to come along. A hundred did so.

Dr. Zinn’s wife died in 2008. He leaves a daughter, Myla Kabat-Zinn of  
Lexington; a son, Jeff of Wellfleet; three granddaugthers; and two  
grandsons.

Funeral plans were not available.