Historian and social activist Howard Zinn spoke at Kent State University for a Labor Action week sponsored by a broad coalition of groups across campus. It was just the type of motivation progressives, like myself, need from time to time.

Zinn spoke candidly for about 10 minutes, before diving into the real issues of the night, about it being his first visit to Kent State, even though he felt like he had already been there with so much of it's history being wrapped up in his own cause for activism during the Vietnam War and following years. He told the story of the first day back to one of his classes at Boston University, in the fall of 1970. Parents used to "come with their kids, to see them off to school the first day" and check out their classes and curricula he said laughingly. In one of his classes he had added "Kent State" to the syllabus for a unit and discussion of the events there earlier that year, and was approached by a woman who introduced herself as Mrs. Krause, and mentioned that her daughter was in his class, and she had noticed Kent State on the syllabus. At this point he was really choked up when she said that her daughter in his class was Allison Krause's sister, one of the victims of the May 4 shooting. A very interesting, but sad, fact I had never come across in interviews with him.

The rest of the topics in the evening had this criss cross effect of events in and outside of his life and what the implications were for his teaching and cause for activism.

He talked about growing up in the slums of Brooklyn, in a working class family. His parents were factory workers, his father with a 4th grade education, and his mother with a 7th grade education. When he graduated high school he went to work in a shipyard because his family needed the money, and had his first experience organizing with workers, since the younger, unskilled workers like himself couldn't belong to the union. Both of those experiences he said gave him a sense of class distinction in the US, and he joked about the American Dream, and how it's typically internalized that we have no class system here, that if you work hard enough, you'll make the money you deserve, but here were his parents who were very hard workers and made very little money.

After that, he volunteered for the Air Force and was a bombardier in World War II. He discussed that, at the time, he didn't think about where he was dropping bombs, who lived there, or what was going on. I expected him to talk about his missions over Pilsen and Royan that I've seen him discuss quite a bit in interviews, but he moved on to his college experience, and talked about how the war affected him more generally later on.

He went to school under the GI bill and gradtuated at Columbia with Ph.D. He took the time to note the success of the GI bill and so-called "big government" in the wake of so many critics and he threw out all the familiar buzz words in a really laughable way: "free-market" "capitalism" "liberalization" and so on. And he noted that governments can do good things, and governments can do bad things, and it's up to the people to steer them away from the bad things and make them do good things.

His first teaching position was at Spelman College (a black school) in Atlanta, GA during the years of the birth of the civil rights movment. He described a very interesting interaction between education and activism in his life there. He said there he was in a classroom teaching classes on constitutional rights and law, and it was quite a different story for the students in his class to go out into the real world and observe what he was teaching. There was a tacit sort of agreement between the city and the people on the boards of the college, and others like it such as Morehouse and Atlanta University, that students would not be trapsing around the city, rather staying confined to the university which was sort of blocked off from the city with walls and even barbed wire in parts, believe it or not.

He said a group of his students approached him, and asked him if they had the right to distribute leaflets protesting racial segregation on the sidewalk in Atlanta, and he said he could have very easily said "well of course you do, it's in the constitution and supreme court decisions" but the reality was that the law didn't much matter. If they began handing out leaflets on Peachtree Street and a white policeman came along and said "Move!" what could they do? Cite the relevant Supreme Court cases to the policeman? "In Lovell v. Griffin, sir, as well as in Hague v. C.l. O. and Largent v. Texas . . . " What was more likely at such a moment, that the policeman would fall prostrate before this recitation of Supreme Court decisions? Or that he would finger his club and repeat, "Move on!" At that moment the great hoax in the teaching of constitutional law, the enormous emphasis on the importance of Supreme Court decisions, would be revealed. What would decide the right of free expression of these black students in Atlanta in 1961, what would be more powerful-the words in the Constitution, or the policeman's club?

He mentioned some of his colleagues at other black colleges -- who said, "This is bad, they are hurting their education." One of them wrote a letter to the Atlanta Constitution saying "I deplore what my students are doing; they are cutting class; they are missing out on their education." And he that was a pitiful, narrow, cramped view of education. He said the students would learn something much more valuable about the world, and the teachers would learn from their students, what it is like to go into the world with an enthusiasm and a curiousity that didn't exist before.

It wasn't until he began to teach constitutional law in the South, in the midst of the struggle against racial segregation, that he began to understand something so obvious that it takes just a bit of thought to see it, something so important that every young person growing up in America should be taught it: Our right to free expression is not determined by the words of the Constitution or the decisions of the Supreme Court, but by who has the power in the immediate situation where we want to exercise our rights: "Democracy is not practiced on a black board with three circles for the branches of government. It's practiced in the streets."

At this point he stopped to tell us all that now he had finished the preliminary work, and he could press on with what he really wanted to talk about. He was really quite entertaining all evening, not in a way that I could relay what he said and have it be funny in type, but there was quite a bit of laughter from the audience through out the speech.

He talked about lies in the Persian Gulf War, and spoke in some detail about when the U.S. Air Force dropped a bomb on an air raid shelter in Baghdad, killing over 600 people, many of them women and children. There had been many bombings, of buses, trains, highways, hospitals, neighborhoods, in which civilians were killed, and where the government described them as accidents. Of course, they were not quite accidents, because if you drop huge numbers of bombs on a city, it is inevitable that innocent people will die. However, in the case of the air raid shelter, the United States conceded that the bombing was deliberate, and justified this by the claim that the air raid shelter was a "communications" site. Reporters going into the rubble immediately after the bombing found not the slightest evidence of that. And even if it were, would that justify a massacre (there's no other name for it) of hundreds of men, women and children?

This last phase of his speech was focused on war in general, terrorism and Afghanistan and the value of history. And more specifically, history from the point of view of those traditionally omitted from history books such as blacks, women, Indians, poor laborers and so on, as he has chonicled in the ever more famous A People's History of the United States (1492-present). He talked generally about history as tool you can use not to be deceived. "If you don't have any history, then whatever you, the person in authority, the president at the microphone announcing we must bomb here, we must go there, the president has the field all to himself. You cannot counteract, because you don't know any history. You can only believe him. You were born yesterday. What history does is give you enough data so that you can question anything that is said from on high. You can measure the claims that are being made by the people in authority against the reality. And you can look at similar claims that were made before, and see what happened then. Here's a president who's saying we're going to war for democracy. And then you go back through history and say, "How many times have presidents said we're going to war for democracy, and what have those wars really been about?" The history can clarify things, prepare you for dealing with the duplicities of the real world. "Knowing about the Mexican War, knowing about the Spanish-American War, knowing about the war in the Philippines, knowing about World War I -- well, people who knew that history would not accept blandly what we were being told! At the very least, they would be skeptical."

Afterwards Kent was selling his books at discount, he signed autographs. I got my copy of the people's history signed, and an issue of the Progressive from last November ([link]) and even got to talk to him for a couple minutes. I took my mum along for $5, who was kind of skeptical about seeing a historian speak, thought he was really funny and thoughtful. Meeting one of my favorite super heroes (one of three among Nader and Chomsky) for the price of FREE with my student ID was obviously worth it.