Remembering Howard Zinn: A Historian of Nonviolence

This is the first blog post in what will be a series on the history of nonviolence by Metta blogger, Philip Wight. If you would like to contact Philip, please send your questions and thoughts to info@mettacenter.org and we will forward them to him!

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Had he been alive, today would have been Howard Zinn’s 90^th birthday. For many peace activists, Zinn needs no introduction. His most famous work—A People’s History of the United States—has sold over two million copies and continues to offer a much-needed dissenting view of American history. Yet few understand his deep commitment as an academic historian to the history of nonviolence. As this blog is dedicated to remembering the rich past of nonviolent activism, we should honor a man who found kernels of hope in America’s too-often bloody past.

Zinn drew his advocacy for nonviolence and social justice from his upbringing and personal experiences. Raised in a working-class, immigrant community, Zinn worked in a shipyard and served as a bombardier in World War II. These cathartic experiences shaped the future historian’s views on American history, socialism, and nonviolence. After researching his complicity in killing hundreds of innocent civilians during the war, he renounced nationalism and war and affirmed, “There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”

As a participant historian, Zinn understood that social criticism could never be divorced from bringing the past to life. He explained, “I would not have become a historian if I thought that it would become my professional duty to never emerge from the past…[or] connect… to events going on in our time.” This was no idle belief, as Zinn paid the price for his commitment as an activist academic. He was fired in 1963 from Spelman College in Atlanta for his outspoken support of SNCC and the Civil Rights Movement. Zinn understood that “education…should be dangerous to the existing social structure.”

Of all his varied and captivating works, I’d recommend A Power Governments Cannot Suppress. Dealing directly with the creation of a just society through nonviolent direct action, this text embodies Zinn’s powerful prose and uncompromising defense of democracy. He argues that writing history is not possible without a conception of the future, which he hoped could “be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than its solid centuries of warfare.” We would all benefit from envisioning a future driven by Zinn’s past of “compassion, sacrifice, courage, and kindness.”