Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn was born in Brooklyn on August 24, 1922, to a Jewish immigrant family. His father, Eddie, came from Austria-Hungary and his mother, Jenny, from Irkutsk. Both parents were factory workers with limited schooling, and he grew up in a series of apartments with no books or magazines. During the Depression his father dug ditches, cleaned windows, and waited tables at weddings and bar mitzvahs as a union member, and for a short time the family ran a candy store that barely paid. His parents bought him literature by mailing ten cents and a coupon to the New York Post for each of twenty volumes of Dickens. A creative writing program at Thomas Jefferson High School sharpened his writing. As a young man he went to a rally in Times Square with Communist friends from his neighborhood, where mounted police charged a peaceful crowd and knocked him unconscious. That experience had a lasting effect on how he saw politics and state power.

After high school he became an apprentice shipfitter at the New York Navy Yard at eighteen. With other apprentices, shut out of trade unions and worried about low pay and dangerous conditions, he helped form the Apprentice Association. He served as its Activities Director. Organizers met weekly outside work to plan strategy and read books then considered radical, and the experience gave him a lasting respect for unions. He had first opposed American entry into World War II, influenced by friends, the Nye Committee findings, and his reading. Learning about fascism, including through Sawdust Caesar and its portrait of Mussolini, changed his mind. He joined the Army Air Forces as an officer and served as a bombardier in the 490th Bombardment Group, with targets in Berlin, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. He married Roslyn Shechter in 1944. In later interviews he said that the human reality of war changed his life, and he came to see his own war service as a source of lasting questions about violence and means.

He earned his BA at New York University and his MA and PhD at Columbia, with a 1958 dissertation on Fiorello LaGuardia in Congress. He then became chair of the history and social sciences department at Spelman College, where he wrote and acted alongside the civil rights movement. His firsthand account of Freedom Day in Selma in 1963 later appeared in You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train. He later taught political science at Boston University. His books from this period include Disobedience and Democracy: Nine Fallacies on Law and Order (1968), a defense of civil disobedience, and Justice in Everyday Life: The Way It Really Works (1974). In November 1970 he debated the philosopher Charles Frankel on civil disobedience, and he chose to go to Baltimore for it rather than appear in court on charges from an army base protest. He used that choice to explain and practice what he argued.

His best-known work, A People's History of the United States, appeared in 1980. It tells American history from the standpoint of the people usually written out of the narrative, and it sold more than a million copies, which he and his publishers celebrated in 2003. He wrote more than twenty books, including the memoir You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train (1994), Passionate Declarations: Essays on War and Justice (2003), A Young People's History of the United States (2007), and Truth Has a Power of Its Own, conversations with Ray Suarez. He also wrote plays and spoke widely, and his speeches from 1963 to 2009 were collected as Howard Zinn Speaks. He described himself as "something of an anarchist, something of a socialist. Maybe a democratic socialist." He argued that Marx's criticism of capitalism remained current while rejecting the claim that dictatorships represented Marxism. His method was to name his own standpoint openly, study movements from below, and treat social change as something ordinary people do through collective pressure and direct action. He died in Santa Monica on January 27, 2010, at 87.