Howard Zinn at Spelman College

Against Discouragement
By Howard Zinn
[In 1963, historian Howard Zinn was fired from Spelman College, where he
was chair of the History Department, because of his civil rights
activities. This year, he was invited back to give the commencement
address. Here is the text of that speech, given on May 15, 2005.]
I am deeply honored to be invited back to Spelman after forty-two years. I
would like to thank the faculty and trustees who voted to invite me, and
especially your president, Dr. Beverly Tatum. And it is a special
privilege to be here with Diahann Carroll and Virginia Davis Floyd.
But this is your day -- the students graduating today. It's a happy day
for you and your families. I know you have your own hopes for the future,
so it may be a little presumptuous for me to tell you what hopes I have
for you, but they are exactly the same ones that I have for my
grandchildren.
My first hope is that you will not be too discouraged by the way the world
looks at this moment. It is easy to be discouraged, because our nation is
at war -- still another war, war after war -- and our government seems
determined to expand its empire even if it costs the lives of tens of
thousands of human beings. There is poverty in this country, and
homelessness, and people without health care, and crowded classrooms, but
our government, which has trillions of dollars to spend, is spending its
wealth on war. There are a billion people in Africa, Asia, Latin America,
and the Middle East who need clean water and medicine to deal with malaria
and tuberculosis and AIDS, but our government, which has thousands of
nuclear weapons, is experimenting with even more deadly nuclear weapons.
Yes, it is easy to be discouraged by all that.
But let me tell you why, in spite of what I have just described, you must
not be discouraged.
I want to remind you that, fifty years ago, racial segregation here in the
South was entrenched as tightly as was apartheid in South Africa. The
national government, even with liberal presidents like Kennedy and Johnson
in office, was looking the other way while black people were beaten and
killed and denied the opportunity to vote. So black people in the South
decided they had to do something by themselves. They boycotted and sat in
and picketed and demonstrated, and were beaten and jailed, and some were
killed, but their cries for freedom were soon heard all over the nation
and around the world, and the President and Congress finally did what they
had previously failed to do -- enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments to the
Constitution. Many people had said: The South will never change. But it
did change. It changed because ordinary people organized and took risks
and challenged the system and would not give up. That's when democracy
came alive.
I want to remind you also that when the war in Vietnam was going on, and
young Americans were dying and coming home paralyzed, and our government
was bombing the villages of Vietnam -- bombing schools and hospitals and
killing ordinary people in huge numbers -- it looked hopeless to try to
stop the war. But just as in the Southern movement, people began to
protest and soon it caught on. It was a national movement. Soldiers were
coming back and denouncing the war, and young people were refusing to join
the military, and the war had to end.
The lesson of that history is that you must not despair, that if you are
right, and you persist, things will change. The government may try to
deceive the people, and the newspapers and television may do the same, but
the truth has a way of coming out. The truth has a power greater than a
hundred lies. I know you have practical things to do -- to get jobs and
get married and have children. You may become prosperous and be considered
a success in the way our society defines success, by wealth and standing
and prestige. But that is not enough for a good life.
Remember Tolstoy's story, "The Death of Ivan Illych." A man on his
deathbed reflects on his life, how he has done everything right, obeyed
the rules, become a judge, married, had children, and is looked upon as a
success. Yet, in his last hours, he wonders why he feels a failure. After
becoming a famous novelist, Tolstoy himself had decided that this was not
enough, that he must speak out against the treatment of the Russian
peasants, that he must write against war and militarism.
My hope is that whatever you do to make a good life for yourself --
whether you become a teacher, or social worker, or business person, or
lawyer, or poet, or scientist -- you will devote part of your life to
making this a better world for your children, for all children. My hope is
that your generation will demand an end to war, that your generation will
do something that has not yet been done in history and wipe out the
national boundaries that separate us from other human beings on this
earth.
Recently I saw a photo on the front page of the New York Times which I
cannot get out of my mind. It showed ordinary Americans sitting on chairs
on the southern border of Arizona, facing Mexico. They were holding guns
and they were looking for Mexicans who might be trying to cross the border
into the United States. This was horrifying to me -- the realization that,
in this twenty-first century of what we call "civilization," we have
carved up what we claim is one world into two hundred artificially created
entities we call "nations" and are ready to kill anyone who crosses a
boundary.
Is not nationalism -- that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary, so
fierce it leads to murder -- one of the great evils of our time, along
with racism, along with religious hatred? These ways of thinking,
cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on, have been useful to
those in power, deadly for those out of power.
Here in the United States, we are brought up to believe that our nation is
different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral; that we
expand into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty,
democracy. But if you know some history you know that's not true. If you
know some history, you know we massacred Indians on this continent,
invaded Mexico, sent armies into Cuba, and the Philippines. We killed huge
numbers of people, and we did not bring them democracy or liberty. We did
not go into Vietnam to bring democracy; we did not invade Panama to stop
the drug trade; we did not invade Afghanistan and Iraq to stop terrorism.
Our aims were the aims of all the other empires of world history -- more
profit for corporations, more power for politicians.
The poets and artists among us seem to have a clearer understanding of the
disease of nationalism. Perhaps the black poets especially are less
enthralled with the virtues of American "liberty" and "democracy," their
people having enjoyed so little of it. The great African-American poet
Langston Hughes addressed his country as follows:
You really haven't been a virgin for so long.
It's ludicrous to keep up the pretext…
You've slept with all the big powers
In military uniforms,
And you've taken the sweet life
Of all the little brown fellows…
Being one of the world's big vampires,
Why don't you come on out and say so
Like Japan, and England, and France,
And all the other nymphomaniacs of power.
I am a veteran of the Second World War. That was considered a "good war,"
but I have come to the conclusion that war solves no fundamental problems
and only leads to more wars. War poisons the minds of soldiers, leads them
to kill and torture, and poisons the soul of the nation.
My hope is that your generation will demand that your children be brought
up in a world without war. If we want a world in which the people of all
countries are brothers and sisters, if the children all over the world are
considered as our children, then war -- in which children are always the
greatest casualties -- cannot be accepted as a way of solving problems.
I was on the faculty of Spelman College for seven years, from 1956 to
1963. It was a heartwarming time, because the friends we made in those
years have remained our friends all these years. My wife Roslyn and I and
our two children lived on campus. Sometimes when we went into town, white
people would ask: How is it to be living in the black community? It was
hard to explain. But we knew this -- that in downtown Atlanta, we felt as
if we were in alien territory, and when we came back to the Spelman
campus, we felt that we were at home.
Those years at Spelman were the most exciting of my life, the most
educational certainly. I learned more from my students than they learned
from me. Those were the years of the great movement in the South against
racial segregation, and I became involved in that in Atlanta, in Albany,
Georgia, in Selma, Alabama, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Greenwood and
Itta Bena and Jackson. I learned something about democracy: that it does
not come from the government, from on high, it comes from people getting
together and struggling for justice. I learned about race. I learned
something that any intelligent person realizes at a certain point -- that
race is a manufactured thing, an artificial thing, and while race does
matter (as Cornel West has written), it only matters because certain
people want it to matter, just as nationalism is something artificial. I
learned that what really matters is that all of us -- of whatever
so-called race and so-called nationality -- are human beings and should
cherish one another.
I was lucky to be at Spelman at a time when I could watch a marvelous
transformation in my students, who were so polite, so quiet, and then
suddenly they were leaving the campus and going into town, and sitting in,
and being arrested, and then coming out of jail full of fire and
rebellion. You can read all about that in Harry Lefever's book Undaunted
by the Fight. One day Marian Wright (now Marian Wright Edelman), who was
my student at Spelman, and was one of the first arrested in the Atlanta
sit-ins, came to our house on campus to show us a petition she was about
to put on the bulletin board of her dormitory. The heading on the petition
epitomized the transformation taking place at Spelman College. Marian had
written on top of the petition: "Young Ladies Who Can Picket, Please Sign
Below."
My hope is that you will not be content just to be successful in the way
that our society measures success; that you will not obey the rules, when
the rules are unjust; that you will act out the courage that I know is in
you. There are wonderful people, black and white, who are models. I don't
mean African- Americans like Condoleezza Rice, or Colin Powell, or
Clarence Thomas, who have become servants of the rich and powerful. I mean
W.E.B. DuBois and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and Marian Wright
Edelman, and James Baldwin and Josephine Baker and good white folk, too,
who defied the Establishment to work for peace and justice.
Another of my students at Spelman, Alice Walker, who, like Marian, has
remained our friend all these years, came from a tenant farmer's family in
Eatonton, Georgia, and became a famous writer. In one of her first
published poems, she wrote:
It is true--
I've always loved
the daring
ones
Like the black young
man
Who tried
to crash
All barriers
at once,
wanted to
swim
At a white
beach (in Alabama)
Nude.
I am not suggesting you go that far, but you can help to break down
barriers, of race certainly, but also of nationalism; that you do what you
can -- you don't have to do something heroic, just something, to join with
millions of others who will just do something, because all of those
somethings, at certain points in history, come together, and make the
world better.
That marvelous African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston, who wouldn't do
what white people wanted her to do, who wouldn't do what black people
wanted her to do, who insisted on being herself, said that her mother
advised her: Leap for the sun -- you may not reach it, but at least you
will get off the ground.
By being here today, you are already standing on your toes, ready to leap.
My hope for you is a good life.