Fighting Racism with Howard Zinn

(New York) On October 5, 1963, Howard Zinn, already experienced in the role of militant intellectual, was in Selma, capital of Dallas County, Alabama, to take part in a “Freedom Day”, scheduled for the day after . The objective: to register on the electoral list the largest number of blacks in the county, while barely 1% are.

Richard Hetu
special collaboration

In the evening, Zinn finds himself in a church where comedian Dick Gregory risks his neck by calling Southern police officers, including those of local sheriff Jim Clark, “underlings”, “idiots in charge of all the bass chores” and “dogs that inflict all the bites”.

John Lewis, young hero of the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), the main student organization of the civil rights movement, is not there, as he should have been. Arrested a few days earlier, he languishes in prison. But the next evening, Zinn will meet another prominent figure of the time in the living room of an activist from Selma, in this case the writer James Baldwin, arriving from France.

In the living room, all eyes are on the author of the essay Next time the fire. But the latter launches, with a big smile: “Speak, comrades. I am new here. I’m trying to figure out what’s going on. »

The next day, “Freedom Day”, Baldwin loses his smile. Around 11:30 a.m., when more than 300 blacks were lining up in front of the Selma courthouse, he protested in front of a man with a microphone and a tape recorder. “The federal government isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do,” he denounces, alluding to the threatening presence of Sheriff Clark and his police pack, large enough to line the entire line.

Ten minutes later, Howard Zinn notes in his notebook that only 12 blacks have completed the registration process. “Twelve in three hours,” he adds.

“The book is topical”

The readers of fight racismwhich has just been published by Lux Éditeur, will not lose their temper when reading the rest of this story, told in one of the essays on the emancipation of African-Americans grouped together in this book signed by Howard Zinn.

This anger is not only due to the evocative prose of the author ofA People’s History of the United Statesalso published by Lux Éditeur, and of which more than two million copies have been sold since the publication of the original version in 1980.

It also contributes to the fact that the barriers of yesteryear to the exercise of the right to vote in the States of the South have not completely disappeared. We think in particular of the long lines in front of polling stations in African-American neighborhoods or the new restrictions provided for in the electoral laws adopted by conservative states in 2021.

“Paradoxically, and somewhat sadly, the book is topical,” says Mark Fortier, editor at Lux Éditeur, alluding in particular to the dismantling, “piece by piece”, of the 1965 law on the right to vote by American conservative forces.

But fight racism, for anyone interested in American history and its actors, is also an enjoyable book. The essays therein are strongly imbued with Howard Zinn’s remarkable experience during his time as chair of the history and social sciences department at Spellman College, an Atlanta institution of higher learning attended only by black women, from 1956 to 1963.

An activist at heart, Howard Zinn does more than describe the student struggle for racial desegregation in the Southern states. He took part himself, in particular as an “adult advisor” to the SNCC, whose founding members, John Lewis, Bob Moses, Julian Bond and Ruby Doris Smith, among others, were responsible in his opinion for the one of the most resounding episodes of the civil rights movement.

It is the multiplication of sit in in snack bars in the Southern States in the spring of 1960.

For civil disobedience

“By bringing about social change without going through the usual political channels and by demonstrating that the power of popular demonstrations is stronger than that of the parliamentary process, the movement has set an example: in just a few weeks, in fact, the practice of civil disobedience spread from snack bars to cinemas, churches, beaches and a dozen other types of places where segregation was rampant,” writes Howard Zinn in an essay chronicling the emergence of SNCC .

This passage alone sums up the political philosophy of the man who had a long career as a professor in the Department of Political Science at Boston University.

His mixed opinion concerning the “political channels of use” is expressed in particular in the essays where he approaches the passive attitude of Abraham Lincoln vis-a-vis the abolitionists or that of John Kennedy vis-a-vis the militants of the civil rights movement.

“The Kennedy administration prides itself on wanting to cross a ‘New Frontier’, but it seems that this frontier does not extend to the South or to constitutional law”, laments Zinn in an article published in the issue of 1^er magazine december 1962 The Nation.

The most recent texts of fight racism date back to the 1980s and 2000s. One of them, taken from a lecture given at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, concerns academic freedom.

What would Howard Zinn, who died in 2010, think of the current debate around this question?

Mark Fortier, who met him twice as an editor, risks an answer: “He is someone who would probably be critical of certain things that are advanced today in anti-racist theory. But I think he would still understand most of the arguments. I don’t think, for example, that Zinn would dismiss the idea of ​​systemic racism out of hand. In short, he would have defended academic freedom, but he would not have been fooled by the instrumentalization of this debate by the conservatives, that is clear. »

fight racism

Howard Zinn

Lux Editor

280 pages