Against discouragement

[Guest guest]

May 24, 2005

 

TomDispatch.com

 

 

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. It 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 Cornell 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. "

 

Howard Zinn is the author with Anthony Arnove of the just published Voices of a

People's History of the United States (Seven Stories Press) and of the

international best-selling A People's History of the United States.

 

Those who control the past, control the future; Those who control the future,

control the present; Those who control the present, control the past.^