Howard Zinn
(1922- )
Prominent American professor, activist, democratic socialist, and author of A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present. Zinn was born in Brooklyn in 1922 to working-class parents. As a young man, he worked in the shipyards before joining the Air Force in 1943 and serving as a bombardier. Though he received an Air Medal and battle stars for his service, his experiences of World War II made him an ardent pacifist from then on. After returning to New York, he majored in History and graduated from Columbia University with a PhD in 1958.
Becoming a professor at Spelman College in Atlanta in 1956, Zinn joined NAACP Chairman Julian Bond and Marian Wright Edelman on the picket lines and sit-ins, supporting their efforts with his eloquent writing. During the 1960's, he was an activist in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which helped gain civil rights for blacks in the South. During the Vietnam War, he joined fellow leftists such as MIT Professor Noam Chomsky and Doctor Bejamin Spock in denouncing the war's objectives. He was one of the activists who secured the release of the first three American prisoners of war.
Zinn became a Professor of History at Boston University in 1964 and taught there until 1988. While in Boston, two of his young neighbors would become the well-known actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. In 1980, he published his best-known book, A People's History of the United States, which looks at the real history of the US (beginning with Columbus) from the viewpoint of the masses; an entire chapter is devoted to "The Socialist Challenge." Over 400,000 copies of A People's History have been sold. Zinn has also published SNCC: The New Abolitionists (1964), Declarations of Independence (1990), The Zinn Reader (1997), and Marx in Soho (1999).
Since 1988, Zinn has been Professor Emiritus of Boston University and lives in Auburndale, Massachussetts, with his wife, Roslyn. He has received the Thomas Merton, Eugene V. Debs, and Upton Sinclair Awards for his tireless activism. He has been a vocal supporter of the Green Party and the Presidential campaign of Ralph Nader. He is also an opponent of the attacks on civil liberties under the banner of the so-called "war on terrorism." He is a regular contributor to the magazine The Progressive.