A Year On. ¡Zinn Presente!
For the last year, on every page of History Is A Weapon, we’ve featured the above image as a memorial to Howard Zinn, the wonderful historian who passed away a year ago today.
Zinn’s impact lives on. In Amazon.com’s Democracy best sellers list, he’s ranked at #2, #3, and #5. The People Speak, the History Channel special about his Voices of a People’s History, did well. We’ve heard that Brian Jones will be reprising his performance of Marx in Soho in a month or two. And people are reading Zinn’s work online as much now as ever.
Today, we’ve turned off the Howard Zinn image and will be going back to our regular boring old History Is A Weapon tab. Not because we’re done mourning his passing and missing his presence and contributions. We love Howard Zinn and miss him dearly.
But Zinn’s work was never a sad eulogy for the dead old worlds of history, written in cobwebs and decaying on the page. His work was a celebration and an exploration, of resistance throughout our times, to look at for lessons, hints and clues about how we could keep it going, pay our respects, and do it better. A call of consciousness, rebellion and humor and solidarity, looking backwards, but working forwards. And that call is still going out, still being heard, and still being met.
Zinn was a historian, something that we took pains to remind people who were only familiar with some of his more widespread works, but he was also an activist: from working with SNCC to anti war activists, he didn’t simply recite something, but embodied it in his work. Hiding Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon papers, preparing them for publication alongside Noam Chomsky, working tirelessly against the war, Zinn acted.
And he was funny and sincere and nice. Some of us got the chance to meet him and it was really touching to be in his presence. The makers of this blog are anonymous, but we’ve come into contact with a lot of the leading figures of the American social movements and a lot of them are decent people (and more than a few of them are not), but Howard Zinn struck us as a really great guy.
We love Howard Zinn. We remember Howard Zinn. We continue the fight. We’re not so foolish as to think we’re continuing Howard Zinn’s fight. (He’d probably be the first to scoff at the idea of this all being about some white male academic). But there are a few that transcend, a few that embody what we aim for with our lives, if not victory against the empire, at least a mark for spending every waking moment bucking it. Some of their names are hallowed, King, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth; others are less well known, and many are nameless, but Zinn is definitely up there. And for that we are grateful.
At this point, I’m just bumming, so let’s conclude this note with a quote from Howard himself:
I would encourage people to look around them in their community and find an organization that is doing something that they believe in, even if that organization has only five people, or ten people, or twenty people, or a hundred people. And to look at history and understand that when change takes place it takes place as a result of large, large numbers of people doing little things unbeknownst to one another. And that history is very important for people to not get discouraged. Because if you look at history you see the way the labor movement was able to achieve things when it stuck to its guns, when it organized, when it resisted. Black people were able to change their condition when they fought back and when they organized. Same thing with the movement against the war in Vietnam, and the women’s movement. History is instructive. And what it suggests to people is that even if they do little things, if they walk on the picket line, if they join a vigil, if they write a letter to their local newspaper. Anything they do, however small, becomes part of a much, much larger sort of flow of energy. And when enough people do enough things, however small they are, then change takes place.
¡Zinn Presente!
