by Mary Grabar
While Zinn accused Manley of authoritarianism and worse, Vanlandingham explains, “Professors at public colleges often feared for their jobs, but at Spelman it appears that Manley did not pressure faculty members who supported or encouraged the students.” In fact, according to student activist leader Herschelle Sullivan, when students came to Manley with plans for a sit-in with other Atlanta University schools, “Manley appreciated the trust in him which this action demonstrated and did not pressure her to cancel the proposed demonstration.” Manley, along with the presidents of the other Atlanta University colleges, actually paid for the full-page “Appeal for Human Rights” advertisement that led to sit-ins.42
In A Legacy Continues, Manley describes these events and the advertisement, which motivated “two hundred students from the Atlanta University Center on March 15, 1960, to stage sit-ins in nine public, tax-supported buildings,” as well as visits by students to several historically white churches that summer, and a conference.43 He remarks favorably on negotiations with Mayor William Hartsfield and then his successor, Mayor Ivan Allen, which resulted in the desegregation of public and private places, as well as the addition of blacks to the ranks of policemen, firefighters, school board members, and candidates for the Atlanta Board of Aldermen. The Spelman president bragged about the city’s progress in the ensuing years, as evidenced by an invigorated economy and two black mayors. But it appears that Zinn eventually went too far for even this tolerant college president who was on board for equal rights. Interestingly, Manley never mentions Howard Zinn by name but only writes, “These improvements were made despite efforts on the part of some small groups to hamper progress by destructive means.”44 And in 1963, Zinn was fired from Spelman.
Howard Zinn begins the chapter of his autobiography about his firing by quoting a student who commented that the Spelman administrators assumed “we’re savages and that it’s their job to civilize us.” According to Zinn, she was complaining about “the antiquated restrictions, the finishing-school atmosphere, the paternalism and control.” The students had been radicalized: “When ‘the Spelman girls’ emerged from jail and returned to campus, they were in no mood to accept what they had accepted before.”45 Zinn obviously was encouraging adolescent rebelliousness and stoking resentment against authority. When Zinn offered to play a tape of the students’ grievances about campus rules at a faculty meeting, Manley refused. “It was becoming clear that he saw me as an instigator rather than simply a supporter of the protests,” Zinn protested.46
Two months later as the Zinn family was in the car heading north for the summer in June 1963, Zinn found in his mailbox the letter informing him of his dismissal with a check for a full year’s salary. It became clear to Zinn why “everyone’s letters of reappointment for the next year had been held up for two months. . . . Manley was waiting until all students were off campus and this could be done without an uproar.”47 Zinn presents himself as a victim. But he had continually provoked the administration. One of his students, Marian Wright Edelman, recalled feeling “shock and confusion” when Zinn “announced in class that he did not believe in Jesus Christ.”48 William Nix, director of the personnel office at Morehouse, thought Zinn was fired because he had too much influence over the student body and because he opposed the administration “too vigorously.” Spelman Dean Mercile Johnson Lee observed that the college “could not operate with two Presidents.”49
Howard Zinn had strayed from traditional professorial duties in other ways. In 1962, after writing “Another Look at Chinese Communists” for the Antioch Review (the look was friendly), the Non-Western Program, which Zinn founded and directed, sponsored a talk on campus by Edgar Snow advocating that “Red China” be admitted to the United Nations. Snow reported favorably on conditions there—where he had traveled—and reported seeing “ ’no professional beggars.’ ”50
Zinn, with Ella Baker, had been one of the few adults at the founding meeting of SNCC. His role in that organization went beyond the scope of even a faculty advisor. Students in SNCC, according to the editor of Zinn’s diary, “trusted, confided in, and accepted advice from” Zinn. Because he had “warm relationships with its activists,” he was “elected to its executive boards” and was “invited to undertake important tasks for the movement.”51 After his firing from Spelman, Zinn continued his involvement with the group, returning to Atlanta in October 1963 to observe and write about its voter registration campaign. He also addressed the annual meeting in April 1964.52
Zinn presents his firing as another example of American injustice against the poor and powerless. While the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) issued a statement citing Spelman for violating his academic freedom, Zinn did not have the money to fight for his job. This demonstrates one of his oft-repeated plaints: “By this time I was acutely conscious of the gap between law and justice. I knew that the letter of the law was not as important as who held the power in any real-life situation.”53
Despite this insight, Zinn did all he could to provoke the people with the power to hire or fire him. Although his severance letter was accompanied by a year’s pay, Zinn demanded more money—something he does not mention in his autobiography. Nor does he write about the thirty-five-page memo he sent to the Board of Trustees in which he not only disputed the terms of his hiring (insisting he had tenure), but also accused Spelman of not keeping pace with the “revolution of expectations.” He also complained about the lack of democracy on campus and the low wages paid to staff and accused Manley of being “rigid and dogmatic” and acting “like a colonial administrator.” Zinn also attacked “the air of piety, the ceremonial occasions, the compulsory chapel attendance,” at Spelman, calling the Christian worship service a “pompous and empty ritual.” According to Duberman, Zinn drew “a direct analogy” between the administration’s “rigid attitudes and the arguments for maintaining segregation, linking Manley’s authoritarianism and that of white segregationists.” Zinn claimed that both justified themselves “by speaking of ‘tradition’ and ‘our way of life.’ ” Duberman admits, “Howard’s analogy would have infuriated the most composed and imperturbable of human beings. . . . it was about as politic as calling a Jew a minion of Hitler.”54
But Zinn’s incessant hostility to Spelman’s administration and its traditions was not the only reason he lost his job. In the back and forth over his termination, college president Manley explained that he had not renewed Zinn’s contract because he knew “of no outstanding book in history that [Zinn] has written or articles of great significance in the history journals.”55 And, in fact, there were none. The man who would become America’s most influential historian was not engaged in historical scholarship. His publications—the new “Look” at Communist China, for example, which was the fruit of a year-long postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard—were essentially political agitation for radical causes and leftist and Communist regimes.
After writing his dissertation on Fiorello LaGuardia and revising it into a book back in 1959, Zinn had written nothing that could properly be called scholarly. His subsequent publications are not the fruit of diligent historical research with footnotes and primary sources. His writings did not adorn the pages of the American Historical Review or the Journal of History in the stacks of periodicals in college libraries. Instead, Zinn was filling the pages of the Nation and other far-left publications with writing about the causes with which he was engaged: SNCC, radicalizing a Christian college, civil disobedience, the joys of jail, protests, demonstrations, and anti-war rallies. And he was the star, the speaker rousing thousands of young people at rallies. His books, too, were about the causes he was involved in, as is clear from their titles: The Southern Mystique, SNNC: The New Abolitionists, and Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. Even the writing he was doing for book collections published by university presses focused on his activism. A 1980 biographical sheet lists his contribution of “Abolitionists, Freedom Riders, and the Tactics of Agitation” to the 1965 coll
ection The Anti-Slavery Vanguard, and “Marxism and the New Left” to the 1968 collection Dissent: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism.56 Aside from book reviews, his shorter publications appeared in popular publications like Harper’s Monthly, the Progressive, the New South Students, Liberation, Ramparts, and Z Magazine. While Zinn biographer and fellow activist and academic Martin Duberman calls Harper’s and the Nation “prestigious national journals” and touts Zinn’s “national prominence,”57 the fact is that while exposure in such popular media outlets may be welcomed by colleges’ public relations departments, most tenure committees do not see it as evidence of academic achievement. By traditional academic standards, a dossier like Zinn’s perhaps should have been cause for denial of tenure and possibly of employment.
And there was another reason. In 1964, Robert Van Waes, the AAUP staff member handling Zinn’s case, asked him to come to Washington to talk. Manley, in his correspondence with the AAUP, had alluded to a “morals charge” against Zinn dating back to 1960, which had become “fairly common gossip on campus.” The college president had previously informed Zinn that if the AAUP decided to investigate his case, “there are certain documented facts concerning your personal and private relationships with a student, which are extremely relevant to your fitness to serve as a faculty member in this or any other institution, along with the fact that you have not been truthful with the College on this matter.”58
Friendly Zinn biographer Duberman reports, “As one anonymous student had put it, ‘Howie tried to “lay a dame.”’ Mrs. Benjamin Mays (wife of the president of Morehouse College, in the same complex with Spelman and Atlanta University), however, told a “more elevated” version of the story, “referring simply to the so-called incident with a student—who, it turned out, had been the winner of a much-coveted Merrill scholarship to study abroad.”59
In his autobiography, Zinn does describe getting caught in a car with a student, Roslyn Pope, but presents the arrest as a case of harassment by racist police. Zinn writes that “she and I had been arrested together as I drove her off-campus one evening to her parents’ home in Atlanta. Flooding my car with their searchlight, two policemen ordered us into their patrol car.” The way he tells the story, when the two of them were arrested for disorderly conduct, Zinn asked, “What’s disorderly about our conduct?” At that point, “Smacking his flashlight into his palm, [the policeman] said, ‘You sitting in a car with a nigger gal and asking me what’s disorderly conduct?” Zinn makes it appear as if he had been pulled over for simply giving a ride to “a friend of the family.”60
But according to Duberman, Zinn changed his story in the course of briefing the AAUP’s Van Waes about the incident. Zinn told Van Waes that the girl was a minor who was confiding in him about boyfriend problems. Duberman recounts details that Zinn left out as his story shifted, but the bottom line is that Zinn was parked with a female student on a dead-end street far from her destination late at night. And Zinn did not want his “ailing” wife to find out. Zinn said he would sue for libel if Manley tried “to ruin him,” but then considered the damage from airing such a suit and said he was open to a settlement. Van Waes mentioned an additional year’s salary and the opportunity to resign. But Zinn reconsidered yet again and wrote Manley a nasty letter, charging the college president with allowing his sexual imagination to “[work] overtime in order to manufacture some tidbit of gossip about me.” Zinn detected “ ‘the sincere moralizing of a true Puritan’ ” in Manley and charged him with hypocrisy for turning a blind eye to the homosexuality and alcoholism on his campus.61
In response, Manley threatened to publish an “official” police report, corroborating statements, and statements from neighbors. By 1965, however, Zinn had been offered an associate professorship at Boston University and the matter was dropped.62
But even in later years, Zinn did not want his wife, who was depressed, to know the story.63 There was a reason for Roz’s “darker moods,” as Duberman explains: “her discovery in the early 1970s that Howard had been having an affair with another woman that had become serious. The few details we know come not from the vacuumed Zinn archives but from material in the archives of others and from a few close friends who’ve spoken frankly. . . .” Zinn chose to confide in his daughter, Myla, when she was in her mid-twenties, “telling her that he’d fallen in love with another woman—though he still loved Roz as well.” Duberman describes the daughter’s response to this sick situation: “if he expected understanding, he was quickly undeceived. Myla (in her own words) ‘was shocked and upset not only because I had had no idea that anything like this had ever happened, but also because he hadn’t told my mother. His seeking my support and approval showed me how little he knew me and how little he understood what a huge betrayal this was of my mother.’ ”
Zinn ultimately chose to stay with his wife, but “did continue to have ‘flings,’ making sure that Roz didn’t find out.”64
In 2016, when she was seventy-seven, Roslyn Pope, the girl Zinn was caught in the car with in 1959, told Robert Cohen, who was doing research for his Howard Zinn’s Southern Diary: Sit-Ins, Civil Rights, and Black Women’s Student Activism, that she had been humiliated by the arrest and then offended by Zinn’s writing about it without discussing it with her. She adamantly denied having an affair with Zinn. At the time, rumors continued to swirl around campus about another student, and Alice Walker, a student of Zinn’s at Spelman, did not dismiss them when she talked to Cohen. “We were all in love with Howie,” she told him. Cohen, however, maintains that Manley sexualized the incident in order to “shock and intimidate Zinn into dropping the appeal of his firing.”65
In his autobiography, Zinn explains that persecution followed him to his new job at Boston University. He was promised that he would be granted tenure a year after he was hired for the new job, but was put off with excuses, such as secretarial errors. “Finally, in early 1967 [actually only a few months more than a year after he was hired] the Department of Political Science held a meeting to vote on my tenure. There were a few professors opposed, saying flatly that my actions against the [Vietnam] war were embarrassing the university. On the other hand, student evaluations of my teaching were enthusiastic, and my fifth book was being published that spring. The department voted for tenure.”
So did the dean and the Board of Trustees, in quick order. In the following years, Zinn regaled students with the story of how, when students asked him to be the speaker at their anti-war protest in front of the hotel where Secretary of State Dean Rusk was speaking on the very same day the board would vote on his tenure, Zinn risked it all and spoke out against the war as Rusk and the trustees stepped out of limousines. He did receive tenure—but only because the board voted on it before the speech.66
But when John Silber became Boston University president, a battle royale ensued. In the spring of 1972, as one of his first acts as president and as an affront to Zinn’s political sensibilities, Silber invited the U.S. Marines onto the campus to recruit students! Students protested and obstructed other students from meeting with recruiters. Silber called the police and was on the scene, according to Zinn, “with a bullhorn, acting like a general in a military operation as the police moved in, using police dogs and clubs, to arrest the demonstrators.” Zinn was ill at home at the time, but the next day from his sick bed he wrote an article about the “history of the U.S. Marines, the philosophy of civil disobedience, and the concept of an ‘open university’. . . .” Silber continued to battle Zinn by enacting a “censorship policy” because the Zinn-advised student newspaper, Exposure, had printed “bold criticism of the administration.” The ACLU stepped in to defend a student punished for hanging a “divest” sign from his dormitory window. Zinn was denied teaching assistants and pay raises.67 (He sued and won back pay.)
Zinn was not much of a scholar or historian. He was continually in danger of losing his job. But he was a brilliant, mesmerizing political activist. He had persuaded his s
tudents at Spelman to defy their college president and the wishes of their parents, to risk expulsion and physical harm, and spend time in jail. Alice Walker wrote that Spelman girls “swooned over” the “tall, rangy, good-looking professor.”68 At Boston University, his rhetoric inspired tears in draft resisters and in young women reading Black Boy for class. Zinn’s classes routinely filled up and had students waiting on overflow. Former student Alice Walker was still gushing about him decades later. One of his students was so inspired that he would go on to commit a portion of the fortune he earned later to establishing the Zinn Education Project.
As of 1970, by his own account, Zinn had “spoken against the war at hundreds of situations around the country—teach-ins, rallies, debates.”69 In the 1970s, Zinn continued to radicalize students in the classroom—including William Holtzman, who later in life co-founded the Zinn Education Project with his wealth, and who recalls how Zinn regaled students with stories told in his “spell-binding manner.” When Holtzman raised his hand to ask a question about American history, compromise, and tenure, Zinn replied in “a Buddha-like manner,” relating his story about risking tenure by speaking in protest during Rusk’s visit.70 In high school, Emily Rentz was subjected to intensive Zinn study and then a visit from the man himself. He was “extremely charismatic,” with most of the students either in “awe” of him when he came to visit her class in 2005 or acting like it to get a good grade. Zinn was “a powerful” speaker, “manipulative.” He spoke with “conviction.” As Rentz told me, “He spoke eloquently and articulately with deliberate pauses that dramatized his points as he spoke. He was very animated and sarcastic,” and directed criticisms at the “government, corporate America, capitalism in general and Republicans as a whole. But he did it carefully and cleverly. . . . He made us feel like we had to be intellectually idiots to think differently. . . . [and to] feel ashamed to be American. . . .” She found that Zinn was also “idolized” at Boston University, which she attended after graduating from high school in 2006.71