Debunking Howard Zinn

by Mary Grabar

  SNCC used the NAACP for travel expenses, attorney fees, bail, and fines—while pushing it aside. On September 1, 1961, NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins wrote to Edward King, executive secretary of SNCC, complaining, “We cannot commit ourselves to free-wheeling activity planned and launched by another organization.” He added in a postscript, “We have received persistent reports, which we hope very much are in error, that your Committee has had a more or less formal intention of ‘involving the NAACP whether they like it or not in situations where they cannot escape embarrassment unless they come along.’ We don’t intend to be embarrassed, if at all possible, and especially in a voter-registration campaign that, so far, seems to have put more workers in jail than it has voters on the books.”53

  In another letter in November of the same year, Wilkins complained that SNCC’s Mississippi voter drive had “added only 18 names to the registered voter list,” but saddled the NAACP with “a minimum $15,000 in bills for fines, bail, appeal bonds, lawyer’s fees, travel and other expenses.”54

  Eventually, the NAACP did “come along,” changing course to keep up with the “direct action” campaigns of SNCC—much to the dismay of NAACP stalwarts like George Schuyler, and to the delight of Howard Zinn, who wrote in his 1964 book SNCC: The New Abolitionists, that “the student movement galvanized the older organizations into a new dynamism” and “won the support of some of the established Negro leaders who quickly sensed that a new wind was blowing.”55

  Zinn may have had more to do with the pressure put on the NAACP than he has let on. In his diary entry of January 13, 1963, he confided that someone from the NAACP had told another activist, Dotty Dawson, that Zinn was a “controversial figure,” and that someone from the Anti-Defamation League told another activist that Zinn was “a Communist.” Five days later, Zinn described a conversation with Spelman colleague Les Dunbar about Communism. Dunbar had told the ADL person that Zinn’s “ideological and policy stances, from what Dunbar knew, precluded my being a Communist.” In response to Zinn’s query about having Communists in a civil rights organization, Dunbar had replied, “I don’t want them.” Zinn expressed his opinion that “the only basis for acting against a person was specific empirical data showing this person was acting in a harmful way.” It was difficult to “know if a person is a Communist,” Zinn had told Dunbar; charges from HUAC and the FBI were unreliable, he claimed.56

  Zinn did not like the NAACP, which was founded in 1909, and which grew out of the Niagara Movement, a group of twenty-nine prominent African Americans led by W. E. B. Du Bois and William Trotter, who were representative of the assertive, educated, and independent “New Negro.” They met near Niagara Falls in 1905 and drew up a manifesto for full civil rights. The NAACP was so highly esteemed that its principals met with presidents. It had won several significant legal cases, among them the Sweet case of 1925 in which a black Detroit homeowner was exonerated after protecting his home from a mob of whites by shooting and killing one of them in self-defense and the Elaine, Arkansas, riots trials—which culminated in a 1925 Supreme Court ruling that a trial conducted in a mob atmosphere violated legal due process. Neither case is mentioned in Zinn’s history. He does discuss the 1905 Niagara meeting, but attributes the “formation” of the NAACP (erroneously, in 1910) to “a race riot in Springfield, Illinois” (only the partial reason). Zinn presents the founders of the NAACP not as the interracial group they were, but as dominated by whites, with W. E. B. Du Bois as its “only black officer.” Zinn leaves it at that, not mentioning the fact that by the 1920s the organization’s leadership was black-dominated. When the Ku Klux Klan resurged in the 1920s, Zinn comments, “the NAACP seemed helpless in the face of mob violence and race hatred everywhere.”57 Far from being helpless, the NAACP was at the forefront of the effort to stop lynchings and improve the lot of blacks in the Jim Crow South. But Zinn ignores the work of black NAACP attorney Charles Houston and downplays that of Thurgood Marshall; he omits the daring forays to the South by Walter White to investigate lynchings, and by Roy Wilkins and George Schuyler in the 1930s to investigate abuses of black Southern levee workers.

  In downplaying the role of the NAACP in the battle for civil rights and exaggerating that of the Communist Party, Howard Zinn was, once again, following the Communist Party propaganda line. In his 1951 History of the Communist Party of the United States, Communist Party USA general secretary William Z. Foster had claimed that it was the party’s legal arm, the International Legal Defense (ILD), that had made the Scottsboro case known. It had sent “its lawyer, the veteran Communist Joseph Brodsky” to prevent the legal lynching. According to Foster, “the A.F. of L., the S.P., A.C.L.U., and even the N.A.A.C.P. displayed no interest in the case.”58

  That’s the Communist Party line—from the time of the original events to Zinn’s A People’s History. The April 10, 1931, Daily Worker printed a statement from the Central Committee of the Communist Party USA claiming that “ ‘reformist’ organizations . . . such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the Urban League, etc” would “betray the Negro masses.” It also announced that a telegram had informed the governor that the Communist ILD was sending an attorney to offer the defendants legal services.59

  Black weekly newspapers soon reported the dire situation in Alabama, with the Chicago Defender reporting briefly on April 4,60 and then providing more extensive coverage two weeks later along with the other major black newspapers, the Pittsburgh Courier and the Afro-American.61 At that point, readers learned that the NAACP was putting together a legal strategy. As the Afro-American was reporting on the NAACP’s progress in its May 2 issue, in the same issue it was reporting how the CPUSA was undermining the organization by sponsoring riots. On May 2, the Afro-American reported on a riot started in Harlem by an interracial group of Communist protestors who carried signs calling to “Smash Scottsboro Frame-Up.”62 This was the first of many riots fomented and paid for by the Soviet Union and supported by a propaganda campaign in its multiple publications.

  After NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White secured an agreement for representation of four of the Scottsboro defendants, the Communist ILD sent out a statement that the defendants had “repudiated it.”63 A few days later, the Courier quoted a statement from White saying, in part, that the NAACP “cannot cooperate with the Communists who have vilified the N.A.A.C.P., accused it in documents submitted for the signature of the boys’ parents of being traitorous, and have stopped at nothing to exclude the N.A.A.C.P. from the case, then proceed[ed] to charge the N.A.A.C.P. with failure to cooperate.”64 The Communists were denounced by the Pittsburgh Courier65 and the Chattanooga City Interdenominational Ministers’ Alliance of Negro Divines.66

  Throughout that summer, Communists tried to shut down NAACP meetings. On Chicago’s south side, they “heckled” NAACP assistant field secretary William Pickens and were charged with “inciting a riot.”67 Pickens was again heckled and “jostled” at meetings in New York and Boston.68 Communists even showed up at the NAACP’s annual meeting in Pittsburgh and distributed flyers stating, “The workers of Pittsburgh must brand the leaders of the N.A.A.C.P. as traitors of the Negro masses.”69

  The New York Times reported that the NAACP’s Pickens had accused the Communists of a willingness to “sacrifice these Negro boys to their party ambitions”70 and that German Communist newspapers were “making capital of the Scottsboro convictions” and “fervently appealing to Reds everywhere to ‘save the victims of judicial murder.’ ” Everywhere included the American Consulate in Berlin, where windows were smashed, and Dresden and Leipzig, where riots took place.71

  While the eight defendants (the case against twelve-year-old Roy Wright, the youngest, had ended in a mistrial) languished in prison that summer, black sharecroppers in nearby Camp Hill, Alabama, organized by Communists into the “Share Croppers’ Union” met to protest the Scottsboro case and to “press . . . demands” on
landowners. At least one African American was killed, thirty-four were imprisoned, and four others disappeared.72 The Communist organizers had fled the scene.

  The NAACP’s White expressed his frustrations in a lengthy article in the December 1931 Harper’s Magazine on the “ ‘united front’ ” ruse, and the suspicion “in the Negro mind . . . more than confirmed—that at least some of the Communists did not want the nine boys saved but sought instead to make ‘martyrs’ of them for the purposes of spreading Communist propaganda among Negroes.”73 But by January 1932, the ILD had wrested the case away from the NAACP.74

  More bloodshed came in December 1932, when, as James Goodman relates in Stories of Scottsboro, “Tallapoosa County sharecroppers, encouraged by Communists to form a union, picked up guns in resistance to whites,” who had simply “served a writ of attachment to cover a bad debt.” As a result, “several sharecroppers were killed.”75

  The Communists made “trouble” not only among Alabama sharecroppers, but also among mill workers, miners, and the unemployed, and they imposed themselves “whenever and wherever a Negro was accused of rape.” In Tuscaloosa, in July 1933, when “three Negroes” were arrested for the rape and murder of a young woman, an ILD lawyer on the first day of the hearing “insisted that he and his two associates had been retained by the defendants,” even though relatives of the accused had already hired other lawyers and told the judge so. “A few thousand Tuscaloosans” who had “gathered outside the courthouse” had also made it clear that the Communist involvement in the case was not welcome, but the ILD from New York “immediately announced it would continue to fight for the defense and sent a telegram to the judge,” which “warned that ‘two hundred thousand members’ were prepared to expose his ‘illegal maneuvers’ as another Scottsboro.” Before the trial, rumors that the ILD would be back insisting on a “change of venue” and that the prosecution had made “a secret deal” against prosecution “fueled reports that a lynch mob was planning to storm the Tuscaloosa jail.” As a result, the prisoners were ordered to be transferred to Birmingham. During transit, twelve masked men hijacked the vehicle, and shot the prisoners, killing two of the three.76

  Apparently, Zinn, who presents the Communist Party as the only hope for African Americans, wasn’t disturbed by the bloodshed. Journalists and members of the NAACP spoke out against the Communists’ recklessness with black lives, but of course Zinn doesn’t quote their statements of protest. George Schuyler, for example—beginning when he heard about the Scottsboro case in 1931 up through his 1966 autobiography and on— expressed his anger at the Communists’ callous use of blacks. Schuyler, who grew up in a working-class family in Syracuse and had served two enlistments in the segregated army, began his journalistic career in 1923 at the black socialist magazine the Messenger. The next year, he also started writing for the Pittsburgh Courier, which by the 1930s was the leading black newspaper.

  On August 15, 1931, he charged “the Communist racketeers” with giving “the murderous Southern Neanderthals the very opportunity and excuse they are looking for to commit additional homicide.”77 Two weeks later, he accused the Communists of wanting “electrocutions, massacres and savage sentences in order that they may have concrete cases on which to base their propaganda.” He charged, accurately, that the CPUSA’s purported help to American blacks was undertaken at the behest and for the benefit of the Kremlin. Schuyler also took note of self-contradictions in the Communist propaganda: the Communists had found a “score of ‘mothers’ ” for the “eight condemned lads” and they were busy collecting donations for a defense fund while at the same time “maintain[ing] that no justice” could be “obtained in the capitalist courts.”78

  In his May 6, 1933, column, Schuyler claimed that “Communist liars” had got to the boys and their parents by “swearing the N.A.A.C.P. wanted the defendants electrocuted. They were also doubtless influenced by the fact that the I.L.D. was a white organization. Even then the N.A.A.C.P. offered to cooperate, but the Communists, thinking this case an excellent wedge to get the colored brother with Red propaganda, refused.” Then the Communists had “bungled matters almost beyond repair”79—by, for example, intentionally prolonging the fundraising period by not filing a bill of exceptions in time for a new trial.80 It was the Communists’ total disregard for the safety and well-being of actual African Americans that opened the eyes of the originally socialist Schuyler and inspired his steady stream of denunciations—which, in turn, inspired threats from the Communists, prompting the journalist to keep a loaded pistol next to his typewriter. The headline of Schuyler’s June 23,1934, Pittsburgh Courier editorial complained about “Another Communist ‘Victory’ ”—in the Ku Klux Klan’s resurgence.81

  The assistance of the NAACP was eventually instrumental in freeing the Scottsboro defendants, but only after many wasted years behind bars thanks to the Communists’ bungling of the case. The last two “Scottsboro Boys” were not paroled until 1944. The record shows that the Communist Party exploited those who needed help most. It was willing to sacrifice black lives.

  Zinn similarly prioritizes revolutionary violence over the real lives of the actual “people” he claims to be speaking for. So, naturally, he was dismayed to report that the “black militant mood” that had been “flashing here and there in the thirties” was “reduced to a subsurface simmering during World War II, when the nation on the one hand denounced racism, and on the other hand maintained segregation in the armed forces and kept blacks in low-paying jobs.” Zinn casts aspersions on the motives of the reformers of the post–World War II era and on the very real improvements they helped bring about for African Americans. For Zinn, President Harry Truman’s postwar civil rights efforts were nothing more than “cold war rivalry” efforts to “calm a black population,” and “to present to the world a United States that could counter the continuous Communist thrust at the most flagrant failure of American society.”82

  Zinn couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights, which, in 1947, recommended expanding the civil rights section of the Justice Department, establishing a permanent Commission on Civil Rights, and passing laws against lynching and job and voting discrimination. He charges that these reforms weren’t being pushed for purely “moral” reasons: “there was also an ‘economic reason’—discrimination was costly to the country, wasteful of its talent. And, perhaps most important, there was an international reason”—namely “world supremacy.”83

  Not only were Truman’s reforms for the wrong reasons, but they also weren’t fast enough. The United States took “small actions.” He grudgingly admits that “Truman—four months before the presidential election of 1948, and challenged from the left in that election by Progressive party candidate Henry Wallace—issued an executive order asking that the armed forces, segregated in World War II, institute policies of racial equality ‘as rapidly as possible.’ ” But again, for the wrong motives: “The order may have been prompted not only by the election but by the need to maintain high morale in the military, as the possibility of war grew.” Plus, Truman could have done more: “Truman could have issued executive orders in other areas, but did not. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, plus the set of laws passed in the 1860s and early 1870s, gave the President enough authority to wipe out discrimination.” Even given Zinn’s exaggeration of the president’s power—he seems to have forgotten not only the other branches of government, but also the political constraints on what office-holders can get away with—no federal action could ever completely “wipe out discrimination.” Even Zinn knows this, as he himself points out in regard to the sweeping 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court: “By 1965, ten years after the ‘all deliberate speed’ guideline, more than 75 percent of the school districts in the South remained segregated.”84

  Nevertheless, as even Zinn acknowledged—in his August 1959 article for Harper’s Monthly, “A Fate Worse Than Integration”—racial barriers were coming
down in the post-War years. Thanks, in part, to capitalism. As Zinn observed in the late fifties, Southerners’ concerns with profit-making, peaceful coexistence, manners, and law-and-order were naturally leading to improved race relations and increased voting and economic power for blacks. When a “bold Negro student” would take a seat in a white section of a bus, no one would say anything, and black bus drivers were accepted. “Growing Negro purchasing power” meant that at Rich’s Department Store in Atlanta, black women tried on and purchased the same clothing as white women and that white salesmen sometimes addressed Negro customers with “Yes, Sir.” White men made deliveries to the back doors of the homes of affluent Negro lawyers and “white employees of a contractor [dug] ditches on the campus of a Negro university.”85 In an October 1959 article in the NAACP’s Crisis, Zinn described the uneventful way that the Atlanta public library was desegregated—through a steady stream of Spelman professors and students asking to check out materials but also preparing for a lawsuit. The pressure worked. The library’s board of trustees voted to desegregate.86 Zinn reported these peaceful, incremental civil rights victories as they happened, but in A People’s History he was never going to acknowledge the reality of such quiet social change.

  Instead, he reports with excitement that blacks “rose in rebellion all over the South” and that “in the late 1960s they were engaging in wild insurrection in a hundred northern cities. It was all a surprise to those without that deep memory of slavery, that everyday presence of humiliation, registered in the poetry, the music, the occasional outbursts of anger, the more frequent sullen silences. Part of that memory was of words uttered, laws passed, decisions made, which turned out to be meaningless.”

  Zinn casts the peacefully conducted and effective Montgomery Bus Boycott as part of the “wild insurrection”; in fact, he introduced it as an example of “revolt” in the immediately following paragraph: “For such a people, with such a memory, and such daily recapitulation of history, revolt was always minutes away, in a timing mechanism which no one had set, but which might go off with some unpredictable set of events. Those events came, at the end of 1955, in the capital city of Alabama—Montgomery.”87