America@250: Howard Zinn “We Should Be Honest About the History of Our Country”

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now: “We end today’s show with the words of the late historian Howard Zinn. We’re turning back now to 2009 when Howard Zinn appeared on Democracy Now, less than a year before he died. He’d just published A Young People’s History Of The United States.

“I asked him to respond to a question he’d frequently been asked about his work: Is it right to be so critical of the government’s policies of the traditional heroes of the country?”

Howard: It’s true that people have asked that question again and again – should we tell kids that Columbus, whom they have been told was a great hero, mutilated Indians and kidnapped them and killed them in pursuit of gold? Should we tell people that Theodore Roosevelt, who has held up as one of our great presidents, was really a war monger who loved military exploits and who congratulated an American general who committed a massacre in the Philippines? Should we tell young people that?

I think the answer is we should be honest with young people; we should not deceive them. We should be honest about the history of our country.

And we should be not only taking down the traditional heroes like Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, but we should be giving young people an alternate set of heroes. Instead of Theodore Roosevelt, tell them about Mark Twain who everybody learns about as the author of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. But when we go to school we don’t learn about Mark Twain as the vice president of the anti-imperialist league; we aren’t told that Mark Twain denounced Theodore Roosevelt for approving this massacre of the Philippines.

We want to give young people ideal figures like Helen Keller. Everybody learns about Helen Keller as a disabled person who overcame her handicaps and became famous. But young people don’t learn in school, and what we’d like them to learn when we create books like A Young People’s History of the United States, is that Helen Keller was a socialist and a labor organizer; she refused to cross a picket line that was picketing a theater showing a play about her. So, there are these alternate heroes in American history.

There’s Fannie Lou Hamer and Bob Moses; they’re the heroes of the civil rights movement.

There are a lot of people who are obscure who are not known that we have in this young people’s history.

We have a young hero who was sitting on the bus in Montgomery Alabama, refused to leave the front of the bus and it was before Rosa Parks.

Rosa Parks is justifiably famous for refusing to leave her seat and she got arrested and that was the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott and that was really the beginning of a great movement in the south. But this 15-year-old girl [Claudette Colvin] did it first. So, we are trying to bring a lot of these obscure people back into the forefront of our attention and inspire young people to say this is the way to live.

On September 17, 2020, in response to a White House conference criticism of Zinn’s book –

“that it is full of ideas inciting riots this year” – the Zinn Education Project tweeted this:

“So, what explains the rebellions in 1676, 1680, 1786, 1831, 1859, & more by Native Americans, enslaved Africans, coal miners? #HowardZinn wasn’t alive then.”