Debunking Howard Zinn

by Mary Grabar

  Unsurprisingly, Zinn downplays the role of the NAACP and its moderate leaders in the Bus Boycott. The first two editions of A People’s History omitted any mention of E. D. Nixon, the Alabama NAACP leader who organized the Boycott. Zinn had apparently ignored a letter from Walter G. Hooke, a reader in Cambridge, New York, about including the courageous leader. Hooke wrote Zinn again in July 1995 when the newly released second edition did not include any mention of Nixon.88 Finally in the 2003 edition, Zinn included a line about Nixon: “Montgomery blacks called a mass meeting. A powerful force in the community was E. D. Nixon, a veteran trade unionist and experienced organizer. There was a vote to boycott all city buses. Car pools were organized to take Negroes to work.”89

  With that bland description of Nixon and the passive construction of the last sentence—“were organized”—Zinn sweeps away decades of work by Nixon. In contrast, contemporary dispatches from the South by Pittsburgh Courier “roving reporter” Trezzvant Anderson give one a sense of how many hours of careful strategizing, often in secret, went into the boycott. And in a retrospective article in 1957, Anderson described how Nixon had built the local NAACP organization up from “400 to nearly 2,000 members,” “organized” a local for the Pullman Porters, taken “an active role” in Randolph’s planned March on Washington, and gotten a USO for black soldiers during World War II. Nixon’s work had eliminated a segregated “peephole window” at which black customers had had to buy tickets at the Montgomery train station, and he had “put up the bond” and gotten the attorney for his secretary, Rosa Parks, after she was arrested. Nixon was the organizer of the boycott, calling the first meeting and bringing together the principals. As Anderson wrote, “the beginning of the boycott was triggered by the same E.D. Nixon, who had for 25 years stood in the forefront of the battle for equal opportunity for Negroes in Montgomery.” Anderson called Nixon “the real dynamo behind the Montgomery bus boycott.” It was not “the Rev. Dr. King—despite all the publicity and awards since given him—but an unlettered, six-foot three-inch Pullman porter, E.D. Nixon. . . .” But as Anderson explained, Nixon magnanimously stepped aside and let the more polished young Martin Luther King Jr. take the spotlight.90

  If there ever was a good candidate to be one of the overlooked “people” whose history Zinn claimed to be writing, it would be E. D. Nixon. But Zinn has little time for the stories of African Americans who worked on peaceful campaigns for civil rights, especially when they did it without the help of Communists. Zinn clearly hoped that “the frightening explosiveness of the black upsurge”91 could be useful in bringing about some kind of socialist revolution or other radical transformation of America.

  Zinn himself spent time organizing in Albany, Georgia, which he describes as “a small deep-South town where the atmosphere of slavery still lingered.” Mass demonstrations “took place in the winter of 1961 and again in 1962. Of 22,000 black people in Albany, over a thousand went to jail for marching, assembling, to protest segregation and discrimination. Here as in all the demonstrations that would sweep over the South, little black children participated—a new generation was learning to act.” Triumphantly, Zinn writes, “There is no way of measuring the effect of that southern movement on the sensibilities of a whole generation of young black people. . . .”92

  SNCC and Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) workers were putting children in harm’s way, going to schools and recruiting teenagers and even children over the wishes of their parents. This had to be done for lack of adult volunteers: the majority of Southern blacks, although in favor of ending segregation, were opposed to the mass demonstration strategies that Zinn celebrates, especially when they led to jail, as Zinn describes: “In Birmingham in 1963, thousands of blacks went into the streets, facing police clubs, tear gas, dogs, high-powered water hoses. And meanwhile, all over the deep South, the young people of SNCC, mostly black, a few white, were moving into communities in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas. Joined by local black people, they were organizing, to register people to vote, to protest against racism, to build up courage against violence. . . . imprisonment became commonplace, beatings became frequent.”93

  Zinn has to acknowledge that “Civil rights laws were passed in 1957, 1960, and 1964,” and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, and even that “The effect on Negro voting in the South was dramatic.” But he pooh-poohs these victories, and the very civil rights for which blacks had been struggling for so long: “The federal government was trying—without making fundamental changes—to control an explosive situation, to channel anger into the traditional cooling mechanism of the ballot box, the polite petition, the officially endorsed quiet gathering.”94 Wait, we ask, weren’t the protests for the right to vote? Yet Zinn casts the ballot box—and virtually every other element of political and civic life in a democracy—as a mere “cooling mechanism.”

  Even the March on Washington in 1963 was nothing for Zinn because it “was quickly embraced by President Kennedy and other national leaders, and turned into a friendly assemblage.” If it isn’t marked by violence and explosive anger, Zinn can’t get excited about it. Though King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was “magnificent oratory,” it failed to capture “that anger that many blacks felt.” SNCC chairman John Lewis, “a young Alabama-born SNCC leader, much arrested, much beaten,” was censored, the sentences in his speech urging “militant action” taken out.95 Zinn does not report the cut sentences, statements about the “the revolution” being “at hand” to free “ourselves of the chains of political and economic slavery,” and a threat to march “through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did.”96

  In contrast, and despite its name, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that Zinn had helped to found had no problem with that kind of rhetoric. A September 25, 1966, article by New York Times reporter Gene Roberts opened with an anecdote about SNCC member Willie Ricks firing up a crowd of about a thousand at the fairgrounds in Yazoo City, Mississippi, with talk of “white blood flowing” and yells of “ ‘black power.’ ” Roberts observed that “Rarely is a Snick [SNCC] office without an handful of copies of such publications as The Worker or People’s World, both organs of the Communist party; Freedomways, a Marxist magazine; The Militant, a Trotskyite newspaper; The National Guardian, which is oriented toward both the Soviet Union and Communist China.” SNCC Chairman Stokely Carmichael had turned a demonstration in Atlanta into a riot over Labor Day weekend. Understandably, SNCC members were not welcomed by black locals. In the Vine City section of Atlanta, residents drove out Bill Ware, a SNCC project director, when he tried to run out a white social worker with his sound truck. “At times, the anger of the poor has turned against Snick intellectuals,” Roberts noted.97

  In the summer of 1967, Hubert G. “Rap” Brown, Carmichael’s successor as SNCC chairman, called for mob violence—on the very same day that President Lyndon Johnson, in an attempt to calm rampant rioting, was addressing and acknowledging “the conditions that breed despair and violence,” such as “ignorance, discrimination, slums, poverty, disease, not enough jobs.” In his August 1 column, David Lawrence noted the irony that the same day that the president was blaming “ignorance” for the riots, the college-educated Brown was “publicly urging Negroes to ‘to shoot and loot,’ calling the President ‘a wild, mad dog, an outlaw from Texas,’ and declaring that Johnson had sent ‘white killers’ and federal troops ‘into Negro communities to kill black people.’ ” At a speech in Washington, Brown had called the killing of a white policeman a “ ‘beautiful’ example of black people controlling their community,” and he had inspired a riot in Cambridge, Maryland.98

  Black residents quite forcefully put out the unwelcome mat for black militants. The claim that Malcolm X “was probably closer to the mood of the black community” than the “quiet dignity’ ” of the March on Washington that President Kennedy had praised is another of Zinn’s lies. As the young scholar Michael Javen Fortner shows in Black Silent Majority, his b
ook about the drug and violence epidemics in Harlem, “Throughout the 1960s, polls consistently showed that only a tiny minority of blacks embraced black nationalists and militants.” A 1964 survey in New York City showed that only 6 percent of blacks believed that Malcolm X was “doing the best for Negroes.” In contrast, 55 percent said it was the NAACP and 22 percent said it was Wilkins, the NAACP’s leader. “In a 1966 national Harris Poll, 62 percent of African Americans said Wilkins was ‘helping’ the ‘Negro cause of Civil Rights,’ while only 18 percent said black power advocate Stokely Carmichael was helping. In fact, 34 percent said Carmichael was hurting the cause.” A Newsweek poll showed similar results. Fortner describes the divide between white liberals and African Americans who were surrounded by criminals and drug addicts in their neighborhoods. He points out, “While conservative white elites condemned the violent tactics of black militants and liberal white elites justified them, the black silent majority felt invisible—unheard and unanswered.”99 Black New Yorkers formed vigilante groups to keep trouble-makers out of their neighborhoods and lobbied for severe drug laws. Harlem pastor Oberia Dempsey, who packed a pistol as he led armed citizen patrols, clashed continuously with white liberals.100

  But Zinn took no real interest in the problems of the working-class residents of Harlem or Vine City. Those aren’t the “people” A People’s History focuses on. Instead, Zinn valorizes black militants—who might be useful for the socialist revolution. He devotes nearly a full page to four paragraphs from Malcolm X’s radical speech in Detroit, which happened two months after the 1963 Martin Luther King march he dismissed.

  We have seen how Zinn was unimpressed by the passage of history-changing civil rights legislation and the upsurge in black voting. “It did not work,” A People’s History explains. “The blacks could not be easily brought into ‘the democratic coalition’ when bombs kept exploding in churches, when new ‘civil rights’ laws did not change the root condition of black people.” Notice how he puts “civil rights” in quotation marks. Again, “The civil rights bills emphasized the voting, but voting was not a fundamental solution to racism or poverty.”101 This is four pages after Zinn has heralded SNCC’s voter registration drives102—which, as we have seen, were more notable for inspiring outbreaks of violence than for actually registering voters. At the SNCC annual meeting in 1963, Zinn told students that voting does not matter.103 An odd thing to tell young people, unless you want to disillusion them and make them want a revolution. It’s almost as if Zinn wanted to sabotage the Civil Rights Movement. In fact, the Marxist class struggle, not civil rights for blacks, was his real agenda. He was obviously indulging in wishful thinking when he asked, with respect to developments during the Nixon administration, “Was there fear that blacks would turn their attention from the controllable field of voting to the more dangerous arena of wealth and poverty—of class conflict?” Why “more dangerous”? “The new emphasis was more dangerous than civil rights, because it created the possibility of blacks and whites uniting on the issue of class exploitation.”104 Zinn might as well go ahead and chant the old Soviet slogan: “Black and white, unite and fight!” Like any real leftist, Zinn was never satisfied with reforms; he wanted more radical, revolutionary change. He claimed in his 1974 book Justice in Everyday Life: The Way It Really Works, that reforms “from Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson have not changed the facts of a class structure in America,” and “all the civil rights laws have not changed the fact that most blacks, on the job, in school, where they live, grow up knowing that they once were slaves, that whites know it too. . . .”105 In A People’s History, Zinn did everything he could to foment bitterness and anger about that historical injustice—not for the sake of civil rights for blacks, but to further his socialist cause. In effect, it was a way to help promote his new “Marxian vision,” adapted for the current situation, which he described in a 1969 article titled “Marxism and the New Left.” There, Zinn proposed that the “Negroes in the ghetto” should replace Marx’s “industrial proletariat as the revolutionary agent.”106

  Zinn seems to luxuriate in the racial violence of the 1960s, describing “black outbreaks in every part of the country.” One of these, in Florida, was “set off by the killing of a Negro woman and a bomb threat against a Negro high school.” Another, in Cleveland, was sparked by “the killing of a white minister who sat in the path of a bulldozer to protest discrimination against blacks in construction work,” and another in New York was a result of “the fatal shooting of a fifteen-year-old Negro boy during a fight with an off-duty policeman.” Zinn reports, on a note of triumph, “There were riots also in Rochester, Jersey City, Chicago, Philadelphia.”107 In the New York case, the grand jury, upon which George Schuyler served, determined that the policeman had acted in self-defense.108

  Zinn claims the Watts riots of 1965 were “provoked by the forcible arrest of a young Negro driver, the clubbing of a bystander by police, the seizure of a young black woman falsely accused of spitting on the police. There was rioting in the streets, looting and firebombing of stores. Police and National Guardsmen were called in; they used their guns.” He offers a short quotation from the preface of a book on the riots by Robert Conot: “the Negro was going on record that he would no longer turn the other cheek.” There was a “new mood in SNCC and among many militant blacks.”109 Zinn absolutely revels in the replacement of Christian ethics and law and order with violence and mayhem. His project of transforming college students from devout Christians to revolutionaries has been completed, and he couldn’t be any happier.

  “In 1967, in the black ghettos of the country,” Zinn says, “came the greatest urban riots of American history.”110 Is that “greatest” in the sense of largest, or in the sense of the best riots? We suspect the latter. Zinn expresses no dismay at innocent lives lost in these riots. He expresses no concern for African Americans who had to live in the midst of rioting and see their neighborhoods destroyed. As George Schuyler pointed out, the lawbreakers were terrorizing “the respectable bulk of Negroes.”111

  While the 1968 Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, usually referred to as the Kerner Report, blamed discrimination, segregation, and poverty for the riots, it also noted the growth of the black middle and upper class, along with gains in wages:

  The Negro “upper-income” group is expanding rapidly and achieving sizeable income gains. In 1966, 28 percent of all Negro families received incomes of $7000 or more, compared with 55 percent of white families. This was double the proportion of Negroes receiving comparable incomes in 1960, and 4 times greater than the proportion receiving such incomes in 1947. Moreover, the proportion of Negroes employed in high-skill, high-status, and well-paying jobs rose faster than comparable proportions among whites from 1960 to 1966. As Negro incomes have risen, the size of the lowest-income group has grown smaller, and the middle and upper groups have grown larger—both relatively and absolutely.112

  Of course, Zinn didn’t welcome this good news for African Americans. He called the Kerner Report “a standard device of the system when facing rebellion.” It is intended to have “a soothing effect.” Zinn’s concern is not with the majority of blacks—the struggling “people” he claims to care about—but with the rabble-rousing advocates of “Black Power.” Zinn suggests that there’s some kind of unexplained conspiracy behind the assassination of its “most eloquent spokesman,” Malcolm X: “After he was assassinated as he spoke on a public platform in February 1965, in a plan whose origins are still obscure, he became the martyr of this movement.”113 The “plan” was far from obscure. The assassination team was made up of followers of the rival Black Muslim leader, Elijah Muhammad; they carried out a carefully orchestrated hit in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem after the police who routinely provided security for Malcolm X had followed the requests of Malcolm X’s “senior people” and positioned themselves at a distance from the event.114

  Assuming to speak for the black community, Zinn
writes, “Martin Luther King, though still respected, was being replaced now by new heroes: Huey Newton of the Black Panthers, for instance. The Panthers had guns; they said blacks should defend themselves.”115 The Black Panthers killed at least sixteen law enforcement officers, including a National Park Service Ranger “on patrol near San Francisco in 1973.”116 Zinn does not mention that fact, nor the torture death of Alex Rackley, a young black man the Panthers accused of being an informer.117

  Zinn wrote about the Black Panthers from a safe distance while enjoying tenure and jaunts to Europe. But David Horowitz, who was involved with the Panthers as an activist on the Left, saw them as they really were, “a criminal gang that preyed on the black ghetto itself,” and who “pursued various avenues of criminal violence which included extortion, drug-trafficking and murder.” He believes they murdered his bookkeeper, a supportive leftist woman who made the mistake of inquiring about their finances. The Black Panthers also attacked other blacks, such as “a leader of the Black Students Union at Grove Street College in Oakland,” whom they murdered “because he had inadvertently insulted one of their enforcers.” In 1973, Horowitz was introduced to Huey Newton by movie producer Bert Schneider. “At the time,” reports Horowitz, “Newton was engaged in a life and death feud with Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver,” who had “fled to Algiers after a shoot-out with Bay Area police.” Horowitz points out that Eldridge has admitted to ambushing them. Former Panther Chairman Bobby Seale had “gone into hiding after Newton had expelled him from the Party.” And no wonder. Horowitz later learned that “Seale had been whipped—literally—and then personally sodomized by [Newton] with such violence that he had to have his anus surgically repaired by a Pacific Heights doctor who was a political supporter of the Panthers.”118 And yet Newton is the man Zinn names as the prime example of the “new heroes” replacing King among black Americans.119