Against Discouragement
By Howard Zinn
[In 1963, historian Howard Zinn was fired from Spelman
College, where he was chair of the History Department, because of his civil
rights activities. This year, he was invited back to give the commencement
address. Here is the text of that speech, given on May 15, 2005.]
"I am deeply honored to be invited back to Spelman after
forty-two years. I would like to thank the faculty and trustees who voted to
invite me, and especially your president, Dr. Beverly Tatum. And it is a
special privilege to be here with Diahann Carroll and Virginia Davis Floyd.
But this is your day -- the students graduating today. It's a
happy day for you and your families. I know you have your own hopes for the
future, so it may be a little presumptuous for me to tell you what hopes I have
for you, but they are exactly the same ones that I have for my grandchildren.
My first hope is that you will not be too
discouraged by the way the world looks at this moment. It is easy to be
discouraged, because our nation is at war -- still another war, war after war
-- and our government seems determined to expand its empire even if it costs
the lives of tens of thousands of human beings. There is poverty in this
country, and homelessness, and people without health care, and crowded
classrooms, but our government, which has trillions of dollars to spend, is
spending its wealth on war. There are a billion people in Africa, Asia, Latin
America, and the Middle East who need clean water and medicine to deal with
malaria and tuberculosis and AIDS, but our government, which has thousands of
nuclear weapons, is experimenting with even more deadly nuclear weapons. Yes,
it is easy to be discouraged by all that.
But let me tell you why, in spite of what I have just described,
you must not be discouraged.
I want to remind you that, fifty years ago, racial segregation
here in the South was entrenched as tightly as was apartheid in South Africa.
The national government, even with liberal presidents like Kennedy and Johnson
in office, was looking the other way while black people were beaten and killed
and denied the opportunity to vote. So black people in the South decided they
had to do something by themselves. They boycotted and sat in and picketed and
demonstrated, and were beaten and jailed, and some were killed, but their cries
for freedom were soon heard all over the nation and around the world, and the
President and Congress finally did what they had previously failed to do --
enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. Many people had said:
The South will never change. But it did change. It changed because ordinary
people organized and took risks and challenged the system and would not give
up. That's when democracy came alive.
I want to remind you also that when the war in Vietnam was going
on, and young Americans were dying and coming home paralyzed, and our
government was bombing the villages of Vietnam -- bombing schools and hospitals
and killing ordinary people in huge numbers -- it looked hopeless to try to
stop the war. But just as in the Southern movement, people began to protest and
soon it caught on. It was a national movement. Soldiers were coming back and
denouncing the war, and young people were refusing to join the military, and
the war had to end.
The lesson of that history is that you must not despair, that if
you are right, and you persist, things will change. The government may try to
deceive the people, and the newspapers and television may do the same, but the
truth has a way of coming out. The truth has a power greater than a hundred
lies. I know you have practical things to do -- to get jobs and get married and
have children. You may become prosperous and be considered a success in the way
our society defines success, by wealth and standing and prestige. But that is
not enough for a good life.
Remember Tolstoy's story, "The Death of Ivan Illych."
A man on his deathbed reflects on his life, how he has done everything right,
obeyed the rules, become a judge, married, had children, and is looked upon as
a success. Yet, in his last hours, he wonders why he feels a failure. After
becoming a famous novelist, Tolstoy himself had decided that this was not
enough, that he must speak out against the treatment of the Russian peasants,
that he must write against war and militarism.
My hope is that whatever you do to make a good life for yourself
-- whether you become a teacher, or social worker, or business person, or
lawyer, or poet, or scientist -- you will devote part of your life to making
this a better world for your children, for all children. My hope is that your
generation will demand an end to war, that your generation will do something
that has not yet been done in history and wipe out the national boundaries that
separate us from other human beings on this earth.
Recently I saw a photo on the front page of the New York Times which I cannot get out of my mind. It
showed ordinary Americans sitting on chairs on the southern border of Arizona,
facing Mexico. They were holding guns and they were looking for Mexicans who
might be trying to cross the border into the United States. This was horrifying
to me -- the realization that, in this twenty-first century of what we call
"civilization," we have carved up what we claim is one world into two
hundred artificially created entities we call "nations" and are ready
to kill anyone who crosses a boundary.
Is not nationalism -- that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a
boundary, so fierce it leads to murder -- one of the great evils of our time,
along with racism, along with religious hatred? These ways of thinking,
cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on, have been useful to
those in power, deadly for those out of power.
Here in the United States, we are brought up to believe that our
nation is different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral;
that we expand into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty,
democracy. But if you know some history you know that's not true. If you know
some history, you know we massacred Indians on this continent, invaded Mexico,
sent armies into Cuba, and the Philippines. We killed huge numbers of people,
and we did not bring them democracy or liberty. We did not go into Vietnam to
bring democracy; we did not invade Panama to stop the drug trade; we did not
invade Afghanistan and Iraq to stop terrorism. Our aims were the aims of all
the other empires of world history -- more profit for corporations, more power
for politicians.
The poets and artists among us seem to have a clearer
understanding of the disease of nationalism. Perhaps the black poets especially
are less enthralled with the virtues of American "liberty" and
"democracy," their people having enjoyed so little of it. The great
African-American poet Langston Hughes addressed his country as follows:
You really haven't been a virgin for so long.
It's ludicrous to keep up the pretext
You've slept with all the big powers
In military uniforms,
And you've taken the sweet life
Of all the little brown fellows
Being one of the world's big vampires,
Why don't you come on out and say so
Like Japan, and England, and France,
And all the other nymphomaniacs of power.
I am a veteran of the Second World War. That was considered a
"good war," but I have come to the conclusion that war solves no
fundamental problems and only leads to more wars. War poisons the minds of
soldiers, leads them to kill and torture, and poisons the soul of the nation.
My hope is that your generation will demand that your children
be brought up in a world without war. If we want a world in which the people of
all countries are brothers and sisters, if the children all over the world are
considered as our children, then war -- in which children are always the
greatest casualties -- cannot be accepted as a way of solving problems.
I was on the faculty of Spelman College for seven years, from
1956 to 1963. It was a heartwarming time, because the friends we made in those
years have remained our friends all these years. My wife Roslyn and I and our
two children lived on campus. Sometimes when we went into town, white people
would ask: How is it to be living in the black community? It was hard to
explain. But we knew this -- that in downtown Atlanta, we felt as if we were in
alien territory, and when we came back to the Spelman campus, we felt that we
were at home.
Those years at Spelman were the most exciting of my life, the
most educational certainly. I learned more from my students than they learned
from me. Those were the years of the great movement in the South against racial
segregation, and I became involved in that in Atlanta, in Albany, Georgia, in
Selma, Alabama, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Greenwood and Itta Bena and
Jackson. I learned something about democracy: that it does not come from the
government, from on high, it comes from people getting together and struggling
for justice. I learned about race. I learned something that any intelligent
person realizes at a certain point -- that race is a manufactured thing, an
artificial thing, and while race does matter (as Cornel West has written), it
only matters because certain people want it to matter, just as nationalism is
something artificial. I learned that what really matters is that all of us --
of whatever so-called race and so-called nationality -- are human beings and
should cherish one another.
I was lucky to be at Spelman at a time when I could watch a
marvelous transformation in my students, who were so polite, so quiet, and then
suddenly they were leaving the campus and going into town, and sitting in, and
being arrested, and then coming out of jail full of fire and rebellion. You can
read all about that in Harry Lefever's book Undaunted
by the Fight. One day Marian Wright (now Marian Wright Edelman), who was
my student at Spelman, and was one of the first arrested in the Atlanta
sit-ins, came to our house on campus to show us a petition she was about to put
on the bulletin board of her dormitory. The heading on the petition epitomized
the transformation taking place at Spelman College. Marian had written on top
of the petition: "Young Ladies Who Can Picket, Please Sign Below."
My hope is that you will not be content just to be successful in
the way that our society measures success; that you will not obey the rules,
when the rules are unjust; that you will act out the courage that I know is in
you. There are wonderful people, black and white, who are models. I don't mean
African- Americans like Condoleezza Rice, or Colin Powell, or Clarence Thomas,
who have become servants of the rich and powerful. I mean W.E.B. DuBois and
Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and Marian Wright Edelman, and James Baldwin
and Josephine Baker and good white folk, too, who defied the Establishment to
work for peace and justice.
Another of my students at Spelman, Alice Walker, who, like
Marian, has remained our friend all these years, came from a tenant farmer's
family in Eatonton, Georgia, and became a famous writer. In one of her first
published poems, she wrote:
It is true--
I've always loved
the daring
ones
Like the black young
man
Who tried
to crash
All barriers
at once,
wanted to
swim
At a white
beach (in Alabama)
Nude.
I am not suggesting you go that far, but you can help to break
down barriers, of race certainly, but also of nationalism; that you do what you
can -- you don't have to do something heroic, just something, to join with
millions of others who will just do something, because all of those somethings,
at certain points in history, come together, and make the world better.
That marvelous African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston, who
wouldn't do what white people wanted her to do, who wouldn't do what black people
wanted her to do, who insisted on being herself, said that her mother advised
her: Leap for the sun -- you may not reach it, but at least you will get off
the ground.
By being here today, you are already standing on your toes,
ready to leap. My hope for you is a good life."
Copyright 2005 Howard Zinn
