Howard Zinn: 'I Wish Obama Would Listen to MLK'

Legendary historian Howard Zinn joins us to talk about war, torture and the teaching of history. Zinn says Obama had Obama heeded the lessons of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he wouldn’t be escalating US attacks abroad and increasing the size of the US military budget. We also play excerpts of the forthcoming documentary, The People Speak, featuring dramatic readings based on Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and Voices of a People’s History of the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: My next guest for the rest of the hour is Howard Zinn, one of the country’s most celebrated historians. His classic work, A People’s History of the United States, changed the way we look at history in America. First published a quarter of a century ago, the book has sold over a million copies and continues to sell more copies each successive year.

After serving as a shipyard worker and then an Air Force bombardier in World War II, Howard Zinn went on to become a lifelong dissident and peace activist. He went to college under the GI Bill, received his PhD from Columbia. He was active in the civil rights movement and many of the struggles for social justice over the past half-century. He taught at Spelman College, the historically black college for women in Atlanta, was fired for insubordination for standing up for the women. He is now Professor Emeritus at Boston University and was recently honored by Spelman.

Howard Zinn has received the Thomas Merton Award, the Eugene V. Debs Award, the Upton Sinclair Award, and the Lannan Literary Award. He is the author of many books, including the People’s History Series; a seven-volume series on the Radical ’60s; several collections of essays on art, war, politics and history; and the plays Emma and Marx in Soho.

This year, a documentary based on the live performances of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and Voices of a People’s History of the United States is premiering on History, the History Channel. It’s called The People Speak. It’s co-directed by Howard Zinn, Anthony Arnove and Chris Moore. It will feature dramatic performances chronicling the history of the country from actors like Matt Damon and Josh Brolin and Viggo Mortensen and Marisa Tomei and Don Cheadle and Jasmine Guy and Kerry Washington and musicians like Bruce Springsteen and Eddie Vedder and John Legend.

Well, Howard Zinn is in New York today to launch the new paperback edition of A Young People’s History of the United States, which is adapted by Rebecca Stefoff. This evening, he’ll be at the 92nd Street Y in New York hosting a performance of readings and songs from Voices of a People’s History of the United States.

Welcome, Howard.

HOWARD ZINN: Thank you, Amy. Happy to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s great to have you with us. In that introduction before, you have Eddie Vedder singing Bob Dylan, “Masters of War,” part of the—

HOWARD ZINN: That’s part of the documentary, yeah, singing Dylan’s song “Masters of War.” I think we had Dylan listen to Eddie Vedder sing the song, and we asked Bob Dylan if he wanted to sing it. And he said, “No, that’s good. Let Eddie sing it.” And so, we have Bob Dylan singing a Woody Guthrie song in the film, “Do Re Mi,” one of Woody Guthrie’s famous songs.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about this whole series and this—I mean, this is just growing. The People’s History of the United States is a remarkable book that really—well, why don’t you describe the philosophy, your approach to US history?

HOWARD ZINN: Yeah. Well, of course, the idea of A People’s History is to go beyond what people have learned in school and what I learned in school or most people learned in school, and that is history through the eyes of the presidents and the generals in the battles fought in the Civil War, and we want the voices of people, of ordinary people, of rebels, of dissidents, of women, of black people, of Asian Americans, of immigrants, of socialists and anarchists and troublemakers of all kinds. And so, we decided to put together—Anthony Arnove and I put together 200 documents. Seven Stories Press agreed to put it out. And these 200 documents are the letters and memoirs and reminiscences of people who stood up against the establishment.

Now, we have, for instance, a black woman recalling growing up in the South, in the segregated South, and walking to school to her black segregated school and having to walk through a white playground, where she wanted to walk—wanted to go on the swings, couldn’t do it because she couldn’t stop in this white playground. And she went into school and refused to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” And they asked her why. She said, “Because so long as I can’t go on this swing, there’s no liberty and justice for all.” And so, we have—that’s just one of the many readings in our book.

And in this Young People’s History that we are launching tonight at the 92nd Street Y, we have a lot of these sort of dramatic words by people who have been dissidents and resisters in history. It’s not a—we don’t present the history of victimization; we present the history of people fighting back. And we want to give—we want to give Americans a history which shows them that it’s possible to fight back, that you don’t have to depend on the President and Congress and the Supreme Court. In fact, you had better not depend on them, because they’re not going to solve the fundamental problems that we have in our society. We can only do it ourselves, when we organize, when we act, when we protest. And so, we’re trying to, yes, energize people by learning a history that is provocative and that is inspirational.

AMY GOODMAN: You write in the introduction to A Young People’s History of the United States, “Over the years, some people have asked me: ‘Do you think that your history, which is radically different than the usual histories of the United States, is suitable for young people? Won’t it create disillusionment with our country? Is it right to be so critical of the government’s policies? Is it right to take down the traditional heroes of the nation, like Christopher Columbus, Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt?’”

HOWARD ZINN: Yeah, it’s true that people have asked that question again and again. You know, should we tell kids that Columbus, whom they have been told was a great hero, that Columbus mutilated Indians and kidnapped them and killed them in pursuit of gold? Should we tell people that Theodore Roosevelt, who is held up as one of our great presidents, was really a warmonger who loved military exploits and who congratulated an American general who committed a massacre in the Philippines? Should we tell young people that?

And 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 and Theodore Roosevelt, but we should be giving young people an alternate set of heroes.

Instead of Theodore Roosevelt, tell them about Mark Twain. Mark Twain—well, Mark Twain, 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 in the Philippines. No.

We want to give young people ideal figures like Helen Keller. And I remember learning about Helen Keller. Everybody learns about Helen Keller, you know, a disabled person who overcame her handicaps and became famous. But people don’t learn in school and young people don’t learn in school what we want them to learn when we do books like A Young People’s History of the United States, that Helen Keller was a socialist. She was a labor organizer. She refused to cross a picket line that was picketing a theater showing a play about her.

And 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. 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 that was before Rosa Parks. I mean, 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 really the beginning of a great movement in the South. But this fifteen-year-old girl did it first. And so, we have a lot of—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.”

AMY GOODMAN: Howard, we’re going to break and then come back. But the break is a part of the performance of The People Speak. Howard Zinn is our guest, the legendary historian. New book, A Young People’s History of the United States. Stay with us.