[HCCN] Fwd: Against Discouragement

[Judith Robbins]

Many thanks to Fran Truitt for sending this. Please read. It's  
certainly one of Howard Zinn's most heartfelt messages to all of us.


>
> Begin forwarded message:
>  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.
>
>  Howard Zinn is the author with Anthony Arnove of the just  
> published Voices of a People's History of the United States <http:// 
> www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1583226281/nationbooks08>  (Seven  
> Stories Press) and of the international best-selling A People's  
> History of the United States <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ 
> ASIN/0060528370/nationbooks08> .
>
>
>
>