The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (48 page)

February 3, 2010

Howard Zinn: The People’s Historian

Howard Zinn, legendary historian, author and activist, died last week at the age of eighty-seven. His most famous book is
A People’s History of the United States
. Zinn told me last May, “The idea of
A People’s History
is to go beyond what people have learned in school . . . history through the eyes of the presidents and the generals in the battles fought in the Civil War, [to] the voices 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.”

It is fitting to write of Zinn’s life at the start of Black History Month. Although he was white, he wrote eloquently of the civil rights struggle and was a part of that movement as well. Fifty years ago, on February 1, 1960, four black students entered the F.W. Woolworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and sat down at the “whites only” lunch counter. They were refused service, and returned day after day. Each day, more and more people came with them. The lunch-counter desegregation movement spread to other Southern cities. By July, the Greensboro Woolworth lunch counter was desegregated. This week, the International Civil Rights Center and Museum opened at the site of that original lunch-counter protest.

At the time of the sit-ins, Zinn was a professor at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college in Atlanta. He told me why, after seven years there, he was fired: “The students at Spelman College rose up out of that very tranquil and controlled atmosphere at the college during the sit-ins and went into town, got arrested, they came back fired up and determined to change the conditions of their lives on campus. . . . I supported them in their rebellion, and I was too much for the administration of the college.” Zinn wrote in the afterword of
A People’s History
: “It was not until I joined the faculty of Spelman College . . . that I began to read the African-American historians who never appeared in my reading lists in graduate school. Nowhere in my history education had I learned about the massacres of black people that took place again and again, amid the silence of a national government pledged, by the Constitution, to protect equal rights for all.”

One of his students at Spelman was Pulitzer Prize–winning author Alice Walker. Soon after she learned of Zinn’s death, Walker explained: “He was thrown out because he loved us, and he showed that love by just being with us. He loved his students. He didn’t see why we should be second-class citizens.” Just a few years ago, Zinn was invited back to Spelman to give the commencement address and receive an honorary degree.

World-renowned linguist and dissident Noam Chomsky, a longtime friend of Zinn’s, reflected on Zinn’s “reverence for and his detailed study of what he called ‘the countless small actions of unknown people’ that lead to those great moments that enter the historical record.” Zinn co-wrote, with Anthony Arnove,
Voices of a People’s History of the United States
, with speeches, letters, and other original source material from those “unknown people” who have shaped this country. It was made into a star-studded documentary, which premiered on the History Channel just weeks before Zinn died. Matt Damon, its executive producer, gave
A People’s History
enormous popular exposure in the hit movie
Good Will Hunting
when his character Will recommended the book to his psychiatrist. Damon was Zinn’s neighbor in Newton, Massachusetts, and knew him since he was ten years old.

Last May, when I interviewed Zinn, he reflected on Barack Obama’s first months in office: “I wish President Obama would listen carefully to Martin Luther King. I’m sure he pays verbal homage, as everyone does, to Martin Luther King, but he ought to think before he sends missiles over Pakistan, before he agrees to this bloated military budget, before he sends troops to Afghanistan, before he opposes the single-payer system. “He ought to ask: ‘What would Martin Luther King do? And what would Martin Luther King say?’ And if he only listened to King, he would be a very different president than he’s turning out to be so far. I think we ought to hold Obama to his promise to be different and bold and to make change. So far, he hasn’t come through on that promise.”

March 10, 2010

Rachel Corrie’s (Posthumous) Day in Court

An unusual trial begins in Israel this week, and people around the world will be watching closely. It involves the tragic death of a twenty-three-year-old American student named Rachel Corrie. On March 16, 2003, she was crushed to death by an Israeli military bulldozer.

Corrie was volunteering with the group International Solidarity Movement (ISM), which formed after Israel and the United States rejected a proposal by then United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson to place international human rights monitors in the occupied territories. The ISM defines itself as “a Palestinian-led movement committed to resisting the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land using nonviolent, direct-action methods and principles.” Israel was building a large steel wall to separate Rafah from Egypt, and was bulldozing homes and gardens to create a “buffer zone.” Corrie and seven other ISM activists responded to a call on that March day to protect the home of the Nasrallah family, which was being threatened with demolition by two of the armored Israeli military bulldozers made by the U.S. company Caterpillar.

Cindy Corrie, Rachel’s mother, related what happened: “The bulldozer proceeded toward Rachel. . . . She was in her orange jacket. When it kept coming, she rose on the mound, and the eyewitnesses testified that her head rose above the top of the blade of the bulldozer, so she could clearly be seen, but the bulldozer continued and proceeded over her, and so that it was covering her body. It stopped and then reversed, according to the eyewitness testimonies, without lifting its blade, so backed over her once again. “Her friends were screaming at the bulldozer drivers through this to stop. They rushed to her, and she said to them, ‘I think my back is broken.’ And those were her final words.”

Shortly after Rachel’s death, the Corries met with the Bush State Department. It was there that the idea of a civil lawsuit was first presented, by Secretary of State Colin Powell’s own chief of staff, Lawrence B. Wilkerson. Craig Corrie, Rachel’s father, recalled: “He said: ‘If it was my daughter, I’d sue them. I don’t care about money. I wouldn’t care about anything. I would sue the state of Israel.’” Ultimately, this is what the Corrie family did.

Just before heading to JFK Airport in New York to attend the trial, Craig Corrie told me about the lawsuit: “We’re accusing the state of Israel of either intentionally killing Rachel or of gross negligence in her killing seven years ago.” The day after Rachel was killed, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon promised President George W. Bush a “thorough, credible and transparent investigation.” Yet according to a Human Rights Watch report from 2005, Israel’s “investigations into Corrie’s killing . . . fell far short of the transparency, impartiality, and thoroughness required by international law.”

The civil trial, Craig Corrie says, is not about the monetary damages, but discovering information, and “like [South African Archbishop] Desmond Tutu talks about, of mending the tear in society.” The Corries never speak solely about their daughter, but about the plight of the Palestinians and the Israeli siege of Gaza. According to the latest figures of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, 24,145 houses have been demolished in the occupied territories since 1967, including the 4,247 that the United Nations estimated were destroyed during Operation Cast Lead, the name Israel gave to its military assault on Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009.

Of course, more than houses were destroyed there. More than 1,400 Palestinians and thirteen Israelis were killed. The Corries also express concern about the psychological toll exacted on Israeli soldiers. Craig Corrie said, “We lost Rachel, and that hurts every day, but that bulldozer driver lost a lot of his humanity when he crushed Rachel.”

The trial begins during the same week that Joe Biden makes his first trip to Israel as vice president. As chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden sought answers on the death of Rachel Corrie during the confirmation hearings for U.S. Ambassador to Israel James Cunningham.

Biden knows the pain of losing a daughter. His daughter was killed with his first wife in a car accident in 1972. The Corries are calling on people around the world to stand with them on March 16, the anniversary of Rachel’s death, for truth, accountability, and justice, “to raise and highlight many of the critical issues to which Rachel’s case is linked.”

May 12, 2010

Singing Lena Horne’s Praises

Lena Horne died this week at the age of ninety-two. More than just a brilliant singer and actress, she was a pioneering civil rights activist, breaking racial barriers for generations of African-Americans who have followed her. She fought segregation and McCarthyism, was blacklisted, yet persisted to gain worldwide fame and success. Her grandmother signed her up as the youngest member of the NAACP as a fourteen-month-old.

Hers is the story of the twentieth century, of the slow march to racial equality, and of remarkable perseverance.

Horne’s career began in Harlem’s renowned Cotton Club, where African-Americans performed for an exclusively white audience. She joined several orchestras, including one of the first integrated bands, and then landed the first meaningful, long-term contract for an African-American actor with a major Hollywood film studio, MGM. Her contract included provisions that she would not be cast in the stereotypical role of a maid. She was never given full acting roles, though, only stand-alone singing scenes. “I looked good and I stood up against a wall and sang and sang. But I had no relationship with anybody else,” she told the
New York Times
in 1957. “Mississippi wanted its movies without me. It was an accepted fact that any scene I did was going to be cut when the movie played the South.” During the World War II years, she toured with the USO, entertaining troops. At Camp Joseph T. Robinson in Arkansas, she learned she would be performing for a segregated whites-only audience. Afterward, she gave an impromptu performance for the African-American troops and was again angered when German POWs imprisoned at the base were allowed to crowd into the mess hall. She insisted they be thrown out.

Horne, in a 1966 Pacifica Radio interview, recalled a watershed moment in Cincinnati. She was touring with a band, and on the night of the boxing match between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling of Nazi Germany, Horne, who didn’t care for boxing, found herself backstage with the band members, around the radio, rooting for Louis: “I said, ‘He’s mine.’ And I didn’t want him to be beaten. ‘He’s ours.’ I think that’s the first I remember ever identifying with another Negro in that way before. I was identifying with the symbol that we had, of a powerful man, an impregnable fortress. And I didn’t realize that we drew strength from these symbols.”

Paul Robeson, the great African-American singer and activist, had a profound influence on Lena Horne. In the Pacifica interview, she recalled, “Paul taught me about being proud because I was Negro . . . he sat down for hours, and he told me about Negro people. . . . And he didn’t talk to me as a symbol of a pretty Negro chick singing in a club. He talked to me about my heritage. And that’s why I always loved him.” The association with Robeson, a proud, outspoken activist, contributed to Horne’s blacklisting during the McCarthy era.

James Gavin, who wrote the definitive biography of Lena Horne,
Stormy Weather
, told me: “Lena Horne was a very brave woman and is not given credit for the activism that she did in the 1940s, at a time when a lot of the black performers that she knew were simply accepting the conditions of the day as the way things were and were afraid of rocking the boat and losing their jobs. And Lena never hesitated to speak her mind.” Gavin described Horne’s appearance at the 1963 March on Washington, where she took the microphone and unleashed one word, “Freedom!” She appeared with the great civil rights leader Medgar Evers at an NAACP rally, just days before he was assassinated. She worked with Eleanor Roosevelt on anti-lynching legislation, and supported SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the National Council of Negro Women (led by Dorothy Height, another civil rights leader, who died last month at the age of ninety-eight).

Horne’s biographer Gavin says she was filled with anguish for not doing enough. But Halle Berry thinks otherwise. When Berry became the first African-American woman to win the Academy Award for best actress in 2001, she sobbed as she held up her Oscar in her acceptance speech: “This moment is so much bigger than me. This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. . . . And it’s for every nameless, faceless woman of color that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened.”

September 1, 2010

Eve Ensler: Bald, Brave, and Beautiful

Bald, brave, and beautiful: Those words can’t begin to capture the remarkable Eve Ensler. She sat down with me last week, in the midst of her battle with uterine cancer, to talk about New Orleans and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Eve, the author of the hit play
The Vagina Monologues
and the creator of V-Day, a global activist movement to stop violence against women and girls, told me how “cancer has been a huge gift.”