The Zinn Reader (69 page)

When the girl finished reading, the teacher asked the class: "Did you like the story?" There was a chorus: "Yes!" "Why?" They responded. He told them about subject and plot, about description and dialogue, how in general one analyzes a story. He asked how the story made them
feel,
and one said sad, and another said it made her laugh, and he asked how could a story do both at the same time, and spoke to them of
irony.
"God, how they understood!"

He bridged what they read and how they lived. He read to them from Ralph Ellison's
Invisible Man.
This was written, he said out of a Negro boy's personal experience. "Now I'll tell you a story of my personal experience." And he told of a wartime incident involving himself and Negro soldiers, in Charleston, South Carolina. And then, to the class: "Who else wants to tell a personal story?" The next day, one girl brought in a story which, he realized, was prose as good as that written by any Stanford freshmen he had encountered. And so, literature was read and created at the same time.

In these classes, discussions of democracy, of the philosophy of nonviolence, were hardly academic. In one Jackson school the class met to elect delegates to a convention of all the Jackson Freedom Schools. An older fellow named Jimmy, age 24, had been hanging around the class for the past few days. He spoke breezily of having recently spent three years in jail for a knifing. The teacher suggested that Jimmy sit up at the desk and chair the meeting. He laughed and complied, "OK, now, I'll choose the delegates," he announced. There were objections from all over the room: "We've got to
elect
them"!

"What kind of resolutions are we going to propose to the convention?" a girl asked. One was suggested: "If any kid is treated brutally in school in Jackson, all the kids in the Jackson schools walk out; we'll have a chairman in each school; we won't act just on say-so; we'll get written affidavits and witnesses before we take action. It's something like a student union."

The teacher was curious: "Do students get beaten up in your schools?" A girl answered: her principal had beaten a boy until he bled.

Jimmy then told how he'd been beaten by a teacher when he was younger. And how he and some friends had then found the teacher alone and taken revenge. "We had a nice understanding after that." He hesitated. "But I don't know what I'd do now. You know this nonviolence we're talking about. If it happened now I might beat him. Or I might just laugh and go away. I was young then and full of hate. At that time, I see something I want. I take it. Now, I
ask.
It's the movement I guess...I want my son to come up different."

Role playing was used very often in the Freedom Schools. "Kids that age are natural actors," a teacher explained. "And it puts them in other people's shoes. We don't want to win easy arguments over straw foes. They have got to be tough thinkers, tough arguers." The teacher listed on the blackboard Barry Goldwater's reasons for voting against the civil rights bill: (1) It is unconstitutional. (2) No law will end prejudice ("We cannot pass a law that will make you like me or me like you."). (3) It can't be enforced. (4) It violates the idea of States' rights. The class went over the arguments, with one boy portraying Goldwater, and defending his points powerfully, another trying to break them down.

Outside on the street, in front of the building, an energetic, redheaded teacher was pointing to a blackboard propped up in the sun, the kids sitting in rows in the shade of the building. "OK, we can build any kind of community we want now. What will the rules be?" This was a hortatory kind of teaching, but a kind the schools fostered: constantly talking with students not just about what
is,
but about what
should be.

A Harvard graduate in literature who had taught in Israel worked in a Vicksburg Freedom School.

It was hard. Youngsters hung around the school, slept there. Every morning, they were like corpses on the floor. To start class, you had to clean them out. The school was cramped, noisy. We used role playing a lot. Kids would portray three generations of Negro families, and we learned history that way. We sat in a circle rather than the usual classroom format, to stress the equality of teacher and student. I read to them from Thomas Wolfe's
You Can't Go Home Again
and from Martin Luther King's I
Have a Dream,
then had them write speeches as if they were Senators urging passage of the civil rights bill. I tried to extend the idea of oppression beyond race. If you pick on a small kid with glasses and beat him up, aren't you acting the same as these white segregationists? I asked them.

One teacher spent a whole hour with his students discussing the word "skeptical." He told them: "This is a Freedom School and we should mean what we say. We should feel free to think as we want, question whomever we like, whether it's our parents, our ministers, our teachers, yes, me, right here. Don't take my word for things. Check up on them. Be
skeptical."
For these youngsters it was a new way of looking at the classroom. They told how in their high school in Jackson the rooms were wired so that at the flick of a switch the principal could listen in on any class in the school. Teachers were afraid to discuss controversial subjects.

The blonde girl from Skidmore College taught French to teenagers in her Freedom School. "I try to do the whole class in French, use pantomime a lot...I soon realized these kids had never had contact with a white person before; maybe that's the greatest thing about this whole experience. If nothing else is accomplished, it's been a
meeting,
for both student and teacher.... We have a Freedom Hour at eleven every morning. They run it themselves, make their own rules." She was asked if the Freedom Schools were not, in fact,
indoctrinating
the children. She paused. "Yes, I suppose so. But I can't think of anything better to indoctrinate them with. Freedom. Justice. The Golden Rule. Isn't there
some
core of belief a school should stand by?"

A green-eyed, attractive Radcliffe graduate, interpreter now for an international agency, whose field was Latin American history but who had not a day of teaching experience or education courses to her credit, went to work in a Freedom School:

My kids were 9 to 13. I told them about the Spanish background of Negro slaves in the United States, about the Caribbean islands and the slave plantation system as it developed there, and compared that system with the one in the English colonies. I spoke to them about life in Brazil, about the multiracial societies in Latin America where people get along fine. I told them about the problems of kids their age in Venezuela, in Puerto Rico (where I've spent some time). Yes, it did something for them psychologically to know that there are people in the world worse off than they are!

Without a strict curriculum to follow, the schools capitalized on the unexpected. A class held out in the sun would take advantage of passers-by, draw them into discussion. One day, three Negro women came by who'd just been trying to register to vote and had been rebuffed. The teacher beckoned: "Come over here and tell my students what happened." And so the children learned about the registration procedure, about voting, about what to tell their parents about going down to register. One of the middle-aged women, her anger still fresh, told them they must become educated if they wanted to change things.

It was risky, teaching without an ordered curriculum. And because it was risky, the Radcliffe girl said, it led to treasures.

I could experiment, do what I wanted, try things completely new, because I had no one to answer to, no reports to make. Nothing could happen to me or to these young people that would leave us worse off than before. And I could go off on tangents whenever I wanted, something I'd be afraid to do in a regular school setup. Wherever thoughts and discussion led, we followed. There was nothing we didn't dare turn to.

The road from study to action was short. Those who attended the schools began to come to mass rallies, to canvass for registration of voters, to question things around them for the first time. In Shaw County, "out in the rural," when the regular school began its session in August (Negro schools in the Delta open in August so that the children will be available for cotton picking in the fall), white Freedom School teachers were turned away from the regular school cafeteria, where some students had invited them to a lunch. The students then boycotted the school and flocked in large numbers to the local Freedom School.

The Freedom Schools' challenge to the social structure of Mississippi was obvious from the start. Its challenge to American education as a whole is more subtle. There is, to begin with, the provocative suggestion that an entire school system can be created in any community outside the official order, and critical of its suppositions. But beyond that, other questions were posed by the Mississippi experiment of last summer.

Can we, somehow, bring teachers and students together, not through the artificial sieve of certification and examination but on the basis of their common attraction to an exciting social goal? Can we solve the old educational problem of teaching children crucial values, while avoiding a blanket imposition of the teacher's ideas? Can this be done by honestly accepting as an educational goal that we want better human beings in the rising generation than we had in the last, and that this requires a forthright declaration that the educational process cherishes equality, justice, compassion and world brotherhood? Is it not possible to create a hunger for those goals through the fiercest argument about whether or not they
are
worthwhile? And cannot the schools have a running, no-ideas-barred exchange of views about alternative ways to those goals?

Is there, in the floating, prosperous, nervous American social order of the Sixties, a national equivalent to the excitement of the civil rights movement, one strong enough in its pull to create a motivation for learning that even the enticements of monetary success cannot match? Would it be possible to declare boldly that the aim of the schools is to find solutions for poverty, for injustice, for race and national hatred, and to turn all educational efforts into a national striving for those solutions?

Perhaps people can begin, here and there (not waiting for the government, but leading it) to set up other pilot ventures, imperfect but suggestive, like the one last summer in Mississippi. Education can, and should, be dangerous.

6

T
HE
N
EW
H
ISTORY

As I write this in 1996, the guardians of the "old history" are angry. Their heroes (Christopher Columbus, Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, the giants of industry, and various military heroes) are increasingly being viewed as racists, militarists, and exploiters of labor. Indians, blacks, women, working people are getting more attention, their point of view listened to more closely. Twenty years ago, when I wrote the following article, a "new history" was just beginning to emerge, stimulated by the protest movements of the Sixties. This appeared in the
Boston Globe,
December 20, 1974, under the title "History Writing Changes."

There is a healthy change in the writing of history these days. We are hearing more from the bottom layers of society, so long submerged and silent under the volumes of memoirs produced by the political elite, and the histories written by intellectuals.

Out of the pages of a new book,
All God's Dangers,
an uneducated black man, Nate Shaw, speaks to us of his life, with enormous wisdom, with the rhythms of the southern earth in his language.

And we are listening now to those we thought dead. In Dee Brown's
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,
Chief Joseph challenges the intruder: "Perhaps you think the Creator sent you here to dispose of us as you see fit." And Red Cloud tells of the massacre of his people.

The graffiti has moved from the walls. It is a prison break. Tommy Trantino, a poet and artist in prison for life, starts his "Lock the Lock" with an unforgettable account of his first-grade encounter with the law: "The Lore of the Lamb."

Women, speaking out of the past, tell their hidden history in Eve Merriam's collection of memoirs,
Growing Up Female in America.
And the new Feminist Press publishes old-time treasures like "Life in the Iron Mills."

Working people talk honestly to Studs Terkel, who records their voices in
Hard Times
and
Working.

Why are we now getting more history from below? Perhaps because of the tumult of social movements in America these past 15 years. Perhaps because we have less faith these days in the words of the famous. Now we are offended by Kissinger's definition of history, in his book
A World Restored,
in which he writes, 'History is the memory of states."

To read the history of the Vietnam War from Kissinger's standpoint, the American troops were withdrawn and the truce was signed as a result of shrewd diplomacy (his own, of course) in Paris.

Such history would not only ignore the amazing resistance of the Vietnamese peasant to the most powerful military machine in the world. It would wipe out of our memories the huge movement against the war which grew in this country between 1965 and 1970. By 1968, half the draftees in northern California were failing to report for induction. One day in 1969, October 15, Moratorium Day, two million Americans gathered in thousands of places all over the country to protest the war. The movement spread into the armed forces, with GIs on patrol in Vietnam wearing black armbands of protest.

Mr. Nixon said the protesters had no effect on him. But the Pentagon Papers, not meant for public eyes, told the story: that in early 1968, the Johnson Administration was turned around in its escalation policy, not only by the Vietnamese spirit, but also by fear of the growing resistance to the war at home. And the Watergate record shows Mr. Nixon so undone by opposition that he became near-hysterical at the sight of one picketer near the White House.

It is good that we are getting more history from below. We have believed too long in our own helplessness, and the new history tells us how, sometimes, movements of people who don't seem to have much power can shake the rich and the powerful. Even out of their seats of power. Even into the prisoner's dock which they prepared for others.