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Crisis - Open Forum > Next Story
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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. You've slept with all the big powers Being one of the world's big vampires, 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. It 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 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 (Seven Stories Press) and of the
international best-selling A People's History of the
United States.
In 1963, 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.
Copyright 2005 Howard Zinn
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Against Discouragement