Howard Zinn, the man who wrote several books on the history of people of color, the Vietnam War and other social subjects, passed away on January 27 at the age of 87 from a heart attack. This prolific social-historian, teacher and social activist did not waste time with theorizing why the world is imbalanced. Instead, he did something about it.
Part of this drive to question the world is that his parents were immigrants with little access to a formal education. This in turn caused Zinn to be a voracious reader who transferred his love of writing (he was in a special writing program in Thomas Jefferson High School) to help those who could not speak for themselves by getting their stories told. His political stances were at times unpopular with the public, but he was never one to back down from a fight he believed in. This stems from his stint with the United States Air Force, where he was involved in napalming an area in Europe when WWII was basically over. It caused him to question just what the government owes its citizens.
Recently, he was a part of the television special, “The People Speak†– a documentary where actors and musicians, through readings and song, gave voice to the oppressed and downtrodden people of previous decades. It was in part based on the set-up of the staged production of “A People’s History of the United States,†the book that Zinn is best known for.
Yes throughout his career, Zinn has won numerous awards for his activism and common sense approach to the problems of the United States, but it is his everyman quality, particularly the way in which he related to people, that will be missed.
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