The people speak: farewell, Howard Zinn.

• Author: Beach, Randall
• Position: Letters to the Editor - Letter to the editor

When I walked across the New Haven Green on May Day 2007 to reintroduce myself to Howard Zinn, I thought back to a tense and tumultuous day thirty-five years earlier when I rode alongside him in a police van to a jail cell in Boston.

I was scared. I had never been to jail before, nor had most of the other members of "the B.U. 62," the Boston University students who occupied the administration building overnight to protest the Vietnam War and campus military recruitment.

But Zinn, a B.U. professor, was a very experienced man when it came to facing police officers and walking into jail cells. What I remember most about him that day was his calm strength and his humor. He just kept smiling and joking. He put us all at ease.

I had the good fortune of sharing a small jail cell with him for an hour or two. He never lost his composure or his sunny disposition.

All those years later, when he came to my town of New Haven to deliver two speeches decrying the war in Iraq, I saw that same defiant but positive spirit. That night, he told a big audience, "We want young people to become troublemakers. Others will say, 'No! They should take their polite place in society.' I say we desperately need troublemakers."

And he told us, "Yes, things can change. The history of possibility should be taught. When you join a social movement, your life changes. It becomes meaningful. It's important for young people to know that."

As I listened, I silently thanked Howard Zinn for teaching me to be a good young patriotic troublemaker.

Randall Beach

via e-mail

Even though history had always been my strongest subject in high school, I almost gave up studying it because everyone I talked to at the time had no interest and would always say, "History is so boring. What are you going to do with it?"

But when I first heard Howard Zinn speak on the radio station KPFK in Los Angeles five years ago, I found that history would always be relevant. He inspired me from then on to continue with history and the search for truth, wherever it may lead. He was talking about the history of the American imperial wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and how there were always "best intentions" behind the massacres of the occupied peoples. America was bringing civilization and freedom to the Filipinos whether they wanted it or not.

Zinn taught me that politicians only act if the population participates in civil disobedience and agitate. Whether it was the civil rights...