The Zinn Reader.

• Author: Wasserman, Harvey

by Howard Zinn Seven Stories Press. 672 pages. $29.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Howard Zinn, with characteristic innocence, introduces his pathbreaking essay "The Southern Mystique," about breaking the color line in Atlanta in the 1950s, like this:

"I did not deliberately seek employment in a black college. I was only vaguely aware such an institution existed. . . ."

To say that Zinn is unique in the panoply of American writer-teacher-activists is to vastly understate his importance. "National treasure" comes closer to the truth. His People's History of the United States remains the most important leftwing narration of America's story yet published, with sales in the range of 225,000 and, after twenty years, still climbing.

Zinn's gentle style, evident throughout this welcome new compendium, is to present his case for radical change in terms of self-effacing human decency and understated common sense.

"Isn't it obvious," he seems to ask, "that these things are wrong, and that we have to change them?" And isn't it equally obvious, he then adds, that the evils of racism, war, and class injustice will sooner or later fall away under the evolving power of nonviolent action?

When Zinn describes busting segregation in the Georgia capital, he writes with the wide-eyed tones of an intrigued, eternally optimistic neophyte who just happened upon a struggle for truth and justice and had no choice but to jump in. "A handful of Spelman students and faculty members, conscious of the unplanned and violent cataclysms that have shaken the world in this century, had been talking about the idea of deliberate social change," he explains.

As his colleagues decide to make an issue of the lack of access for blacks to the public library system, Zinn is swept up in a quiet, beautifully managed movement to open those doors.

And open they do. So much else changes over the decades of Southern turbulence that the immensely complex "Southern mystique" is forever altered. "We are all magicians," Zinn says. "We created the mystery of the South, and we can dissolve it."

With beguiling grace, Zinn subtly dissects the burden of segregation and the movement to dismantle it. He was a participant in much of the early civil-rights movement, and his skill as a writer with access to key national journals was crucial in helping to spread the word.

Next, Zinn "somehow" finds himself amid the turmoil of the Vietnam War, and again takes on the role of author-teacher-activist. As a popular...