Against Discouragement By Howard Zinn
In 1963, historian
Howard Zinn was fired from Spelman College, where he was chair of the History
Department, because of his civil rights activities. In 2005, he was invited to give the commencement address. Here is the text of that speech, given
on May 15, 2005.
So all of you, settle into your chairs, take off your hats, feel the comforting heat of that sun beating down, and consider the words of Howard Zinn as he urges the students of Spelman College not to be discouraged, not to despair, but to enter the world with their heads held high, imagining what each of them might do for him or herself -- and for the rest of us. Tom
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.. read more:
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