Support justice-driven, accurate and transparent news — make a quick donation to Truthout today! 

We speak to Dave Zirin, author and sports editor at The Nation, about his new book, The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn, chronicling the life and activism of the legendary historian Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States. For Zinn, says Zirin, “being an academic was always secondary to being in the streets and making history, not just studying history.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org.

We turn now to the new book The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn, written by our next guest, Dave Zirin. The book explores the remarkable life of the late historian, teacher and activist Howard Zinn. He’s best known for writing A People’s History of the United States. First published in 1980, the book has sold more than 4 million copies.

Howard Zinn died in 2010 at the age of 87, but his work is still seen as threatening to many, and by others, by empowering so many. During his first term, President Trump directly attacked Zinn’s work.

10 Years After His Passing, Howard Zinn Remains a Threat to the Status Quo

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The left-wing rioting and mayhem are the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools. It’s gone on far too long. Our children are instructed from propaganda tracts, like those of Howard Zinn, that try to make students ashamed of their own history.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The left-wing rioting and mayhem are the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools. It’s gone on far too long. Our children are instructed from propaganda tracts, like those of Howard Zinn, that try to make students ashamed of their own history.

AMY GOODMAN: Over the years, professor Howard Zinn appeared on Democracy Now! many times. In 2009, he “talked”: about the importance of teaching students the true history of the country.

HOWARD ZINN: It’s true that people have asked that question again and again. You know, should we tell kids that Columbus, whom they have been told was a great hero, that Columbus mutilated Indians and kidnapped them and killed them in pursuit of gold? Should we tell people that Theodore Roosevelt, who is held up as one of our great presidents, was really a warmonger who loved military exploits and who congratulated an American general who committed a massacre in the Philippines? Should we tell young people that? And I think the answer is: We should be honest with young people; we should not deceive them. We should be honest about the history of our country. And we should be not only taking down the traditional heroes, like Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt, but we should be giving young people an alternate set of heroes.

HOWARD ZINN: It’s true that people have asked that question again and again. You know, should we tell kids that Columbus, whom they have been told was a great hero, that Columbus mutilated Indians and kidnapped them and killed them in pursuit of gold? Should we tell people that Theodore Roosevelt, who is held up as one of our great presidents, was really a warmonger who loved military exploits and who congratulated an American general who committed a massacre in the Philippines? Should we tell young people that?

And I think the answer is: We should be honest with young people; we should not deceive them. We should be honest about the history of our country. And we should be not only taking down the traditional heroes, like Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt, but we should be giving young people an alternate set of heroes.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that is the late great historian Howard Zinn.

Dave Zirin joins us now.

Dave, you wrote The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn. Everyone knows you as a sportswriter. Why you switch gears for now, if in fact you did? And tell us Howard Zinn’s life story and his impact.

DAVE ZIRIN: Well, I could tell you that in the 1930s, as a teenage union organizer, Howard Zinn played for his union basketball team and used his tall frame as a way to recruit people to the union, but that still doesn’t make this a sports story. That’s as close as we’re going to get.

Howard Zinn’s life was remarkable. It was 70 years-plus of activism, 64 of those years alongside his incredible partner Roslyn Shechter Zinn. And it’s in those 70 years that we have so many lessons for us today and for our struggles. I mean, we’re talking about somebody who in the 1930s, like I said, was a teenage union organizer during the Depression. In the 1940s, he was a bombardier in World War II who hated fascism so much, he signed up to be a bombardier even though he’d never been on a plane. I mean, I get claustrophobic in the middle seat, and he’s there as a bombardier. You know, in the late 1940s, he lived through the Red Scare as a firebrand, 20-something organizer fighting for veterans’ rights in Brooklyn, which is an incredible story which he never told unto himself, which I was able to get documentary information on.

In the 1950s, teaching at Spelman College, a HBCU for women in Atlanta, he taught an incredible generation of women, people like Alice Walker, the author, Marian Wright Edelman, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, women who were the first to graduate from Harvard Law School, and Howard Zinn was their beloved professor. They voted him the professor........

© Truthout