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Best known, I suppose, for his A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn was a relentless force for change.

He fought for the poor, the underclass, the underprivileged, and the underheard.

In his 2002 book, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times, Zinn describes his own awakening into an awareness of the deep inequities built into American society.

He writes:

As I began to realize, no pitifully small picket line, no poorly attended meeting, no tossing out of an idea to an audience or even to an individual should be scorned as insignificant.

The power of a bold idea uttered publicly in defiance of dominant opinion cannot be easily measured. Those special people who speak out in such a way as to shake up not only the self-assurance of their enemies, but the complacency of their friends, are precious catalysts for change.

Howard Zinn was 87 years old. Even so, the time we got to have him seems pitifully brief.

Related information:

• here’s an obituary from the LA Times
• here’s an obit from The Boston Globe, including Noam Chomsky’s take on Zinn’s legacy
• here’s video of Howard Zinn’s 2005 talk, “The Myth of American Exceptionalism,” at MIT
• here’s a short remembrance from History is a Weapon, which describes itself as “a left counter-hegemonic education project.”

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