Voices of a People's History of the United States in the 21st Century

Introduction

This project continues work by Howard Zinn (1922–2010) in the book Voices of a People’s History of the United States and, before that, A People’s History of the United States, first published in 1980. In both books, Howard took inspiration and distilled critical lessons from countless people who worked to challenge oppression, exploitation, and injustice, participating in social movements that brought about changes many did not live to see in their own lifetime. Howard understood the power of listening to how these voices speak to our present and provide, in the words of Raymond Williams, “resources of hope.”

The book Voices of a People’s History of the United States has three editions. Howard worked on the first edition, published in 2004, and an updated second edition, published in 2009. For the third edition, published in 2014, Anthony Arnove updated the book with selections from the period after Howard’s death in 2010, seeking to foreground voices that spoke to Howard’s passions and concerns.

In beginning work on a fourth edition, especially inspired by the remarkable upsurge of activism for Black lives and liberation, which galvanized perhaps the largest protests in US history, our publisher, Dan Simon of Seven Stories Press, suggested a bold and compelling idea. Given that there were so many voices to add to this new edition, and given our wish to preserve all the selections of the original text, we would be severely limited by space. Could we create a new companion book focused on the voices of the people’s movements of the United States in the twenty-first century? So, while a fourth edition of Voices of a People’s History of the United States is forthcoming, we are extremely excited to have the opportunity here to delve more deeply into the many voices of protest and dissent in the United States in the twenty-first century.

In gathering these selections, we benefited tremendously from the work of the many people associated with the organization Voices of a People’s History of the United States, which has been working on stages and in schools since 2003 to bring primary-source texts of people’s history to new audiences. For these staged readings and classroom workshops, Voices has developed a living body of new texts beyond those gathered in the first and later editions of the book. We are extremely grateful to the actors, spoken word artists, musicians, teachers, students, librarians, researchers, and others who helped us source these documents and show us their resonance. Some of the texts here were first identified in our work on the documentary film The People Speak, which Howard Zinn wrote, directed, and produced. We are excited that some of these now appear in a Voices book for the first time.

Today, battle lines over how we understand US history are being drawn in real time. Following the 2020 protests against anti-Black racism and police brutality, right-wing politicians have sought to ban educators from teaching the 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory. Both serve as a catch-all for any acknowledgement that this country was founded through the genocide of Indigenous people and the kidnapping and enslavement of Africans whose labor produced the wealth of this country and served as the basis of its global empire.

Howard’s own work continues to be targeted by political forces threatened by an honest conversation of our history and an independent-minded population informed about the history of people speaking out for change. President Donald Trump invoked Howard Zinn a full decade after his death at the 2020 White House Conference on American History, attacking his work as “propaganda.” Without a hint of irony, Trump went on to call for the restoration of “patriotic education” to the nation’s schools. We couldn’t ask for a better endorsement to pick up a copy of or re-read A People’s History of the United States and other works by Howard Zinn.
Young people are not empty vessels, passively accepting whatever ideas they are taught. They deserve the opportunity to engage critically with the world and to decide what they think for themselves. Alongside teacher-activist Jesse Hagopian, whose speech “I’m Not Alone in Pledging to #TeachTruth” is featured in this collection, we stand with all educators who continue to teach the genuine history of this country and its traditions of resistance.

As we write this introduction, tens of thousands of people are taking to the streets around the country to protest the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, culminating a decades-long effort by Republicans and the religious right to eliminate abortion rights in the United States. Just as mass movements in Argentina, Mexico, and Ireland have succeeded in expanding reproductive rights, the United States is headed in the opposite direction. In his concurring opinion, Clarence Thomas made clear that overturning Roe opens the door for the conservative-stacked court to take aim at other rights, such as those protecting contraception, gay marriage, and same-sex relationships.

All of this is a sober reminder that progress is not linear. Any positive reforms that workers, poor people, and the oppressed have wrested from the powerful can be taken away unless we organize to defend them. This is precisely why those who benefit most from the status quo are so fixated on controlling what we learn and how we talk about the past. They understand the power of history, because when we understand the past from the perspective of the oppressed, rather than the powerful, this calls into question the idea that this country has ever been committed to “liberty and justice for all” or that we could ever rely on the Supreme Court to protect our rights.
History told from this vantage, critically, also reveals the ways that, time and again, ordinary people have refused to accept unjust conditions. They spoke out, they fought back—and, sometimes, they won.

The last twenty-two years have witnessed historic concentrations of wealth and political power into fewer and fewer hands. As the COVID-19 pandemic claimed the lives of more than one million people in the United States and millions more globally, the wealth of the ten richest people on earth—nine of whom are from the United States— doubled from $700 billion to a staggering $1.5 trillion, according to a 2022 Oxfam report. This growing economic inequality has been accompanied by efforts to shift blame for mass unemployment and declining living standards away from the 1 percent—or, perhaps more accurately, the 0.1 percent—and onto some of the most disenfranchised communities, especially immigrants and those who are queer, trans, and people of color. It is a classic case of divide and conquer, and it has emboldened white supremacists to act violently, as in the mass shootings of Asian women at a spa in Atlanta, Georgia, or the targeted killing of Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.

But this same period has also been one of explosive protest, from the anti-war movement against the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, to the massive 2006 Day Without an Immigrant, which brought a million people into the streets under the slogan “Undocumented and Unafraid,” to Occupy Wall Street, which reintroduced the concept of class into collective consciousness and popularized the language of the 99 percent versus the 1 percent (which Howard Zinn had used in A People’s History of the United States), to the Black Lives Matter movement and the “new abolitionists” (to borrow another phrase from Zinn), who insist that we imagine a society without police or prisons, to the explosive struggle at Standing Rock to defend Indigenous land and stop catastrophic climate change, to the teachers’ strike wave that revived the labor movement, even in so-called red states where striking is illegal, to the #MeToo movement against misogyny and systemic sexism, which gave voice to survivors of sexual violence, to the Brooklyn March for Black Trans Lives, which brought out fifteen thousand people, the largest such march to date.

The United States is far from alone in this regard: a 2021 study found that the number of protests in 101 countries and across borders more than tripled between 2006 and 2020, including some of the largest protests in history. What these protests had in common is that they emerged in response to “failures of democracy and of economic and social development, fueled by discontent and a lack of faith in the official political processes.” Protests in the United States during the pandemic further confirmed these sentiments, as employers attempted to force low-wage “essential workers” to risk their lives for the sake of profit. That burden fell disproportionately on Black people—already the targets of police brutality—who died at higher rates as the pandemic raged on.

Despite and because of the failure of federal and state governments to stop the chaos of disease and death, people came together in unexpected ways to do what the government would not. Communities created mutual aid groups to provide food, masks, and essential supplies for older, immunocompromised, and disabled people who could not afford to risk leaving their homes and potentially contracting the virus. Neighbors organized to keep those facing eviction from being kicked out onto the street as unemployment reached historic heights. Workers demanded the right to health and safety on the job, and refused to return to conditions that were intolerable long before the pandemic. People risked their own health and safety by mobilizing in massive, militant, multiracial protests to denounce anti-Black racism. Their actions embody Howard’s contention that to be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

By highlighting the voices of key activists and organizers who participated in the movements of this new century, we aim to show how social change has come about not through the actions of extraordinary individuals, but through ordinary people acting on their own behalf and in solidarity with each other. As Alicia Garza rightly points out in her speech “Why Black Lives Matter,” included in chapter 6, “It is important to us that we understand that movements are not begun by any one person.”

A number of the speeches, poems, and writings in this book feature the voices of activists and advocates with whom readers will likely be familiar. Others are by people who deserve to be more widely known. We are deeply honored to feature the text of Angela Y. Davis’s speech to the Women’s March on Washington; Chelsea E. Manning’s statement read aloud by her attorneys ahead of her prison sentence for leaking classified documents that exposed US war crimes in Iraq; Naomi Klein’s message delivered at Zuccotti Park at the height of Occupy Wall Street; the words of Bree Newsome, who scaled the flagpole outside the South Carolina State Capitol building to remove the Confederate Flag; and the open letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos by Christian Smalls, the Amazon worker who was fired for organizing during the pandemic, only to become the leader of the first successful effort to unionize Amazon, among others. But we are equally excited for readers to encounter, perhaps for the first time, other voices, including Airickca Gordon-Taylor, the cousin of Emmett Till; Toni Smith-Thompson, the college basketball player who refused to stand for the National Anthem twelve years before Colin Kaepernick took a knee in protest against police murders of Black people; Naomi Wadler, who at eleven years old was the youngest speaker at the March for Our Lives and spoke on behalf of Black girls whose deaths by gun violence rarely make headlines; Steven Salaita, who was fired from his university for speaking out against Israel’s brutality toward Palestinians; and Xiuhtezcatl Tonatiuh Martinez, a young Indigenous activist who offers a powerful vision of a just future for people and the planet.

Thanks to these and countless other rebels, today’s movements are far less likely to be single-issue and more likely to see struggles against capitalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, colonialism, and imperialism as linked. Our ability to more readily make these connections reflects the fact that movements are rarely self-contained: they cross-pollinate, build upon each other, and open space for activists to draw new connections and work across division. We owe to all of these activists a debt of gratitude for putting us on firmer ground to forge the solidarity needed to build a better world.

What unites these selections is that each person spoke out, took action, or intervened at a critical juncture. They were not merely identifying unjust conditions, but resisting them, sometimes at great personal risk. By breaking a silence, by picking a side, the voices we have gathered have individually and collectively generated the potential for another person, and then another, and then another to stand up and take meaningful action, often in ways they could not have anticipated. They remind us that what we do matters, that there is hope in resistance, and that in speaking out, we are never alone.

—Anthony Arnove and Haley Pessin