Howard Zinn: Obama "Is Going to Need Demonstrations and Protest and Letters and Petitions" to Do the Right Things

Last month in San Francisco, I had the opportunity to attend a performance of Voices of a People's History, the groundbreaking show conceived by historian Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States, and Anthony Arnove, co-editor of Voices of a People's History and author of books including Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal (New Press). Blending historical narrative with spoken word -- and some spunky bluegrass performed by the San Francisco-based Stairwell Sisters -- it was an event that, in one brisk hour, celebrated the power of protest and made manifest the best traditions of radical American thought, creativity, and dissent.

The show is brilliant for its simplicity: Take a handful of famous American texts (and several more obscure ones), some movies stars with radical politics (and a few non-actors), mix in some rabble-rousing music, and make sure the audience includes students, activists, and people who believed in hope and change before Obama came along. In San Francisco, the result was Diane Lane, playing writer and activist Mary Ellen Lease, crying, "We want the foreclosure system wiped out!" to thunderous applause, while reciting a speech called "Wall Street Owns the Country" (circa 1890). It was Kerry Washington deliver Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" -- first spoken in 1851 at the Women's Convention in Akron, Ohio -- with ferocity and sass. It was "W" star Josh Brolin play the socialist Eugene Debs, hip-hop artist Boots Riley give Muhammad Ali's speech against the Vietnam War, Benjamin Bratt, as Sgt. Camilo Mejia deliver his 2005 statement on GI resistance to the war in Iraq. The non-actors in the cast were equally impressive; Civil rights attorney Renee Maria Saucedo paid homage to the Latino youth of the country -- and of Mission High School, where the show took place -- as she delivered Chicana activist and writer Elizabeth "Betita" Martinez's "Be Down With the Brown!" (Martinez herself was in the audience and got a standing ovation.) And union organizer Clarence Thomas, who powerfully embodied the spirit and wisdom of Martin Luther King Jr. in "Beyond Vietnam," also tapped into the urgency of people's hope in Barack Obama -- and what's at stake -- when he delivered Langston Hughes's poem, "The Ballad of Roosevelt." ("I am tired of waiting on Roosevelt, Roosevelt, Roosevelt. Damned tired of waiting on Roosevelt. And a lot of other folks was hungry and cold, done stopped believing what they had been told by Roosevelt, Roosevelt, Roosevelt. Because the pot is still empty and the cupboard is still bare and you cannot build a bungalow out of air.")

Howard Zinn, himself an icon of radical history at 86, kicked off the evening with humor and warmth, explaining that, as a historian and an academic, he never wanted to retreat into the past. "I wanted the voices of the past to come to the present," he explained. "You go into the past and get lost. I want to get out of the past." Zinn's own rebellion has been to reimagine the conventions of his chosen profession. Alternate histories may seem less remarkable in an age where it is possible to buy books that tell the story of everything from coffee to cod. But A People's History of the United States, which sold its one millionth copy in 2003 and has now hit the 2 million mark, first told the stories of American rebels past and present when the present included recent memories of segregation, Vietnam, and the murder of MLK. Voices has taken the documents of that and other eras of rebellion -- the speeches, the poems, the songs -- and breathed life into them.

I recently spoke to Howard Zinn over the phone from New York. He shared his thoughts on President Obama’s domestic and foreign policy, the best parts of the New Deal, what he hopes Voices will help accomplish, and why he believes Obama must face mass protest in order to steer the country in the right direction.