The Zinn Reader (18 page)

And for a certain minority of Negroes, there is police brutality, courtroom injustice, horrible conditions in Southern jails and workgangs, the simple fact that capital punishment is much more likely to be invoked for a Negro criminal than for a white. The South is not one mad orgy of lynchings and brutality, as Communist propaganda might have it. But there is a kind of permanent brutality in the atmosphere, which nobody's propaganda has quite accurately described. Because of this, no accusation directed against the South is much of an exaggeration. Any emphasis upon the evil aspects of Southern life is a valuable prod to the movement for equality.

As for the moderate exhortation to compromise, the angry but cool Negro students in the South have learned that this is best left as the very last act in the succession of moves toward settlement of any issue. Department stores, before the sit-ins, were willing to compromise by adding more segregated eating facilities for Negroes. After the sit-ins, the only compromise which the students had to accept was to wait a few months in some cases, or to leave some restaurants out of the settlement, or to put up with inaction on connected issues like employment rights; but the lunch counters were fully integrated. The lesson has been well learned by now; throw the full weight of attack into the fray despite demands for prior concessions; then the final compromise will be at the highest possible level.

"You'll alienate the merchants if you sit-in, and they'll never agree to integrate," the students were told when they began their movement. But they know, through some semiconscious perception rather than by complex rational analysis, that certain antagonists in a social struggle cannot be won over by gentleness, only by pressure. The merchants were alienated, not only from the students, but from their customers. It was the latter effect which was most striking, and it led to their capitulation and the integration of lunch counters in leading Southern cities. On the other hand, students were careful to try not to alienate the ordinary Southern white, the customer, the observer. They were scrupulously polite, nonviolent, and impressive in their intelligence and deportment. With a precise instinct, they singled out of the complex of opponents which ones would have to be irritated, and which would need to be cajoled.

In spite of some fearful murmurs immediately after the 1954 Supreme Court Decision, there is no prospect of civil war in the United States over desegregation. And this points up the fact that the total collision between two power groups which is called war cannot come about through the action of radial reformers, who stand outside these power groupings. The movement for desegregation today has all the elements of the abolition movement: its moral fervor and excitement, its small group of martyrs and mass of passive supporters, its occasional explosions of mob scenes and violence. But there will be no war because there are no issues between the real power groups in society serious enough, deep enough, to necessitate war as a solution. War remains the instrument of the state. All that reformers can do is put some moral baggage on its train.

The role of the politicians vis-a-vis the agitator was revealed as clearly in the Kennedy Administration as it was under Lincoln. Like Lincoln, Kennedy read the meter of public concern and reacted to it, but never exerted the full force of his office to change the reading drastically. He too had a deeply ingrained humanitarianism, but it took the shock of Birmingham to bring from him his first clear moral appeal against segregation and his first move for civil rights legislation (the Civil Rights Act of 1964). Lyndon Johnson holding to the level created by the agitation of that Birmingham summer, still hesitated—even while modern-day abolitionists were being murdered in Mississippi—to revoke the Compromise of 1877 and decisively enforce federal law in that state.

Behind every one of the national government's moves toward racial equality lies the sweat and effort of boycotts, picketing, beatings, sit-ins, and mass demonstrations. All of our recent administrations have constituted a funnel into which gargantuan human effort—organized by radical agitators like Martin Luther King, Jr. and the young professional militants of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee—is poured, only to emerge at the other end in slow dribbles of social progress. No American President, from Lincoln to Johnson, was able to see the immense possibilities for social change that lie in a
dynamic
reading of public opinion. Progress toward racial equality in the United States is certain, but this is because agitators, radicals and "extremists"—black and white together—are giving the United States its only living reminder that it was once a revolutionary nation.

10

W
HEN
W
ILL THE
L
ONG
F
EUD
E
ND?

I had argued in
The Southern Mystique
in 1964 that the South was not radically different than the North, that racism was a national phenomenon, not just a Southern one. In the Seventies, in northern cities, including my city of Boston, whites, usually in working-class districts, gathered in mobs to protest the busing of black children into their neighborhood schools. What follows is one of the bi-weekly columns I was writing in 1975 for the
Boston Globe.
It appeared in the September 19, 1975 issue.

"Despite considerable apprehension, violence failed to materialize. In September...Negro children entered Boston's white schools with little difficulty.... Although a few white parents withdrew their children and some Negroes suffered insults, integrated schools resulted in neither race violence nor amalgamation."

The year was 1855. The description is from Leon Litwack's book "North of Slavery." He tells about Sarah Roberts, who passed five white elementary schools on the way to hers. Her father sued for her right to go to a neighborhood school, and her lawyer, Charles Sumner, argued before the Supreme Court of Massachusetts against the segregation rule of the Primary School Committee: "On the one side is the city of Boston...on the other side is a little child.... This little child asks, at your hands, her personal rights."

The court upheld the School Committee, but the Legislature then passed a law to integrate Boston schools. A pessimist, reviewing this history, might say: We see now how far we have come in 120 years: three inches. An optimist might point to how much has changed since then. But it is hard to ignore the persistence, through three centuries, of race hostility to the point of recurring violence.

Another fact is hard to ignore: it is the economically harassed white people who have turned repeatedly in anger against blacks, thinking, "There is the cause of our misery, there is the threat to our jobs, our safety, our children." My father was a slum-dwelling immigrant, and prejudiced against Negroes. I had an aunt who kept warning us kids not to go under the El, where blacks lived in even more run-down tenements than ours.

We need to pay attention to these people with lives of frustration and unfulfilled dreams. Not to dismiss them if they are full of racial epithets. Not to doubt them if they say: "I am not a racist, all I want is..." I recall some lines from a book about street orphans in postwar Naples, which apply to whites and blacks alike: "The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you do not listen to it, you will never know what justice is."

It started early in our history. The first whites in Virginia were stricken with hunger and sickness. In the heat of the first summer, every other man died. They called it "The Starving Time." In 1618, they begged King James for vagabonds and criminals to work in servitude. The following year, came a solution: the first shipload of blacks. When it docked, race prejudice began.

In the pre-Civil War South, there were 300,000 slave plantations, but most of the five million whites were poor, and not slave-owners. They were described by a Southern historian: "Uninspired, physically deficient, occupying the pine barrens or the infertile back country, they lived a hand-to-mouth existence, mere hangers-on of a regime in which they had no determining part."

In New York, in the midst of the Civil War, during four hot days in July, poor Irish rioted against the draft. They were being sent to die for the freedom of black slaves they did not know, while the rich, making fortunes out of the war, could escape the draft by paying $300. Here is an account: "...another mob was sacking houses in Lexington avenue. Elegant furniture and silver plate were borne away by the crowd...and the whole block on Broadway, between 28th and 29th streets, was burned down...." Then they set out to destroy the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue and 44th street, which contained 200 children, from infants up to 12 years of age.

And so it continues. Hassled whites turn on blacks. Angry blacks retaliate.

Will this hostility ever end? Not until black and white people discover together, the source of their long feud—an economic system which has deprived them and their children for centuries, to the benefit of, first, the Founding Fathers, and lately, the hundred or so giant corporations that hog the resources of this bountiful country.

PART
TWO

CLASS

1

G
ROWING
U
P
C
LASS-
C
ONSCIOUS

This is a chapter from my 1994 memoir,
You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train,
published by Beacon Press. In that book I write about my experiences in the South, as a bombardier in World War II, in the movement against the Vietnam War, my encounters with courtrooms and jails, my jousts with academic administrations. About threequarters of the way through the book I go back to my early years to try to understand my path to radical thinking.

I was in my teens when I wrote this poem:

Go see your Uncle Phil
      And say hello.
      Who would walk a mile today
      To say hello,
      The city freezing in the snow?
      

Phil had a news stand
      Under the black El.
      He sat on a wooden box
      In the cold and in the heat.
      And three small rooms across the street.
      

Today the wooden box was gone,
      On top the stand Uncle Phil was curled,
      A skeleton inside an Army coat.
      He smiled and gave me a stick of gum
      With stiffened fingers, red and numb.
      

Go see your Uncle Phil today
      My mother said again in June
      I walked the mile to say hello
      With the city smelling almost sweet
      Brand new sneakers on my feet.
      

The stand was nailed and boarded tight
      And quiet in the sun.
      Uncle Phil lay cold, asleep,
      Under the black El, in a wooden box
      In three small rooms across the street.
      

I recall these lines, certainly not as an example of "poetry," but because they evoke something about my growing up in the slums of Brooklyn in the thirties, when my father and mother in desperate moments turned to saviors: the corner grocer, who gave credit by writing down the day's purchases on a roll of paper; the kind doctor who treated my rickets for years without charging; Uncle Phil, whose army service had earned him a newsstand license and who loaned us money when we had trouble paying the rent.

Phil and my father were two of four brothers, Jewish immigrants from Austria, who came to this country before the First World War and worked together in New York factories. Phil's fellow workers kept questioning him: "Zinn, Zinn—what kind of name is that? Did you change it? It's not a Jewish name." Phil told them no, the name had not been changed, it was Zinn and that's all there was to it. But he got tired of the interrogations and one day had his name legally changed to Weintraub, which from then on was the name of that branch of the family.

My father, looking to escape the factory, became a waiter, mostly at weddings, sometimes in restaurants, and a member of Local 2 of the Waiters Union. While the union tightly controlled its membership, on New Years Eve, when there was a need for extra waiters, the sons of the members, called juniors, would work alongside their fathers, and I did too.

I hated every moment of it: the ill-fitting waiter's tuxedo, borrowed from my father, on my lanky body, the sleeves absurdly short my father was five-foot-five and at sixteen I was a six-footer); the way the bosses treated the waiters, who were fed chicken wings just before they marched out to serve roast beef and filet mignon to the guests; everybody in their fancy dress, wearing silly hats, singing "Auld Lang Syne" as the New Year began and me standing there in my waiter's costume, watching my father, his face strained, clear his tables, feeling no joy at the coming of the New Year.

When I first came across a certain e.e. cummings poem, I didn't fully understand why it touched me so deeply, but I knew it connected with some hidden feeling.

my father moved through dooms of love
      through sames of am through haves of give,
      singing each morning out of each night
      my father moved through depths of height
      

His name was Eddie. He was always physically affectionate to his four boys, and loved to laugh. He had a strong face, a muscular body, and flat feet( due, it was said, to long years as a waiter, but who could be sure?), and his waiter friends called him "Charlie Chaplin" because he walked with his feet splayed out—he claimed he could balance the trays better that way.

In the Depression years the weddings fell off, there was little work, and he got tired of hanging around the union hall, playing cards, waiting for a job. So he became at different times a window cleaner, a pushcart peddler, a street salesman of neckties, a WPA worker in Central Park. As a window cleaner, his supporting belt broke one day and he fell off the ladder onto the concrete steps of a subway entrance. I was perhaps twelve and I remember him being brought, bleeding, into our little flat. He had hurt himself badly. My mother would not let him clean windows again.

All his life he worked hard for very little. I've always resented the smug statements of politicians, media commentators, corporate executives who talked of how, in America, if you worked hard you would become rich. The meaning of that was if you were poor it was because you hadn't worked hard enough. I knew this was a lie, about my father and millions of others, men and women who worked harder than anyone, harder than financiers and politicians, harder than
anybody if
you accept that when you work at an unpleasant job that makes it very hard work indeed.

My mother worked and worked without getting paid at all. She was a plump woman, with a sweet, oval Russian face—a beauty, in fact. She had grown up in Irkutsk, in Siberia. While my father worked
his
hours on the job, she worked all day and all night, managing the family, finding the food, cooking and cleaning, taking the kids to the doctor or the hospital clinic for measles and mumps and whooping cough and tonsillitis and whatever came up. And taking care of family finances. My father had a fourth-grade education and could not read much or do much arithmetic. My mother had gone as far as seventh grade, but her intelligence went far beyond that; she was the brains of the family. And the strength of the family.

Her name was Jenny. Roz and I sat with her in our kitchen one day when she was in her seventies and had her talk about her life, with a tape recorder on the table. She told of her mother's arranged marriage in Irkutsk, of how "they brought a boy home, a Jewish soldier stationed in Irkutsk, and said, 'This is who you'll marry.'"

They emigrated to America. Jenny's mother died in her thirties, having given birth to three boys and three girls, and her father—against whom she boiled with indignation all her life—deserted the family. Jenny, the eldest but only a teenager, became the mother of the family, took care of the rest, working in factories, until they grew up and found jobs.

She met Eddie through his sister, who worked in her factory, and it was a passionate marriage all the way. Eddie died at sixty-seven. To the end he was carrying trays of food at weddings and in restaurants, never having made enough money to retire. It was a sudden heart attack, and I got the news in Atlanta, where Roz and I had just moved. I remembered our last meeting, when my father was clearly upset about our little family moving south, so far away, but said nothing except "Good luck. Take care of yourself."

My mother outlived him by many years. She lived by herself, fiercely insisting on her independence, knitting sweaters for everybody, saving her shopping coupons, playing bingo with her friends. But toward the end she suffered a stroke and entered a nursing home.

As a child, I was drawn to a framed photograph on the wall, of a delicate-faced little boy with soft brown eyes and a shock of brown hair, and one day my mother told me it was her firstborn, my older brother, who died of spinal meningitis as the age of five. In our tape recording she tells how and when he died, how they'd been in the country for a brief, cheap vacation, and how she and my father held the boy's body on the long train ride back to New York City.

We lived in a succession of tenements, sometimes four rooms, sometimes three. Some winters we lived in a building with central heating. Other times we lived in what was called a cold-water flat—no heat except from the coal cooking stove in the kitchen, no hot water except what we boiled on that same stove.

It was always a battle to pay the bills. I would come home from school in the winter, when the sun set at four, and find the house dark— the electric company had turned off the electricity, and my mother would be sitting there, knitting by candlelight.

There was no refrigerator, but an icebox, for which we would go to the "ice block" and buy a five-or-ten-cent chunk of ice. In the winter a wooden box rested on the sill just outside the window, using nature to keep things cold. There was no shower, but the washtub in the kitchen was our bathtub.

No radio for a long time, until one day my father took me on a long walk through the city to find a second-hand radio, and triumphantly brought it home on his shoulder, me trotting along by his side. No telephone. We could be called to the phone at the candy store down the block, and pay the kid who ran upstairs to get us two pennies or a nickel.

And yes, the roaches. Never absent, wherever we lived. We'd come home and they'd be all over the kitchen table and scatter when we turned on the light. I never got used to them.

I don't remember ever being hungry. The rent might not be paid (we moved often, a step ahead of eviction), no bills might be paid, the grocer might not be paid, but my mother was ingenious at making sure there was always food. Always hot cereal in the morning, always hot soup in the evening, always bread, butter, eggs, milk, noodles and cheese, sour cream, chicken fricassee.

My mother was not shy about using the English language, which she adapted to her purposes. We would hear her telling her friend about the problem she was having with "very close veins," or "a pain in my crutch." She would look in the dairy store for "monster cheese." She would say to my father if he forgot something, "Eddie, try to remember, wreck your brains."

My brothers—Bernie, Jerry, Shelly—and I had lots of fun over the years recalling her ways. She would sign her letters to us, "Your mother, Jenny Zinn." We laughed at those memories even while standing by in the hospital room where she lay in a coma, kept "alive" by a tangle of tubes, her brain already damaged beyond repair. We had signed that terrible order, "Do Not Resuscitate," shortly after which she coughed up her breathing tube and died. She was ninety.

We four boys grew up together—sleeping two or three to a bed, in rooms dark and uninviting. So I spent a lot of time in the street or the schoolyard, playing handball, football, softball, stickball, or taking boxing lessons from a guy in the neighborhood who had made the Golden Gloves and was our version of a celebrity.

In the time I did spend in the house I read. From the time I was eight I was reading whatever books I could find. The very first was one I picked up on the street. The beginning pages were torn out, but that didn't matter. It was
Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar
and from then on I was a fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs, not only his Tarzan books but his other fantasies:
The Chessmen of Mars,
about the way wars were fought by Martians, with warriors, on foot or on horses, playing out the chess moves;
The Earth's Core,
about a strange civilization in the center of the earth.

There were no books in our house. My father had never read a book. My mother read romance magazines. They both read the newspaper. They knew little about politics, except that Franklin Roosevelt was a good man because he helped the poor.

As a boy I read no children's books. My parents did not know about such books, but when I was ten, the
New York Post
offered a set of the complete works of Charles Dickens (of whom they had never heard, of course). By using coupons cut out of the newspaper, they could get a volume every week for a few pennies. They signed up because they knew I loved to read. And so I read Dickens in the order in which we received the books, starting with
David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, The Pickwick Papers, Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities,
and all the rest, until the coupons were exhausted and so was I.

I did not know where Dickens fitted into the history of modern literature because he was all I knew of that literature. I did not know that he was probably the most popular novelist in the English-speaking world (perhaps in any world) in the mid-nineteenth century, or that he was a great actor whose readings of his own work drew mobs of people, or that when he visited the United States in 1842 (he was thirty), landing first in Boston, some of his readers traveled two thousand miles from the Far West to see him.

What I did know was that he aroused in me tumultuous emotions. First, an anger at arbitrary power puffed up with wealth and kept in place by law. But most of all a profound compassion for the poor. I did not see myself as poor in the way Oliver Twist was poor. I didn't recognize that I was so moved by his story because his life touched chords in mine.

How wise Dickens was to make readers feel poverty and cruelty through the fate of children who had not reached the age where the righteous and comfortable classes could accuse them of being responsible for their own misery.

Today, reading pallid, cramped novels about "relationships," I recall Dickens' unashamed rousing of feeling, his uproariously funny characters, his epic settings—cities of hunger and degradation, countries in revolution, the stakes being life and death not just for one family but for thousands.

Dickens is sometimes criticized by literary snobs for sentimentality, melodrama, partisanship, exaggeration. But surely the state of the world makes fictional exaggeration unnecessary and partisanship vital. It was only many years after I read those Dickens novels that I understood his accomplishment.