This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
[The excerpt from a longer 1960 piece by Howard Zinn and Paula Giddings posted at TomDispatch.com are from the Nation magazine's 150th Anniversary Special Issue on newsstands in April. They appear here with the kind permission of the editors of that magazine.]
It gives me a double pleasure to have today's double-barreled post -- an excerpt from a 1960 Howard Zinn piece on the young women of Spelman College turning into protestors and historian Paula Giddings vividly looking back on Zinn and the Spelman experience 55 years later -- on loan from the Nation magazine and up at TomDispatch. First of all, Zinn, who died in 2010, was a figure at this site. As a professor at Spelman, he had been deeply involved with his students in the Civil Rights Movement, and in response -- as Giddings reminds us -- the school fired him in 1963 for "insubordination." In 2005, TomDispatch featured the graduation speech he gave on his proud return to that school, in which he pointed with what could be called a Zinnian lack of discouragement and disappointment to what the protestors of that era had accomplished. ("The lesson of that history is that you must not despair, that if you are right, and you persist, things will change. The government may try to deceive the people, and the newspapers and television may do the same, but the truth has a way of coming out. The truth has a power greater than a hundred lies.")
Second, TomDispatch is a project of the Nation Institute, which means that the Nation is our second home. The two interlinked pieces below are from that magazine's monumental 150th Anniversary Special Issue, soon to be on local newsstands everywhere, and are posted at TomDispatch thanks to the kindness of Katrina vanden Heuvel, the Nation's editor these last two momentous decades. I'm old enough by now that, with a little stretch of the imagination, I might almost believe I had been reading the Nation for that full century and a half. In truth, however, I first came upon it in the 1960s, that era of upheavals, picked it up with relief, and have, in all the decades since, never put it down. So it's a particular pleasure to celebrate its remarkable 150-year stretch of life and to realize that (unlike some of us) it's going stronger than ever.
Along with other publications I stumbled across in those years like I.F. Stone's Weekly, it provided a much needed alternative to the blinders of mainstream reporting. Even in the age of the Internet, decades after so many other alternate publications fell away, it continues to do so. In her introduction to the anniversary issue, vanden Heuvel sums up both her role and that of the magazine stirringly in this way: "Above all, I see myself as the steward of an idea that has sustained the Nation since its founding: the idea that there are always alternatives -- in history, in politics, in life -- that would make our country and the world a more humane, just, and secure place." TomDispatch salutes the Nation on its 150th birthday with today's double post. Tom
Finishing School for Pickets
By Howard Zinn (August 6, 1960)
One afternoon some weeks ago, with the dogwood on the Spelman College campus newly bloomed and the grass close-cropped and fragrant, an attractive, tawny-skinned girl crossed the lawn to her dormitory to put a notice on the bulletin board. It read: Young Ladies Who Can Picket Please Sign Below.
The notice revealed, in its own quaint language, that within the dramatic revolt of Negro college students in the South today another phenomenon has been developing. This is the upsurge of the young, educated Negro woman against the generations-old advice of her elders: be nice, be well-mannered and ladylike, don't speak loudly, and don't get into trouble. On the campus of the nation's leading college for Negro young women -- pious, sedate, encrusted with the traditions of gentility and moderation -- these exhortations, for the first time, are being firmly rejected.
Spelman College girls are still "nice," but not enough to keep them from walking up and down, carrying picket signs, in front of supermarkets in the heart of Atlanta. They are well-mannered, but this is somewhat tempered by a recent declaration that they will use every method short of violence to end segregation. As for staying out of trouble, they were doing fine until this spring, when fourteen of them were arrested and jailed by Atlanta police. The staid New England women missionaries who helped found Spelman College back in the 1880s would probably be distressed at this turn of events, and present-day conservatives in the administration and faculty are rather upset. But respectability is no longer respectable among young Negro women attending college today.
"You can always tell a Spelman girl," alumni and friends of the college have boasted for years. The "Spelman girl" walked gracefully, talked properly, went to church every Sunday, poured tea elegantly, and had all the attributes of the product of a fine finishing school. If intellect and talent and social consciousness happened to develop also, they were, to an alarming extent, byproducts.
This is changing. It would be an exaggeration to say: "You can always tell a Spelman girl -- she's under arrest." But the statement has a measure of truth.
Howard Zinn (1922--2010) wrote for The Nation from 1960 to 2008. Those articles are collected in Some Truths Are Not Self-Evident: Essays in The Nation on Civil Rights, Vietnam and the "War on Terror." (eBookNation, 2014).
Learning Insubordination
By Paula J. Giddings (March 2015)
In the current age of "lean-in" feminism at one end of the spectrum and an "anti-respectability" discourse at the other, the late Howard Zinn's essay reminds us of an earlier meaning of women's liberation.
Zinn was of Russian-Jewish heritage, an influential historian and, in 1960, a beloved professor at Spelman College, the historically black women's institution in the then-segregated city of Atlanta. The attribution of "finishing school" in the title was well-earned: Spelman girls, whose acceptance letters included requests to bring white gloves and girdles with them to campus, were molded to honor the virtues of "true-womanhood": piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness.
Nevertheless, by 1960, Zinn's students had morphed from "nice, well-mannered and ladylike" paragons of politesse to determined demonstrators who picketed, organized sit-ins, and were sometimes arrested and jailed for their efforts. "Respectability is no longer respectable among young Negro women attending college today," Zinn concluded.
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