Published: 4 March 2010

George Binette pays tribute to the radical historian and author of best-selling A People’s History of the United States, who has died aged 87 

Howard Zinn lectured at Boston University (BU) for nearly 25 years, first joining its faculty in 1964 after the authorities at Spelman College, a small African-American women’s institution in Atlanta, Georgia, had dismissed him for “insubordination” for his very open involvement with the direct action left wing of the civil rights movement, the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee.

I returned to my native city of Boston as a callow undergrad­uate in September 1978, having grown up in relative privilege against the backdrop of blue-­collar Buffalo. Mine was the second generation of my family to enjoy the advantage of higher education, but the first for whom it was an expectation.

By the time I arrived at BU, Zinn was already something of a local legend. 

Though I then had only a vague idea of his committed opposition to the Vietnam war, I had a burgeoning interest in punk rock, considered myself on “the left” and was receptive to a radical critique of American society, so inevitably opted for one of Zinn’s courses in my second term.

Tall and thin with a full head of prematurely white hair, Zinn was an arresting figure behind the lectern. He spoke in an accent that betrayed his Brooklyn origins and perhaps bore a slight trace of eastern Europe (both his parents were poor Jewish immigrants). His lectures started slowly and occasionally meandered, yet they almost invariably gained momentum, driven by an uncommon moral passion. 

He first struck a resonant chord with me in a lecture about the harsh realities of the world’s largest penal system, evoking my own memories of television coverage of the brutal climax of the 1970 Attica prison riot, which left 43 dead.

Given his reputation as a left-wing firebrand, Zinn was an avuncular man, who seemed to always find time to speak with earnest students, whether politically sympathetic or diametrically opposed. But for all his disarming charm he was an implacable foe of BU’s union-busting ­president, John Silber, who accused Zinn of “poisoning the well of academe”.

Matters came to a head in the spring of 1979. Over the preceding months BU had been a veritable hotbed of industrial unrest, including a week-long walkout by the college lecturers’ union. This was followed almost immediately by a strike for union recognition and a pay claim by administrative and ­clerical workers. 

Along with four other lecturers Zinn refused to cross picket lines. All five were threatened with suspension, but the BU administration blinked first as academics from Boston area ­colleges signed an open letter in their support.

These were weeks of frenetic activity and proved hugely educative. Perhaps my most abiding memory of that turbulent spring is of Zinn urging and persuading students to join him on a campus lawn adjacent to Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue as an alternative to crossing the picket line. Shouting to be heard above the traffic din, Zinn located the clerical workers’ strike in the context of the history of American labour struggles in the 20th century, from the Bread and Roses ­struggle of 1912 through to equal pay walkouts in the ­preceding decade. 

I left BU and indeed the United States in 1982, but with 30 years of hindsight I appreciate the profound influence Howard Zinn exercised on my trajectory. Appropriately enough, much of his last day as a BU lecturer in 1988 was spent on a health­workers’ picket line.

• George Binette is branch secretary of Camden Unison