 | |
| Author | Howard Zinn |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Beacon Press |
Publication date | 1964 |
| Publication place | United States |
| ISBN | 9781608462995 |
| Text | SNCC: The New Abolitionists at The Internet Archive |
SNCC: The New Abolitionists is a book by Howard Zinn that describes the early years of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and their registering of voters in the rural south.
This book describes the SNCC, focusing especially on the early years. Zinn details in particular the voting registration efforts by black activists in the most recalcitrant areas of the South, as well as the federal government's failure to support their efforts. [1] Zinn highlighted the role of civil disobedience as a countermeasure to state repression. [2]
Martin Duberman describes this book and its reception in his biography Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left. Duberman notes that Zinn received largely positive reviews at time of publication, and he describes the book as among Zinn's best. Duberman writes that the book is "passionately argued, intense, and persuasive, though it has a few peripheral problems. Duberman critiques the non-chronological structure of the book, which makes it difficult to know which events occur when. In addition, Duberman criticizes Zinn's style of citation, noting that Zinn doesn't always make clear whether he is using remembered quotes or precise quotes from audio tapes. [3]
Writing in a 1974 review of the civil rights history corpus, George Burson Jr. describes Zinn's work as "an excellent history" and as one of the very few books dealing specifically with the SNCC. He notes that the book provides "valuable insights into the SNCC's radicalism." [1]
Writing shortly after publication in the Harvard Crimson , Donald E. Graham, later the chairman of the Washington Post, said that despite the book's quality as an "unbalanced glorification of the SNCC," the book has considerable power and merit. He highlights the book's capacity to help "maintain your sense of urgency of civil rights problems," making concrete the harsh reality of the civil rights protests through Zinn's crafting of narrative and evocative style. Further, Graham says that Zinn's work "stand[s] out" from other accounts because it "presents the unusual philosophy that has been born out of SNCC work," leaving beching the armchair philosophy of other works. [4]
Beacon Press approached Zinn in 1963, suggesting that he write a scholarly book on the NAACP. Zinn proposed that he instead write about the SNCC from his perspective as a participant. Despite a schedule allowing his little time to write, preoccupied as he was with his teaching and his activism, Zinn finished the book in 1964. He based the book on his own experiences with the SCNCC, including recordings of SNCC volunteers and his own recalled conversations. [3]
Civil disobedience is the active, and professed refusal of a citizen to obey certain laws, demands, orders or commands of a government. By some definitions, civil disobedience has to be nonviolent to be called "civil". Hence, civil disobedience is sometimes equated with peaceful protests or nonviolent resistance. Henry David Thoreau's essay Resistance to Civil Government, published posthumously as Civil Disobedience, popularized the term in the US, although the concept itself has been practiced longer before.
Howard Zinn was an American historian, playwright, philosopher, socialist intellectual and World War II veteran. He was chair of the history and social sciences department at Spelman College, and a political science professor at Boston University. Zinn wrote more than 20 books, including his best-selling and influential A People's History of the United States in 1980. In 2007, he published a version of it for younger readers, A Young People's History of the United States.
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was the principal channel of student commitment in the United States to the civil rights movement during the 1960s. Emerging in 1960 from the student-led sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Nashville, Tennessee, the Committee sought to coordinate and assist direct-action challenges to the civic segregation and political exclusion of African Americans. From 1962, with the support of the Voter Education Project, SNCC committed to the registration and mobilization of black voters in the Deep South. Affiliates such as the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama also worked to increase the pressure on federal and state government to enforce constitutional protections.
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A People's History of the United States is a 1980 nonfiction book by American historian and political scientist Howard Zinn. In the book, Zinn presented what he considered to be a different side of history from the more traditional "fundamental nationalist glorification of country". Zinn portrays a side of American history that can largely be seen as the exploitation and manipulation of the majority by rigged systems that hugely favor a large aggregate of elite rulers from across the orthodox political parties.
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