Reading Howard Zinn

"To a great extent, this moral objective is not considered in teaching history. I think people have to be given the facts of slavery, the facts of racial segregation, the facts of government complicity in racial segregation, the facts of the fight for equality. But that is not enough. I think students need to be aroused emotionally on the issue of equality. They have to try to feel what it was like to be a slave, to be jammed into slave ships, to be separated from your family. Novels, poems, autobiographies, memoirs, the reminiscences of ex-slaves, the letters that slaves wrote, the writings of Frederick Douglass- I think they have to be introduced as much as possible. Students should learn the words of people themselves, to feel their anger, their indignation. In general, I don’t think there has been enough use of literature in history. People should read Richard Wright’s Black Boy; they should read the poems of Countee Cullen; they should read the novels of Alice Walker, the poems of Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansbury’s A Raisin in the Sun. These writings have an emotional impact that can’t be found in an ordinary recitation of history.”