Dick Gregory, the African American comedian who transcended show-business success to become a prominent activist for social justice and civil rights, performs at Bates College at 7 p.m. Monday, May 23, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell Street.

Sponsored by the Bates Program in African American Studies and the Multifaith Chaplaincy, the event is open to the public at no cost, but reservations are required. Please contact 207-786-8272.

Gregory was one of a handful of black comedians who broke from the minstrelsy tradition to redefine the role of African American comedy. Throughout his career, he has used satire to comment on current political and race issues, turning his incisive humor and fame to good advantage in the civic arena.

Today, the 78-year-old Gregory is also recognized as an entrepreneur with expertise in nutrition, but his focus remains on social and racial justice.

Born in St. Louis, Gregory began performing comedy in the 1950s while serving in the Army. His show-business breakthrough came in 1961 with a successful stint, playing to primarily white audiences, at Chicago’s Playboy Club. That led to a three-year Playboy contract that brought Gregory national recognition.

“Gregory was, in his words, ‘the first flatfooter’ — no dancing, no shuffling — to play white clubs, a break with the singing and dancing routines of his black predecessors,” New York Times reporter Bruce Headlam wrote in 2009.

Engaged in social justice issues even in high school, Gregory later became deeply engaged in the civil rights movement. He took part in voter registration drives and sit-ins to protest segregation in the South. When local governments in Mississippi stopped distributing surplus federal food to poor blacks in areas where the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was encouraging voter registration, Gregory chartered a plane to bring in tons of food.

His autobiography Nigger (written with Robert Lipsyte; Pocket Books) appeared in 1963 and became the No. 1 best-selling book in America. Over the decades it has sold more than 7 million copies. Gregory explained his choice for the title in the forward to the book: “Whenever you hear the word ‘Nigger,’ you’ll know they’re advertising my book.”

His other books include a subsequent autobiography, Callus On My Soul: A Memoir (with Sheila Moses; Kensington, 2003).

He has marched, spoken and fasted to support causes ranging from the Vietnam War to world hunger. Among other initiatives, in 1992 he began a program called Campaign for Human Dignity to fight crime in St. Louis neighborhoods.

In Iran he fasted and prayed to persuade the Ayatollah Khomeini to release the American embassy staff who had been taken hostage in 1979. On Sept. 10, 2010, he undertook a hunger strike to protest U.S. government reports about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He intends to maintain the protest until his 80th birthday, in 2012.

A vegetarian and nutritional consultant, Gregory’s interest in food issues bore fruit in 1984 when he founded Health Enterprises Inc., a company that distributed weight-loss products. In 1987 he introduced the Slim-Safe Bahamian Diet, a powdered diet mix, which was immensely profitable. That year Gregory made headlines with his public effort to help Walter Hudson, a 1,200-pound man, lose weight.

He has homes in Washington, D.C., and in Plymouth, Mass., where he lives with Lily, his wife of 50 years. He performs about 200 shows a year.

“It’s been a long, a long time coming, but I know a change is gonna come.” The hopeful words of the Sam Cooke song sung by soloist Megan Guynes ’11 made a fitting opening for the Jan. 16 Memorial Service of Worship that began Martin Luther King Jr. Day observances at Bates.

The centerpiece was the Rev. James Lawson’s sermon. Lawson was an important advocate for nonviolent activism during the civil rights movement, and was instrumental to the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1960.

A personal friend of King’s, Lawson told the Bates audience how King had first encouraged him to move down South and continue his work at the heart of the emerging civil rights movement. Lawson praised King’s work as “breaking down barriers of fear, silence, racism and sexism, and lifting up a new era.”

Lawson also emphasized that the campaign goes on. “I want you to understand that to celebrate Martin Luther King’s life is to celebrate a movement made up of hundreds of thousands of people,” Lawson told his attentive audience.

Pointing to the many issues of violence, fear and injustice that our nation continues to struggle with, he said, “We, the American people, have not permitted the slogan ‘equality, liberty and justice for all’ to be the slogan of our land.”

He urged, “Destroy what destroys us, and replace it with instruments that allow human creativity and joy.”

Taking place in the Bates Chapel, the service was attended by 175 or so members of the Bates and Lewiston-Auburn communities. The audience was also treated to inspirational readings from students and faculty, music provided by Bates ensembles the Crosstones and the Gospelaires, and a dance performance by Bates’ liturgical dance troupe, Justified.

– Gabrielle Otto ’11

In case you think that all the heavy lifting in the cause of social justice is over and done with, the Rev. James Lawson has news for you.

“I am absolutely convinced” that the 21st century will be the time for a social justice movement that overshadows the transformative campaigns of the previous century, Lawson told a Bates College audience gathered on Jan. 17 to celebrate the life and work of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

It will be a movement, he proclaimed in his keynote speech, even “greater in its intensity and its power of truth” than the civil rights movement in which he played a key role. In an effort that spans all faiths and targets all prejudices, “we must work for the dismantling of the systems of oppression in the United States,” said Lawson, an influential advocate of non-violent activism who worked closely with King in the 1950s and ’60s.

Memorial Service of Worship

A Sun Journal report

A WGME-TV report

The performance “Sankofa”

Also on hand was Vinie Burrows, the actress and activist, who moderated a discussion and will offer performances at Bates and elsewhere in Maine during the week. A debate and a student performance Monday and a worship service Sunday evening featuring a sermon by Lawson were also in the plan.

Lawson’s keynote provided the right message for a King Day observance meant to spur action. Borrowing its first half from reggae singer Bob Marley and its second half from King, the theme for the day was “Get Up. Stand Up. The Fierce Urgency of Now.”

Listeners also heard much about the roles of Christ and of Gandhi in the philosophy of non-violence as practiced by the keynote speakers.

Bates President Elaine Tuttle Hansen and Dean of Faculty Jill Reich offered opening remarks during the morning keynote session in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall. Hansen pointed out that Bates — founded by abolitionists and always open to men and women of all races and religions — was distinctively qualified as a place to celebrate and reflect on King’s legacy. Hansen noted that the Jan. 8 massacre in Tucson “reminds us that the world needs the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King more than ever.”

“We need both Dr. King’s lessons and his persistence. No matter how dire the situation, he said, ‘I refuse to allow myself to fall into the dark chambers of pessimism.’ “

Reich enjoined the Olin Arts Center audience of some 250 people to step beyond the ceremony of a single day and turn inspiration into action. “The inspirational words in which we find comfort are not enough,” she said. “We must find ways to live them — not just on special days like this one, but every hour, every minute, day in, day out.”

An elegant figure in a pinstripe suit and Western boots, Lawson wore a wireless microphone so he could pace the Olin stage as he talked. His address — titled, after King’s book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? — ranged effortlessly from past to present, from his own story to that of the civil rights movement, and thence to the nagging unmet demands of social justice.

The theme that shaped his talk was the deep imperative he felt from Christ and Gandhi to the exercise of non-violence in the cause of human rights. “You have before you a follower of Jesus who began resisting injustice around the age of 4, 78 years ago,” he said.

After he struck someone who used a racial slur against him, Lawson’s mother forbade further violence and urged that he wield brotherly love instead, “and make it work for every issue in my life, experiment with it, and make it a form of strength instead of weakness.” That was the seed of a lifetime of non-violence that was enriched by Gandhi and bloomed into full flower during the civil rights movement.

Though he rejects any political labels for himself, Lawson was eloquent in cataloging the evils still perpetrated by Western society and the white-male power structure. “The major obstacle to the advancement of the human race in the world today is white Western civilization,” he said, while acknowledging that he is himself a product of that power structure.

Anticipating Kolieboi’s talk several hours later, Lawson didn’t spare a conservative evangelical community that has, he believes, lost sight of Christianity’s essence. “One might ask, why does Christianity put all the weight on ‘Are you saved?’ instead of on doing God’s work on Earth?” he wondered. “It seems to me that the notion of the Kingdom of God is that there is no area of human life that does not benefit from learning the ways of truth and compassion.”

In describing his own work as a co-director of the Equality Ride, which periodically brings young LGBTQ advocates to colleges and universities to advocate for fairness and diversity, Kolieboi (now LGBTQ community coordinator at Oberlin College) paid explicit tribute to Lawson’s gift to American activism of non-violence.

But in contrast to Lawson’s free-ranging review of a life in social activism, Kolieboi hewed closely to the values and operations of the Equality Ride and its parent organization, Soulforce. Describing the prejudice against the LGBTQ community at some evangelical Christian schools, he admitted that it was an education even for him to discover the harsh consequences suffered by anyone expressing same-sex attraction — expulsion, suspension, loss of financial aid, compulsory “conversion therapy.”

Pointing to racist and homophobic sentiments that still persist even among social activists, Kolieboi echoed Lawson’s call for a social justice movement that would transcend specific communities of interest to strive for equality, justice and freedom for all people.

“We are not single-issue people,” he said. “We can’t talk about LGBTQ rights without talking about access to education, or about healthcare or the prison-industrial complex.”

He ended his address with a maxim from Napoleon Bonaparte: “There are only two forces in the world, the sword and the spirit. In the long run, the sword will always be conquered by the spirit.”

Breakout sessions after each keynote, and finally a late-afternoon plenary session with Lawson and Kolieboi, sought to digest and expand upon the speakers’ thoughts.

Vinie Burrows led one morning session. The petite actress wielded an outsize personal authority that kept the session moving along despite the group’s initial reticence to speak. She asked the group of about 40 students and Lewiston-Auburn community members how they would respond to the charge to action that Lawson had issued. Like society in miniature, the resulting discussion was a collision between prescriptions for action and descriptions of the obstacles.

In the end, it boiled down to a question simple but profound: Why can’t students make friends outside their familiar circles? An African American student applauded Bates’ efforts to diversify the student body, but said that in spite of growing diversity on campus, the races rarely mix in Commons. “Is it really diversity if it’s not integrated?” she wondered.

The burden is on students, a male student replied. “The point of school is to expand our horizons. People need to challenge themselves.”

About 40 people attended an afternoon breakout moderated by Erica Rand, professor of art and visual culture, and Cynthia Alexandre-Brutus ’13 of Brooklyn, N.Y. Focusing on the struggle to expand gay rights and on issues with conservative Christians, the session was sparked up by the contributions of LGBTQ activists from the community.

One of those activists offered cause for optimism, pointing out that despite the considerable prejudice still in place, the LGBTQ cause has been met “with the fastest change in opinion in American history. We are making tremendous progress.”

“We have to thank the civil rights and women’s rights movements,” someone else said. “This is the third time we’ve been through this.”

But the discussion nevertheless returned, inevitably, to the basic need to spark meaningful action.

“It’s hard to create that safe space where people can just be honest” about race, women’s issues and so on, said Alexandre-Brutus. “How can we get people engaged?”

“Maybe do this more than once a year?” another student suggested.

– Additional reporting by Allison Lizars ’11

Not the viewbook Bates where faculty and students scale ever-higher peaks of achievement. Instead, a more prosaic place where, in back offices, kitchens, and workshops, College staffers make the academic fireworks possible.

And it’s a place whose achievements, perhaps, reflect what Benjamin Mays ’20 had in mind when he exhorted mourners at King’s funeral to make the civil rights leader’s unfinished work “truly our own.”

President Hansen considers a comment during the King Day workshop on diversity efforts in the Bates workplace. At right is Ellen Peters ’87, director of the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

President Elaine Tuttle Hansen convened “Institutionalizing Unfinished Work” to illuminate those achievements. As Bates has striven to make the campus more diverse and inclusive, Hansen explained, she has been struck by the intensity College staffers have brought to that effort. For the MLK Day workshop, she asked seven College administrators to share challenges and revelations they’ve encountered along the way.

The King holiday, Hansen said later, afforded a plum opportunity “to explore all the places on campus where people really are trying to do the unfinished work of social justice and inclusion.”

We heard from Carmita McCoy, who is helping Bates develop a concept from the Benjamin Mays Initiative: “swing deans” who help recruit a new class for Admissions one year, then spend the next year as a dean of students mentoring that same class, especially members of underrepresented groups.

Something she hadn’t expected, she explained, was the concern some African American parents expressed that their children wouldn’t be able to maintain their faith practices at Bates.

Bob Pallone, who works in Advancement, wondered how to convince alums of color that today’s Bates is more welcoming than the one they knew. “How do we understand what they experienced?” he asked. “And how do we convey what’s happening now?”

The diversity of diversities resonated throughout the workshop. In realigning staff assignments for the new dining Commons, said Dining Services head Christine Schwartz, she has encouraged her people to try out for jobs they really want.

Implementing this enlightened policy, though, sometimes brought Schwartz up against the effects of old, harsh inequalities — such as a worker who had gone through public school labeled as a special-ed student on the basis of a single, specific disability.

The diversity of diversities includes job classification. As Carmen Purdy, a presenter and the coordinator of the affirmative action office, pointed out, Bates staff feel empowered simply to be heard.

The convener agreed. “I talk about Bates all the time, and I rarely have an opportunity to talk publicly about people who are behind the scenes,” Hansen said afterward. “Quite invisible but so important to the college, just kind of making everything else happen.”

Including, now more than ever, some unfinished work that just can’t wait.

“Selfishness and greed have toppled many great empires in the past,” Southern Poverty Law Center co-founder Morris Dees told a Bates audience on May 8.

Unless fairness for all people prevails, he said, frustration among the disadvantaged here could rise to a tragic degree. “One day, there may not be one skyscraper left in this nation.”

Dees wove stories from the Bible, from the life of Martin Luther King Jr. and from his own biography into a compelling, sometimes emotional address lasting nearly an hour.

Some 300 members of the campus community and friends gathered in the College Chapel on a summery afternoon to hear Dees. He was the keynote speaker for the second annual symposium, this year titled Unswerving Values, Changing Times, convened by President Elaine Tuttle Hansen to address the vital work of advancing diversity at Bates.

Dees, raised on an Alabama cotton farm, is a lawyer who co-founded the Southern Poverty Law Center in 1971. Dedicated to seeking legal redress against hate groups, and in more recent years to providing programming that

Dees’ talk at Bates resembled the best kind of memoir, as he used tragedies and triumphs from his own life to shape a larger narrative about America’s history of racial injustice, his own journey to the awareness of inequity and the continuing need for love and justice in society.

Titled “With Justice for All in Our Multicultural Nation,” the address began with Dees describing one Vera Belle Johnson, his teacher in a three-room
schoolhouse in Shorter, Ala. Johnson, he explained, “wanted us to grow up to be good citizens . . . fair and honest.”

Christian values and abstention from alcohol and tobacco were high on Mrs. Johnson’s list, said Dees, recalling the day he challenged her with the seeming contradiction in the story of Jesus turning water into wine.

“Yes, Morris,” she retorted, “but we would have thought more highly of him if he hadn’t done that.”

Equally memorable but more influential were Johnson’s efforts to convince Dees and her other pupils of the real value of the words in the Pledge of Allegiance: “one nation, with liberty and justice for all.”

It took the work of civil rights leader King, Dees continued, to “ensure that America lived up to its promises of equality written in the Constitution.”

One day King told a crowd in a Memphis church about seeing the distant Promised Land from a mountaintop. He said, “I may not get there with you, but it’s going to be a land of fairness and justice and liberty for all.” King was assassinated the next day.

Similarly, Dees said, Moses brought his people out of Egypt and to the river shore opposite the Promised Land, but they didn’t cross. Instead, the Jews wandered in the wilderness for another 40 years before they crossed the River Jordan.

“It is ironic today,” Dees said, “that we are standing on the river and, so to speak, looking across, and it’s been 40 years since the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King left us.”

“Are we going to turn and go back? Are we going to wander around in this wilderness, where we’ve made some progress but not a lot of progress, in human rights? Or are we going to step out and attempt to make changes?”

A highlight of Dees’ talk was his 1981 defense of Vietnamese immigrants who had fled their country after the communist victory and had overcome considerable hardship to establish themselves as shrimpers in Texas. The Ku Klux Klan then employed the usual tactics to force them out of the industry.

Dees and the shrimpers were at the threshold of a legal victory, in the form of a federal injunction against the white supremacists, when a group of
Vietnamese businesspeople asked that the lawsuit be dropped. Why? Fear of retaliation against their own businesses.

“Please, please don’t drop your lawsuit,” Dees implored the shrimpers, using King’s example to illustrate the ultimate power of the U.S. legal system. But, he told the Bates audience, “I could see fear in their faces. It wasn’t me who had to live in that community.”

In the end, the shrimpers hung tough and the injunction went through, Dees said. On the day the shrimping season opened, as an early fog lifted, he was among the crowd on the waterfront in Kemah, Texas, as the shrimp fleet including the Vietnamese boats received a priest’s blessing and headed out to sea. “I not only felt proud to be their lawyer, I felt proud to be an American,” he said.

Dees’ dominant theme came to the fore as he interpreted the Old Testament story of the prophet Amos. A farmer visiting the city of Bethel, Amos was appalled by the gap he saw between the rich establishment and the disenfranchised poor.

In Dees’ version, Amos told the powers-that-be that “you’ve got a good thing going here. But you won’t get to keep what you have and pass it down to the future generations unless you’re fair to all the people. Because if you’re not fair to all the people, they’re going to take what you have away from you.”

“Amos spoke to the people of that ancient city in the words that Dr. King chose to speak to us,” Dees told the Bates audience, “when he stood on the Mall in Washington, D.C., and begged this nation to live up to its promises of equality.”

“Amos said to those people, ‘Don’t be satisfied, folks, until justice rolls down like the waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.’ ”

Dees’ theme was anticipated in opening remarks by President Hansen. She reminded the gathering of the substance of last year’s symposium, which explored the changing demographics of the student population.

“This afternoon we come together again to that perpetual task of changing and preparing ourselves to do the right thing,” she said, “which requires not just reacting to what we think may be coming, but proactively building an educational environment to house and nurture the capacities needed to sustain a thriving multicultural nation and a peaceful global society.”

Offering a brief introduction to Dees’ life and accomplishments, Trustee Dana Peterson Moore ’79 described Dees as “an eyewitness and a warrior in the civil rights movement.”

She told Dees, “We’re very hungry to learn from you how justice for all can be secured in these changing times.”

Morris Dees

Weaving stories from the Bible, from the life of Martin Luther King Jr. and from his own biography, Southern Poverty Law Center co-founder Morris Dees presents a compelling, sometimes emotional address at Bates College on May 8 as the Presidential Symposium keynote speaker. From MPBN’s Speaking in Maine. (Total time: 1:07:42) [More...]

Morris Dees, founder and chief trial counsel of the Southern Poverty Law Center, will deliver a keynote address, With Justice for All in Our Multicultural Nation, at 4 p.m. May 8 in the Bates College Chapel.

Hosted by Bates College President Elaine Tuttle Hansen, this second annual Presidential Symposium on Unswerving Values, Changing Times is free and open to the public. Hansen notes that Dees’ topic supports the college’s longstanding commitment to offering an outstanding liberal arts education to a broad array of talented students.

“Today more than ever, greater access to higher education is an urgent need,” Hansen says.  “And as we strive to deepen Bates’ diversity, broadly defined, we must prepare all our students to learn from its complexity and to recognize their responsibilities as ethical leaders and global citizens.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center, founded in 1971, is dedicated to educational programs that teach tolerance to young students and to seeking legal redress against white supremacist groups. Dees has argued and won cases against the United Klans of America for the lynching of a young black man, against the group Aryan Nations and the White Aryan Resistance for anti-black hate violence, and against the Carolina Klan for burning black churches.

The center’s newest litigation focuses on immigrant civil rights. Noting that this issue is fertile ground for hate groups and other extremists looking to spread their racist beliefs, SPLC reasons that it is important to understand the background and motives of the groups shaping the debate about immigration.

In 1980, the Southern Poverty Law Center founded the Intelligence Project in response to resurgence in organized racist activity. The project monitors hate groups and develops legal strategies for protecting citizens from violence-prone groups. A made-for-television movie about Dees aired on NBC, ”Line of Fire” describes his successful fight against the Ku Klux Klan.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, under Dees’ leadership, broke new ground in anti-bias education in 1991, when it began supporting the efforts of K-12 teachers and other educators to promote respect for differences and an appreciation of diversity. The program, known as “Teaching Tolerance,” has earned accolades from a variety of national organizations, including three Oscar nominations, two Academy Awards and more than 20 honors from the Educational Press Association of America.

Dees has received numerous awards in connection with his work at the Center. Trial Lawyers for Public Justice named him Trial Lawyer of the Year. He received the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Award and was awarded the Friend of Education Award by the National Education Association. In 2006, the National Law Journal listed him among the 100 most influential lawyers in America.

Libertarian, entertainer and entrepreneur, Reginald Jones offers a talk titled Betrayal: Sold Out by the Civil Rights Movement at 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 14, in Room 204, Carnegie Science Hall, 44 Campus Ave.

Sponsored by the Bates College Republicans, the event is open to the public at no cost.

“Mr. Jones’ talk will focus on the struggle for civil rights and how the African-American community has been mistreated by public officials over the years,” said Michael O’Gorman, a Bates first-year student and second vice president of the Bates Republicans.

Jones is a singer and hip-hop entrepreneur. As a young man in the South Bronx, Jones worked with rap artist Grand Master Flash, one of the pioneers of the hip hop movement. Jones parlayed that experience into a job at MCA/Universal Records, and in 1990 formed his own entertainment company, The Reggitainment Group, which managed music acts.

In 1994, Jones made the leap to public speaking and politics when he joined Project 21, an African-American leadership group. In 1995, he got his first talk-radio job on WTTM in Trenton, New Jersey. Since then, he has hosted the Grassroots Liv” show on National Empowerment Television, spoken on dozens of college campuses and manned the microphone on the Radio America Network’s Generation Now.

Jones occasionally performs as a backup singer for George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic, and volunteers for Afri-Male, a New Jersey mentoring group for young black males. Throughout all his endeavors, Jones has offered a simple message of empowerment for the black community: “Capitalism.”

“That’s the word that I want to hear from now on,” he says. “Talk to me about free enterprise. Racism did not destroy our neighborhoods. Government did it.”

Meeting today with students enrolled in “Wartime Dissent in Modern America” — a course taught by associate professor of history Hilmar Jensen — Boston civil rights attorney Howard Friedman discussed restrictions on civil liberties caused by the war on terror.

“Our constitutional rights to free speech and protection from unreasonable searches and seizures have been limited in the name of the war on terror,” Friedman told the students, “yet we are no safer as a result.” Friedman discussed examples of official changes in national policy, such as the Patriot Act, and toleration of civil rights violations, such as mass arrests without cause. Jensen’s course History 265 explores, in part, what the long-term consequences of even short-term curtailments of freedom portend for the future of American democracy.

An attorney for plaintiffs in civil rights litigation for more than 25 years, Friedman specializes in representing victims of police misconduct; in fact, he was called “one of the foremost practitioners” in police misconduct law by U.S. District Court Judge William G. Young. But Friedman has handled a wide range of high-profile cases, from “Mack v. Suffolk County” (a $10 million settlement on behalf of a class of 5,400 women who were illegally strip-searched) to “Nader v. Commission on Presidential Debates,” where Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader challenged CPD for refusing to allow him to both participate in and attend an October 2000 debate with Democratic and Republican candidates.

Friedman is the president of the National Police Accountability Project, a project of the National Lawyers Guild that seeks to end police abuse of authority through coordinated legal action, public education and support of organizations combating police misconduct. Friedman works as a key attorney for the National Innocence Project, which uses DNA and other evidence to free those who have been unjustly imprisoned. Boston Magazine recently named him a “Super Lawyer,” one of the top 5 percent of Massachusetts attorneys in more than 60 practice areas.

Friedman speaks frequently about civil rights and police misconduct to law-enforcement groups such as the Boston Police Academy, the FBI National Academy Associates of New England and the International Criminal Justice Expo & Conference.Friedman has trained lawyers in civil rights law at continuing education seminars for various groups including the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, the Boston Bar Association, the Maine Criminal Defense Lawyers and the National Lawyers Guild. He has spoken at many Boston-area law schools, including the Boston University School of Law, Northeastern University School of Law, Suffolk University School of Law and Vermont Law School.

The author of various articles for lawyers on civil rights litigation, Friedman received his J.D. from Northeastern University and his B.A. from Goddard College.

Zinn, a former professor of history at Boston University and Spelman College, received the Albert Beveridge Prize from the American Historical Association for his book LaGuardia in Congress (Greenwood Press, 1972). His other books include The Southern Mystique, S.N.C.C.: The New Abolitionists, (South End Press, South End Press Ed ed., 2002) New Deal Thought, (Prentice Hall College Div., 1966) Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal, (South End Press, 2002) Disobedience and Democracy, (South End Press, 2002) The Politics of History, (University of Illinois Press; 2nd ed., 1990) Postwar America, 1945-1971 (South End Press, 2002) and Declarations of Independence, (Perennial, 1991) which won the Olive Branch Award in 1991.

Zinn’s play Emma, about the anarchist-feminist Emma Goldman, has been produced in New York, Boston, London, Edinburgh and Tokyo. His other plays include Unsafe Distances and Marx in Soho. He received a bachelor’s degree from New University and master’s and doctoral degrees from Columbia University.