Zinn did not confine his revolutionary work to his scholarship. While he was overturning history, he was also making it–adding his voice to the movements for peace, civil rights, social justice, and equality. As a professor at Spelman College in the 1950s, he joined his students on the picket lines and at sit-ins, traveling throughout the south as a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He headed north to Boston University in the 1960s and took to the streets to protest the Vietnam War. He was arrested numerous times for his anti-war actions, but he could not be silenced. He traveled to North Vietnam and Japan to speak out against US policies, and he testified at some dozen trials on the importance of breaking unjust laws.
More recently, he has been an outspoken critic of the so-called war on terrorism. This spring he published Terrorism and War, a book exploring the loss of civil liberties during war and the history of American resistance to wars from World War I to the war in Afghanistan.
Democracy Now! • June 21, 2002