Staughton Lynd, ¡Presente! - Zinn Education Project

As a former graduate student of Howard Zinn, who, of course, introduced us to Staughton Lynd, I encourage you to read this excellent tribute to Lynd who died yesterday.

- GWC

Staughton Lynd, ¡Presente! - Zinn Education Project

People’s historian Staughton Lynd died on Nov. 17 after an extraordinary life as a conscientious objector, peace and civil rights activist, tax resister, professor, author, and lawyer.

Lynd inspired us with his role as a people’s historian, always working in solidarity with struggles for justice today.

Lynd served as director of the Freedom Schools in the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project. He worked with prisoners and challenged the prison-industrial complex.

Staughton Lynd speaks with Freedom School teachers in Oxford, Ohio, 1964. Photo by Herbert Randall.

While teaching at Spelman College, his family and Howard Zinn’s developed a lifelong friendship. Zinn said of Lynd, “He is an exemplar of strength and gentleness in the quest for a better world.”

Among Lynd’s many books is Doing History from the Bottom Up, in which he described three key perspectives that are guides for any teacher or student of history.

1. History from below is not, or should not be, mere description of hitherto invisible poor and oppressed people: it should challenge mainstream versions of the past.

2. The United States was founded on crimes against humanity directed at Native Americans and enslaved African Americans.

3. Participants in making history should be regarded not only as sources of facts but as colleagues in interpreting what happened.

Historian Stephen West tweeted about an earlier book of Lynd’s on Reconstruction.

 

In that book, Lynd critiqued liberal analysis and uplifted the arguments of people like W. E. B. Du Bois and Thaddeus Stevens:

In my opinion a third point of view is crystalizing. It seeks to escape the debate as to whether Northern policy was too soft or too hard by contending that it was hard in the wrong way, or more precisely, in the wrong area of social life. This third view holds that the fundamental error in Reconstruction policy was that it did not give the freedman land of [their] own. Whether by confiscation of the property of leading rebels, by a vigorous Southern homestead policy, or by some combination of the two, Congress should have given the ex-slaves the economic independence to resist political intimidation.