Robert Cohen (5) (1955–)

Real Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: How young black women fought paternalism on campus and Jim Crow downtown, and how Howard Zinn was fired for supporting them

In the 1960s, students of Spelman College, a black liberal arts college for women, were drawn into historic civil rights protests occurring across Atlanta, leading to the arrest of some for participating in sit-ins in the local community. A young Howard Zinn (future author of the worldwide best seller A People’s History of the United States) was a professor of history at Spelman during this era and served as an adviser to the Atlanta sit-in movement and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Zinn mentored many of Spelman’s students fighting for civil rights at the time, including Alice Walker and Marian Wright Edelman.

As a key facilitator of the Spelman student movement, Zinn supported students who challenged and criticized the campus’s paternalistic social restrictions, even when this led to conflicts with the Spelman administration. Zinn’s involvement with the Atlanta student movement and his closeness to Spelman’s leading student and faculty activists gave him an insider’s view of that movement and of the political and intellectual world of Spelman, Atlanta University, and the SNCC.

Robert Cohen presents a thorough historical overview as well as an entrée to Zinn’s diary. One of the most extensive records of the political climate on a historically black college in 1960s America, Zinn’s diary offers an in-depth view. It is a fascinating historical document of the free speech, academic freedom, and student rights battles that rocked Spelman and led to Zinn’s dismissal from the college in 1963 for supporting the student movement.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: There is no quisling like a race quisling. Spelman College, an institution of higher education for wealthy Black families, operated "in loco parentis" and, in typical midcentury overreach, became the controlling patriarch of its woman students' every single act. They were aiming for a complete absence of any breath of scandal. A Spelman alumna was Caesar's wife, blameless in all ways, and President Albert Manley (don't think that name didn't suit him to a "T") was going to make sure the women at 1960s Spelman were perfectly prepared to be housewives and helpmeets for Black executives, free of radical notions about race equality and gender parity.

Along comes new History professor Howard Zinn, radical New York Jew....

What makes this a good read is what makes any personal story a good read. The diary of a very interesting person, a person who's entire being is dedicated to breaking bad stuff and gluing it back together into better shapes, is going to be of interest to at least a few of us. When that person is someone whose way with words is demonstrably snappy, merging erudition with sarcasm and bypassing facetiousness to jab sharp elbows of truth-telling into the soft midriffs of the Status Quovians, chances are you're in for a good read.

Robert Cohen had access to Zinn's diaries before others in order to annotate and analyze the source material aided by a grant from New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. The purpose of the grant was to support research that could illuminate previously unknown connections and bring to light buried facts in Cohen's area of scholarship, social movements in higher education. This project combines the diaries of a major cultural figure with interviews of some women whose lives he touched (eg, Alice Walker) and the profound changes he catalyzed in some of them. It is hard to overstate Zinn's personal charisma. It is hard to overestimate the role contact with such a live wire has on a person beginning to form an identity. And Zinn's desire to assist the USA in birthing a fairer, more inclusive culture in all ways should've found friends in Spelman's hierarchy.

It very much did not.

Zinn was harassed and abused by senior colleagues, going so far as Spelman President Manley threatening him with an entirely fabricated sex scandal, for having the audacity to try to prepare his charges for the world of equal rights that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was advocating across the street at Morehouse College. Ultimately, Zinn was forced to leave Spelman after seven years without tenure and was handed over to Boston University for a twenty-four year career of pushing aside the nostrums and asininities of US "education" in the History and Social Studies fields.

What makes this book fun to read is Editor Cohen's trenchant annotations and explications of the diary herein. The thing about a diary is that it's not usually meant for other eyes...but there's a hint that Zinn was slyly glancing over his shoulder at us from beyond the grave. What I enjoyed most were the moments that Cohen asks Zinn's former students about events in the diary. The putative subject of Zinn's "sexual harassment" was floored that this had ever been mooted! Manley, the President, was so desperate to protect what he saw as Spelman's selling point to wealthy parents...the oppressive in-loco-parentis system, the focus on high-brow, low-conflict education...that he would stoop to telling a lie that (had Zinn not caved and left the school) would've destroyed both lives.

This is not an unusual thing for a boss to have done, or even to do still. But the proof that it was being fired UP is what wonderful and important stuff happened at Boston University afterwards.

The problem with reading a book like this is the inevitable overage. Overexplaining. Overreaching to grasp a conclusion. Overdoing the support of a point of view. In the case of this book's subject, this book's timing, these were inevitable and expected. I was left wishing for less not more. But I appreciated the Catch-22 the simple existence of this book represents. Scholars need more, more proof more sources more citations, in order to survive as scholars. You can bet you'll see this book cited a great deal. The primary sources it relies on are brand new to scholarship. The interviews Editor Cohen conducted will, within a depressingly short time, be impossible to repeat due to aging and mortality. Luckily for the reader, this is not a painful overabundance of blah, bland, beige verbiage. I would caution not-scholarly readers to use the Oystercatcher Method: Fly in, skim catch crunch, swallow and move on; then wade through, dig, scuff up lower levels of tasty morsel, repeat later.

I won't give it five stars simply because there's so much information that requires additional effort to contextualize, but I will give it four-and-a-quarter because it's lively, trenchant, and conversational when it matters most to be those things for the story being told.… (plus d'informations)

Howard Zinn’s Southern Diary has all the makings of a great film. It opens at a pleasant, respectable, all black, all female college in Atlanta. The women are there to learn poise and homemaking to provide a stock of great wives for the upcoming middle class black managers now being educated. It’s the 1960s, and kids, both black and white, are fed up with the stifling authority of their own schools, and the hypocritical, cruel world they are being formed to fit. Into this mix comes Howard Zinn, young, white, open, Jewish, liberal, New York activist history professor. What could go wrong?

Atlanta’s Spelman College was presided over by Albert Manley, a black man, who reported to a white board. The whole school experience seemed to be about control. The librarian refused to allow a book (put on reserve by a professor for his course) to be seen by any student at all. The blinds had to be closed at least half way in dorm rooms, and fully closed if a light was on inside. Students were monitored all day, had to sign in and out, were not allowed to go downtown unless accompanied, not allowed to join civil rights protests, withdraw from courses, miss a concert or daily chapel. Students could only hold meetings in the presence of the dean. The closing party for a play could not take place that night -because of curfew - but only during daylight hours the next day. Students routinely had their scholarships revoked for the slightest infraction (eg. “citizenship”), forcing them to leave. Getting married was cause for expulsion. Curfew violation could get a student campused (house arrest). It was suffocating for 1960s “Spelman young ladies” as the school called them. They got demerits for everything from being AWOL to having a bed unmade- even after bed check.

This will read like science fiction to current students, who are coddled, marketed to, solicited, and treated like customers rather than orphans with no rights. The Administration was omnipotent, and when Zinn would ask a co-worker why s/he made some oppressive decision, the answer came back as: I don’t have to justify it.

This was the era of civil rights, voter registrations, Birmingham, Selma, and sit-ins, with Julian Bond and Martin Luther King right across the street at Morehouse College. Zinn was right in the thick of it. He famously led a group of black students to sit it in the whites-only area of the legislature’s public gallery, which caused debate to stop while guards were called to remove them. So they all moved to the colored seating, which caused the Speaker to demand the whites be removed from there, too. He loudly and proudly proclaimed Georgia to be a segregated state. Point made, Zinn and company left.

Howard Zinn was everyone’s favorite teacher. He personally promoted his students to grad school contacts, cajoled benefactors into scholarships, and showed them all the way, himself. They loved him like family, kept in touch the rest of his life, and still honor their memories of their time with him.

Spelman President Manley fired him. In a truly odious and cowardly letter, he denied Zinn the last year of his current contract, denied he had acquired tenure, gave him three weeks to clear out of his school apartment, and when Zinn appealed, threatened to hit him with a sexual misconduct scandal with one of his students (who never even heard about the phony story until this book was being researched, 50 years later).

The book is no screenplay. It is a clinically arranged documentary, based on Zinn’s finally released personal diary. The first 80 pages are a round-robin, sort of Rashomon reliving by various players still around. It is remarkable how differently they each remember key players and events, and in particular their view of President Albert Manley. He is clearly the arch villain in all this, but he has his defenders and apologists.

The diaries themselves are totally annotated and footnoted. Every typo is worth saving and noting, and every name worth an explanation. Robert Cohen handles everyone and everything as if it were a precious relic from a long-lost civilization. It is often too detailed and patronizing, which slows it down. Zinn, on the other hand, is direct and clever, a kind of Robert Kennedy character, for whom everything was possible.

It concludes with transcripts from two meetings, showing off Zinn’s ease with crowds and words. Ever the teacher, he teased thoughts into listeners’ minds, leading them come to his conclusions themselves.

Howard Zinn’s Southern Diary is therefore several books. It is a history of life at Spelman, a history of Howard Zinn, an anthropological look at an abominable institution, and a present tense look at life in Jim Crow Georgia from those who had to live it. Definitely worth a film.

David Wineberg… (plus d'informations)

In 1964, I was a 17 year freshman from a farm town in the San Joaquin Valley. Insecure and painfully shy, I had managed somehow to get accepted to Berkeley. Before that Fall was over, I was about to get a first-class education in the Bill of Rights, political action, and courage, that involved crawling through a basement window to view an actual underground press at work, picketing to stop union drivers' deliveries to the University, the takeover of the UC administration building, searching for arrested roommates, and hearing Savio's astonishing body-on-the-machine speech first-hand. It changed my life, and fueled my writing career as a librarian reviewer of alternative and small press materials that were so critical during the Free Speech Movement and afterward. Suppression and censorship was the game: the Free Speech Movement its name. This book presents a kalidioscope of perspectives by participants from both sides of the barriers.… (plus d'informations)