Common and i always liked him very much as a human being. So, i talked to the family and the archives or in process but they were let me willing to let me in, and i did that for a couple of years. I think the real surprise in terms of the archives is that he seemed to be very open man and had in fact vetted his archives quite considerably committing much of his correspondence and also anything that diluted to his personal life. I didnt expect that. That was the first for me and all of the biographies that ive done. We will start with his earlier life where you were able to get information from family and friends. So i wanted to ask about some of his formative political experience, starting first with his family life, growing up as the son of immigrants, russian jewish immigrants in brooklyn. Guest well, as i think i say in the book, he was in a sense born conscience because both of his parents had very little education, and his father worked extremely hard as a waiter come as a window washer, all kinds of work with the result that he had a very bad back that had to keep on working and the family had to keep on moving. His mother was very resourceful and she would get a deal where the department would be free for one month and they would pay for the second month and they would take a free month and then moved and they kept doing that in order to avoid a friend. So it was a very poor family. And she knew very early on that the notion all you have to do is work hard and you can get anywhere you want to get in life he knew that was nonsense. No one could have worked harder than his father did coming and his father never even entered the middle class. When he was in high school he had a number of friends involved in political activity, and you talk about a sort of radical experience, what happened with him at a demonstration in times square. Yes, we dont have much information about it. Its fairly fuzzy, but we do know that he hung out with some radical minded fellow teenagers in brooklyn and that he was influenced by them. We know that a couple of them where even in the communist party. Howard was not, he was never an ideal of of any kind but he was influenced by them and by his own circumstances, and one day they went to times square and we dont even know where the conversation was about but we do know that howard went along only to have the police mounted on horseback charging through the crowd, and he got bought on the head and he woke up hours later in a doorway at the march or the protest had long since ended. Now, a few years later and i fascism became a big part of his political identity and in fact also a love of his friends thought at the Second World War in a sort of battle of variant dim eikenberry as imperialists he felt the fascism was a very serious thing and in fact wanted to be in the war. Can you talk about how he got involved . Well, he actually volunteered. She did feel as you say very strongly about fascism. But i was surprised given the fact as a lead teenager he had been at least somewhat radicalized. I was surprised that he wasnt more outspoken about the horror of the world. In fact we dont have a lot of information from his time in the surface. The protest for the slaughter, the meaning of the killing, etc. I think in part that is because as always you are dropping bombs from high yep you never see the damage thats being brought by the bombs on the ground below, so he never had to face explosively the results of his own activity, but it was very soon after world war ii that he became aware of the fact the very last mission that he flew they were ordered to fly the mission even though they knew the war was about to end after the war he went back and actually did some archival work and she was horrified how much this beautiful little town had been a fever for example had been decimated and almost ought german troops had been killed. But you do say that he never called himself a pacifist and although this is a big experience for him he ended up having a somewhat nuanced opinion. I would say certainly he was the essence of nonviolence. He was a gentle, kind, generous man. He never actually joined a group like the war resistors which is devoted to nonviolence on all occasions because he was a jew. What i have done if i had been on the war. What i have picked up bombs or tried to shoot my way out . What i have killed germans . He never answered it to his satisfaction. But he knew pretty well the answer was yes. That as a matter of selfdefense , he did believe that that violence could be justified. So maybe now you can walk us through what he did after the war. Thanks to the bill he was able to go to college and following that he was already married by the way. He married when he was quite young in his early 20s and his wife was also young, and he already had two babies so when he decided to get his ph. D. In history at columbia, it was difficult. The family was living very badly brozs took some sort of secretarial work part time. They couldnt afford a babysitter all the time and they did various midnight shifts in order to add a little more money to the park. But they were essentially very poor for getting his doctorate in fairly short order. Host he was at Spelman College, long term appointment. Guest yeah, he talked about getting his ph. D. , but his first fulltime appointment was at spellman. Median moving down to the south that seems to be how he got involved in a lot of the civil rights activity. What was going on at Spelman College at that time, and what did howard find himself in the middle of a lot of the civil rights politics . Spelman college was in atlanta and even though it is seen today as one of the less racist spots in the south, in effect atlanta was almost totally segregated when howard arrived at spellman, but by the way, she made sure that people never thought that he took a job at an all black Womens College because he was committed to the black struggle. But it was just beginning and to know how word did care about black rights he wasnt in activist on behalf of those rights. In fairly short order she and his wife both became very active the first white women came a little bit our after his arrival and even then a very few of them young black women many of whom had been part of the rural areas, they were slightly stunned at this white teacher and there were fewer other members of this bill my faculty. But howard was a genius of a teacher. She was very informal, very easygoing fox, he prided himself on a conversation and entertaining other points of view. He didnt see himself as a lecturer. Someone was handing down the truth to the enlarged. Securely on created a very warm giveandtake in the classroom to get to the activist students began put a towel in the water and go from what happens when you view that policeman will for you against a wall or whatever. They decided im going to do more, others retreat completely and return to the fray, but howard was certainly not one of those. Host the activity that he belongs in at least helping the students out with was the set in which is a confrontational step. Guest absolutely any number of times. I never bothered to add up the full count, but howard and his wife would sit in often with two or three black students and then when they were refused service they would continue to serve. What would then follow would be a variety of things, just depending on the restaurant of the day of the week and so forth. Some restaurants just turned over their rights and locked the doors. Others just let them sit there and went on a serving the other customers. They are with sncc. Can you talk about how you got involved with them . Guest got involved originally true sncc through the sitins. He was very modest always about the contribution that he made to sncc but a number of other historians who are specialists in the civil rights struggle, one of them i remember said howard was so modest about his pronounced activity with sncc that if they want Certain Records that we have, one would hardly know that he was involved at all. But in fact she was equally involved, and he was asked along with baker if who was one in the movement, howard and ella baker were the senior advisers to sncc. Host could you set in the book that he wasnt much of a joyner and that he likes to be a part of the movements but he wasnt an organizer so much as he was an inspiration to a lot of people. What were some of the skills that you think that he brought crux was it the public speaking, his personal relationships. I think all of that. What he meant when he said he wasnt a joyner wasnt that he wasnt willing to give any amount of time necessary to something that he believed. What he meant is that he had no patience for the administrative work, and the sort of nuts and bolts of building an organization. He wanted to discuss the big issues. And what his archives to contain or a significant amount of handwritten notes that he took during some of the most significant meetings of sncc. For example, the meeting that it debated whether or not sncc should continue to allow whites to volunteer for the organization. There was a very heated debate, and eventually ended up black members and fighting the white members to go and organize their own communities of north. Host how did she react to that decision . He thought that it was a mistake because it meant there would be segregated enterprises once again. The blacks and blacks alone would be active in sncc and they would be organizing white workingclass communities. He was against it, but at the same time he understood it he was aware having taught at stoneman all those years like bob moses and julian bond i dont mean on their part necessarily. They begin to look to some of the organizations as if the white students were taking over the leadership position in part because the black members were deferring to them. Host would you say that it was around the same time some of these divisions were popping up in the Civil Rights Movement that she began to get more involved in the peace movement, the antivietnam war movement . I think that was somewhat coincidental. He was in fact fallujah from spellman in 1963, and the entire war movement had not yet really begun. It started to begin the very next year. How word shifted his base of operation and his family at north when he was offered a job at Boston University. But he continued to flash back to the south. He took part for example and freedom summer in 1964 and flew back any number of times in order to attend some of the strategy sessions. But it is true that once the Movement Began against of the war in vietnam that he also felt very strongly about that and his energy began to divide, you know, she never forgot about the black struggle or ceased to have full sympathy with it. But the demand on his time tended to be more in regard to the vietnam. Host before we talk about what he did in opposition to the war we can talk about him getting fired from spearman college. This is an interesting episode of his life and it is certainly related to the civil rights that he did. What was going on at spellman at the time . Guest spellman had a black president at that time named albert manly, and its only since the book has come out as a result of the conversation with someone. Ive changed my perspective and he and so vividly howard and his family were packed up in the summer of 1963 ready to go to boston for the summer, and he stopped off at the mailbox for one last book because they needed the last salary check and he hoped would be there. What she found instead was the letter from him that preemptively fired him and told him not to come back. And it seemed like an awfully rough and cruel way to get rid of somebody when all the students were off campus and so forth. But when i referred to rethinking it a little, i did come across an early speech of which he congratulated the black students of spellman for having activate themselves on behalf of civil rights, and i was very puzzled because i had no other evidence of that she was encouraging. In fact, he was a very tight authoritarian figure who insisted that all the rules, and the rules included no man ever allowed in the room, the students had to wear gloves half of officious fourth, they had to go to the chapel every morning etc, an extremely traditional set of rules. But in rethinking it recently, it seems to me that maybe what that letter represents is that manly himself was walking a very fine line. All the black president s of colleges in those years were essentially held their positions on the sufferance of the white powers that be. So it could have been that at least part, if not much of his anger wasnt simply that he was mobilizing the students, but that he was unable to because of his position. If he had given a speech saying lets all go down to joes restaurant she would have been fired immediately. So, it was a very complicated kind of dance the two were doing with each other. Host there is a somewhat less complicated it seems when he was at Boston University where he butted heads with the president of the university there, john silver, and that went over the decades that he was there; is that correct . Yes. Yes. , silver that died recently i was just told some publication had a sign to review my biography. I cant say that i was pleased he had died but he had reviewed the book. He was such a deep conservative that on some issues its even fair to call him a reactionary. At Boston University the chair of the board was a man at least as conservative as sulfur himself if that he was back involved in. Guest and 64, 65 im for getting myself at this point, but i think it was 65 that howard was already active. He gave a speech on the Boston Common against the war, and that only drew 100 people. When he spoke just a few years later, you know, he drew 50,000 because in the entire war troops had mobilized. But back in 65 the mobilization was just beginning to roll they withdrew all of their troops immediately. That was an extremely radical position. Even into the early 70s. But howard argued brilliantly. To my mind is one of the two or three best of his books. And certainly it was a clearing and call because nobody else had argued the case so brilliantly as he did in that book. Host one of the more controversial episodes in the book is a trip howard made to North Vietnam along with a very famous peace activist from the 60s. You talk a little bit about how that came together and what happened with this trip he made. Yes. It was the result of david del clincher who was another very well known peace activist at the time. David hellinger called him and said that the North Vietnamese leadership had alerted him that they were willing to release three american pilots who had been captured, but they wanted to release them into the hands of peace negotiators, not into reps from the u. S. Government said he was asked to go with dan, and he said well. He said tomorrow morning and he left the next morning. There was conflict how the p. O. W. Was being released and to get back to the United States. What happened there . Guest it had been how word and dans understanding that the pilots would come home and drive the commercial planes and the u. S. Government insisted on using the government plans which outraged not only howard and a ban but also the resist and everybody had been involved in that operation. There was a lot of criticism for this trip. Many people seem to think that he was basically acting as a stooge for the communist North Vietnam. How did they respond to some of the criticisms coming out . Guest no way he responded to all criticisms in regard to his entire war stance, this is an evil war. We should never have been there in the first place. We are doing roofless horrible things, killing multitudes of people. Though war has to be ended and any jester we can make to that end we want to go on making. Estimate his political activity would go on throughout his life in the solidarity being impressed by the regimes and the opposition to apartheid fairly soon he would be most famous for his writing for his history theres a book on racism in the south on sncc and vietnam host what happened with the peoples history and the United States . How did that start to cover . Guest i think that was an outgrowth of the way in which he saw the world and the way in which the truth was being represented by american historians and textbooks. There was a study done the year before the peoples assistant of the u. S. Came out in 1980, the 1979 study was of a group of u. S. History textbooks and the research concluded those textbooks overwhelmingly the lives of ordinary people that never mentioned him pfft it glorifies the american triumphalism that the textbooks were essentially the stories of our wonderful akaka the businessmen, privileged corporate elite, etc. , but you know nothing about, next to nothing about what life was like for ordinary citizens of the country. Some of the figures who were heroes lies in the textbooks like Christopher Columbus hardly deserve to those that were being sent their way, that columbus in fact have been butchered them when he first landed in the new world and treated them with immense hardship and harshness so what he set out to do without pretense he didnt conceal his hand. He said im writing to fill in the blanks and an alternate history to a standard textbooks. I think students need to know about the rest of American History. The standard textbooks cover. Host the history you will find references to the historians whose work action is building often writing the book and the 600 pages very, very quickly. So he was he synthesizing other word that was coming out the was more scholarly and getting the material together for the book. Guest he wasnt doing archival work. He didnt enjoy doing and Manuscript Library is year after year gathering primary materials he was gregarious and social a man. He wasnt cut out for that kind of archival work. I myself am an archival historian. But that says lots of things about me. For the very detailed perfectionist kinds of work its quite true that peoples history is the result of him synthesizing the work of a great many other historians what had happened in the 1960s with the counterculture with a whole new generation of young historians that had come up and they worried innocence in evaluating all aspects of our paths one of his closest friends the historians who was an archival historian any number of books revaluating the american revolution. Host at the time it cannot its been in sood book was the subject of a lot of criticisms to hear criticisms even on the people that were glad of and sympathetic with his politics there were criticisms of the boo