Busboys and Poets to Honor Former NWC Board Member, Howard Zinn

Join NWC Executive Director Stephen M. Kohn at Busboys and Poets in Hyattsville, MD on Wednesday, September 21st to celebrate International Peace Day and dedicate the new Howard Zinn Room. The room will be dedicated in honor of the late Howard Zinn, historian and political activist. Perhaps best known for his work, A People’s History of the United States, he studied and presented history from the perspective of the average citizen. Zinn taught generations of young activists that change can originate from the people. He wrote in his autobiography, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train (1994), "From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than ‘objectivity’; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it.”

Zinn previously served on the NWC Board of Directors and wrote the preface to Mr. Kohn’s 2004 book, American Political Prisoners.

The dedication will include a full restaurant event (free and open to the public) from 6-10 p.m. The restaurant event will include music, special guest presentations, a reading of People Speak Live (with selections from Voices of a People’s History), and a raffle for prizes.

The dedication also includes and a fundraiser/reception in the Zinn Room from 6-8 p.m. The fundraiser will include music, refreshments, and presentation by Jeff Zinn, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Amy Goodman, Dave Zirin, Marian Wright Edelman, and more. Tickets for the fundraiser/reception can be purchased online for a donation of $100 to the Zinn Education Project, and an anonymous donor will match all donations. For more information and to purchase tickets please click here.

The Zinn Education Project promotes and supports the use of Howard Zinn’s best-selling book A People’s History of the United States and other materials for teaching a people’s history in middle and high school classrooms across the country.

We hope to see you there!

*Trevor Melvin (a NWC intern) contributed to this posting

** Correction: The post originally had the date of the event correct but incorrectly stated the day of the week as Saturday. The correct day of the week is Wednesday, Sept. 21.