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INSIDE UGA PRESS 18 SPRING/SUMMER 18 The Newsletter of the University of Georgia Press issue no. 18 advisory council Craig Barrow III, Chair FROM THE DIRECTOR Savannah, Georgia Peggy Heard Galis, Vice Chair Athens, Georgia Frederick Allen III I was very fortunate to be invited to speak at the University Atlanta, Georgia Press Redux conference held in London in February. It was Elizabeth Balentine Atlanta, Georgia fascinating to better understand the diversity of university Dr. Suzanne Barbour presses in the United Kingdom, where they have the better- Athens, Georgia The Honorable Roy E. Barnes known traditional presses like Oxford, Cambridge, and Marietta, Georgia Edinburgh operating alongside a number of new library-based Pete Candler Asheville, North Carolina start-ups with strong open access bents. Erin Kirk New by Photo J. Wiley Ellis In spite of UGA Press being quite different from most, if not all, Savannah, Georgia Katharine E. Elsas UK university presses—I had to explain “land-grant,” for instance—the audience was Atlanta, Georgia Thomas Fleetwood receptive to my keynote on the importance of cultivating a strong institutional relationship. Atlanta, Georgia The Council The power of “institutional embeddedness” is relevant to most university presses seeking Candace Gilliland acts as a group of to thrive in the current environment. Athens, Georgia Dr. Nancy L. Grayson stewards for the While in London I visited the British Museum, where I came upon several watercolors Athens, Georgia Press, promoting H. Edward Hales Jr. our publishing by eighteenth-century naturalist Mark Catesby. His meticulous artistic recording of the Atlanta, Georgia flora and fauna of the southeastern coast is discussed in our 2015 bookThe Curious Mister Dr. John B. Hardman program and Atlanta, Georgia assisting in fund- Catesby. This serendipitous sighting provided me with the perfect close for my keynote, Marian W. Hill raising efforts. from former Association of University Presses president Meredith Babb: Atlanta, Georgia Ellen Hale Jones “When you think of a scholarly press, we are a rare finch in the university ecosystem. Each Atlanta, Georgia of us should challenge our administrators to find a more adaptive, innovative, mission- Harrison Jones II Atlanta, Georgia driven unit on the campus. Collaborating is what university presses do; adaptation is our Philip M. Juras strength and resilience.” Athens, Georgia Dr. Charles B. Knapp Like the adaptive finch, we carry on with your generous support—and for that, we thank you. Big Canoe, Georgia Christopher Lane Savannah, Georgia Best, Rebecca D. Lang Athens, Georgia H. Bruce McEver New York, New York Richard Meyer III Savannah, Georgia Lisa Bayer Dr. Daniel J. Nadenicek Athens, Georgia William Henry NeSmith Jr. Athens, Georgia Merryll S. Penson Athens, Georgia Dr. Paul M. Pressly Savannah, Georgia Sarah V. Ross Roaring Gap, North Carolina Henrietta M. Singletary Albany, Georgia Charles M. Tarver Blufton, South Carolina The Honorable R. Lindsay Thomas Screven, Georgia Mimi Vickers Union Point, Georgia Kelly Kerner, Ex officio Athens, Georgia Dr. Steve W. Wrigley, Ex officio Athens, Georgia emeritus Peter M. Candler Greensboro, Georgia F. Sheffield Hale Atlanta, Georgia Thomas Hills Atlanta, Georgia Fran J. Lane Athens, Georgia Dr. M. Louise McBee Athens, Georgia The UGA Press Advisory Council tours the SEC Champion Georgia Bulldogs’ new indoor practice facility, Fall 2017 meeting B. Neely Young Marietta, Georgia 2 | the university of georgia press | spring // summer 2018 BEHIND THE BOOK Howard Zinn’s Southern Diary: Civil Rights, Sit-ins, and African American Women’s Student Activism by author Robert Cohen, NYU Zinn in Selma, Alabama, with James Baldwin, Freedom Day, October 1963. (photo courtesy of the Estate of Howard Zinn) ppropriately enough, my book project on the radical discussing my work as a historian and education professor activist and historian Howard Zinn has roots in a sit-in who collaborated with and trained high school social studies A at my university (and Zinn’s alma mater), NYU. It was teachers, and for some reason I mentioned that those teachers 2009, and student protesters demanding fiscal transparency— loved Zinn’s best-selling A People’s History of the United States, among other things—occupied the cafeteria of the student which I found puzzling since many academic historians tended union. But the students responsible for the occupation, part of to dismiss Zinn’s book as a left-wing polemic. Marilyn suggested a group calling itself Take Back NYU, had skipped all the basic that I explore Zinn’s impact on those teachers by going through steps one needed to take to stage a successful sit-in, including Zinn’s correspondence. When I did so, I found many letters from that of letting the students and faculty know why they were high school students and teachers to Zinn that explained why sitting in. The protesters seemed to think that doing a stealth they were so fond of Zinn’s iconoclastic history, and those letters action would work since it gave them the element of surprise. will be the core of a book I will publish with UGA Press next But since the campus community initially knew nothing of their year (with my coauthor Sonia Murrow) on America’s response demands, it would prove impossible for them to rally support, to A People’s History of the United States and how this radical and their arrest and disciplining for violating the law would soon introduction to American history came to sell more than two smash their small, isolated, and ineffective movement. While the million copies since its publication in 1980. sit-in was in progress, my friend and colleague Marilyn Young The Zinn papers are such a rich collection, however, that while (the great historian of the Vietnam War) and I, standing outside researching this book on Zinn’s People’s History I stumbled the student union, worrying about the students and fretting over on some unpublished Zinn writings on his years teaching at their ignorance of how effective protests were organized in the Spelman College—the oldest and most famous historically black past, began to discuss ways to end such ignorance. We came up women’s college in Atlanta—that led me to a second book project, with the idea of coteaching a new history course on the heyday a history of Zinn and the black student movement of the late of effective student protest in the United States, the 1960s. 1950s and early 1960s. As a former UGA faculty member who has Soon after we began teaching our 1960s course, Howard published on the desegregation of UGA, I had a long-standing Zinn, a close friend of Marilyn’s, died. Marilyn helped interest in how Georgians, black and white, responded to the arrange with Zinn’s family to have his papers placed in NYU’s revolution in race relations that shook the state and the South as Tamiment Library. After the papers opened, Marilyn and I were the color line faded and fell in the 1960s. So I was amazed to find the university of georgia press | spring // summer 2018 | 3 Zinn, teaching a Chinese history class at Spelman, 1961. (photo courtesy of the Estate of Howard Zinn) here in NYU file after file of Zinn’s papers illuminating and memorable, shedding documenting the freedom struggles he and light on the impact that Zinn as a historian, his students participated in during his years teacher, and mentor had on the civil rights at Spelman, 1956–63; it was a joy to discover generation at Spelman and how these that I could do archival research on Georgia black women students struggled not only history just blocks from my Greenwich for racial justice off campus but for an end Village apartment. I was even more amazed to sexist and paternalistic restrictions to discover that among those Zinn files was on their social lives and political rights a diary—partially handwritten, partially on campus. Thus my street-corner typed—that documented on a daily basis the conversation with Marilyn Young near that political and intellectual world of Spelman NYU student sit-in in 2009 would start College, Atlanta’s black student sit-in me on the road leading to new sources and movement, and the larger black freedom the writing of a book on their precursors, student movement in Georgia and beyond. Alice Walker and Howard Zinn, 1992, Atlanta’s African American students who The diary was from Zinn’s last semester at former student and teacher, who pioneered a use of the sit-in tactics in the Spelman in 1963, after which he was fired would become lifelong friends and early 1960s. And just as North met South for supporting the student movement. Zinn influential authors. (photo copyright in this project, West would meet East, as had been a mentor to the movement, and Jean Weisinger) philanthropist Steve Silberstein, a Berkeley many of his students became prominent in alum who had supported my previous it, including Marian Wright (Edelman), Betty Stevens Walker, books on Berkeley student protest and Free Speech Movement and future novelist and poet Alice Walker. It soon became leader Mario Savio, offered similarly generous support for this evident that Zinn’s diary was an invaluable source on the history new book Howard Zinn’s Southern Diary: Civil Rights, Sit-ins, it covered, and so I obtained permission from Zinn’s family to and African American Women’s Student Activism, which UGA publish the diary. Press will publish in September. It also quickly became obvious that in order to do justice to this history I would need to not only do archival research at Spelman but undertake interviews with Zinn’s former students ROBERT COHEN is a professor of history and social studies in NYU’s and colleagues.

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