Southern Influence in National Politics

Howard Zinn was an adviser to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and wrote the book SNCC: The New Abolitionists to document their important work. In this speech, delivered at the Third Annual Spring Conference of SNCC, he questions the title of his talk given by the conference's organizers and challenges the audience to ask tough questions about the challenges facing the civil rights and student movements.

Maybe at some point in this talk, if that's what it will be, I will get back somewhere and maybe at some point in it there will be some relationship between what I say and the title "Southern Influence in National Politics. " If so, it will be an accident. But what I really want to talk about is just politics, or maybe just national politics, or maybe a number of other things connected with it. I'll tell you why I don't like to talk about Southern influence in national politics: because it perpetuates a kind of mythology which I think is very prevalent in American thinking, and probably in foreign thinking about the United States, and that is that we have here a fine, decent, democratic, beautifully structured, lovely country which the South is spoiling. We have some great statesmen in this country, we have a good country, a fine president, a magnificent Supreme Court, a wonderful set of laws, a great constitution, a magnificent heritage, and all of this is being spoiled by a few miserable, evil Southerners. And I don't think this is true. And you know this isn't true.