<p>Robert Cohen has written a powerful and timely account of Howard Zinn’s formative years as an educator and civil rights activist at Spelman College. The book, drawing on an array of archival materials, including Zinn’s diary from the period, has numerous lessons—badly needed today—about what it means to be a principled and engaged intellectual, to work in service of larger goals and ideals, and to build genuine solidarity. I urge anyone interested in Zinn’s life and work to read it.</p>

coeditor, with Howard Zinn, of Voices of a People’s History of the United States

<p>In this expert treatment, Robert Cohen uses Howard Zinn’s diary as a vehicle to tell a larger story about the intersection of race and gender in a social movement, black campuses and their relationship to the southern black freedom struggle, and the effort to upend <i>in loco parentis </i>regulations and remake college life. The diary itself is a compelling read, but Cohen’s astute discussion of the complex reality of the times and his interviews with Zinn’s contemporaries add a rich texture to the book that should not be missed. Readers will be rewarded with an incisive look at one of the most iconic historians of our time and a window into the battle to remake black colleges and American society in the middle twentieth century.</p>

author of Jim Crow Campus: Higher Education and the Struggle for a New Southern Social Order

<p>This is a gem of a book! Organized around Howard Zinn’s fascinating diary of events during 1963, Robert Cohen’s account provides fresh information about how Zinn’s time at Spelman College (1956–63) converged with the contentious process of change in Atlanta, across the South, and on the Spelman campus. In recovering this formative chapter in Zinn’s biography, Cohen tells the story of a generation of black college women on the front lines of the freedom struggle.</p>

author of Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement