In “Speech Against the Vietnam War, Boston Common,” given on May 5, 1971, Howard Zinn said, “They’ll say we’re disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war. For two weeks, for two weeks we have not let the country forget about this war. The veterans in their ways, the mass meetings in their way, the disrupters in their way . . . and we must continue disturbing the war and the makers of the war.”

In this excerpt from the autobiography You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, Howard Zinn illustrates how Spelman students organized to petition for social change at their institution and the administration’s response. Zinn writes,

“When students begin to defy established authority it often appears to besieged administrators that ‘someone must be behind this,’ the implication being that young people are incapable of thinking or acting on their own.”