He learned the students’ stories of racial intolerance. Therefore, working at Spelman College caused discrimination against Zinn and his wife: “When I told them I was teaching at Spelman, the atmosphere changed apartments were no longer available” (17). The hostility of the anti-movement community extended beyond black people to those that supported their rights and viewed them as equals (Zinn 18). In the chapter on his work at Spelman, he describes the rigid segregation in Atlanta of the time: “If black people were downtown it was because they were working for whites, or shopping at Rich’s Department Store, where both races could come to buy but the cafeteria was for whites only” (Zinn 18). His work in the college built on his previous experiences: Zinn admits that his teenage reading of Sinclair, Steinbeck, and Wright left him to see race and class oppression as linked, whereas his work in the Navy Yard and the Air Force showed him more of the segregation and oppression of black soldiers (17). Zinn’s students were black females, for whom college education was “a matter of life and death” (18). Zinn’s first encounter with the Civil Rights Movement occurred when he was hired as the Head of History and Social Sciences department at Spelman College (Zinn 16).
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