Incident in Hattiesburg

Howard Zinn, a famed educator and author of A People’s History of the United States, began as an organizer heavily involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s. “Incident in Hattiesburg,” originally published in the major magazine The Nation, is here reprinted in a SNCC newsletter. Zinn depicts the violence that SNCC volunteers face in Mississippi and calls for change in how federal officials and his fellow white Americans respond to the police brutality that SNCC volunteers experience routinely.