The Times Square Demonstration

A formative experience in Zinn's youth, at least as important as his encounters with the books of Dickens as a child. http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/10/a_peoples_history_of_howard_z i/

I was just a seventeen-year-old kid, going to Times Square to participate in this left-wing demonstration. I really didn’t know what was going on. But it seemed good. The signs were for peace and justice and so on. But then at this peaceful demonstration, I was attacked by police mounted on horseback and on foot. Before I knew it, I was clubbed and knocked unconscious. You might say I woke up with a new consciousness. I woke up realizing that things my radical friends had been saying to me were really true, that the police and the government were not detached bystanders, that freedom of speech did not really exist for dissenters, for radicals, for troublemakers. So it gave me a radical view of the United States, a critical view of the role of the state and of the instruments of the state—the police, the Army, and so on—as not being neutral at all in political battles, but being generally against workers and against striking people, against dissenters of all kinds.