A high-school student recently asked me: "I read in your book A People’s History of the United States about the massacres of Indians, the long history of racism, the persistence of poverty in the richest country in the world, the senseless wars. How can I keep from being thoroughly alienated and depressed?"

It’s a question I’ve heard many times. Another question often put to me by students is: Don’t we need our national idols? You are taking down all our national heroes–the Founding Fathers, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy.

Granted, it is good to have historical figures we can admire and emulate. But why hold up as models the 55 rich white men who drafted the Constitution to establish a government that would protect the interests of their class–slaveholders merchants, bondholders, land speculators?

Why not recall the humanitarianism of William Penn, an early colonist who made peace with the Delaware Indians instead of warring on them?

Why not John Woolman, who, in the years before the Revolution, refused to pay taxes to support the British wars, and who spoke, out against slavery?

Why not Captain Daniel Shays, veteran of the Revolutionary War, who led a revolt of poor farmers in western Massachusetts against the oppressive taxes levied by the rich who controlled the state legislature?

Why go along with the hero-worship, so universal in our history textbooks, of Andrew Jackson, the slave-owner, the killer of Indians? Jackson was the architect of the Trail of Tears, which resulted in the deaths of 4,000 of 16,000 Cherokees who were kicked off their land in Georgia.

Why not replace him as national icon with John Ross, a Cherokee chief who resisted the dispossession of his people, and whose wife died on the Trail of Tears? Or the Seminole leader Osceola, imprisoned and killed for leading a campaign against the removal of the Indians?

And while we’re at it, should not the Lincoln Memorial be joined by a memorial to Frederick Douglass, who better represented the struggle against slavery? It was that crusade of black and white abolitionists, growing into a great national movement, that pushed a reluctant Lincoln into finally issuing a half-hearted Emancipation Proclamation, and persuaded Congress to pass the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments.

Take another presidential hero, Theodore Roosevelt, who is always near the top of the tiresome lists of Our Greatest Presidents. There he is on Mount Rushmore, as a permanent reminder of our historical amnesia about his racism, his militarism, his love of war.

Why not replace him as hero–granted, removing him from Mount Rushmore will take some doing–with Mark Twain? Roosevelt had congratulated an American general who in 1906 ordered the massacre of 600 men, women and children on a Philippine island. As vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League, Twain denounced this and continued to point out the cruelties committed in the Philippine war.

Should we not replace the portraits of our presidents on classroom walls with the likenesses of grassroots heroes like Fannie Lou Hamer, the Mississippi sharecropper? Mrs. Hamer was evicted from her farm and tortured in prison after she joined the civil rights movement, but she became an eloquent voice for freedom. Or with Ella Baker, whose wise counsel and support guided the young black people in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the militant edge of the civil rights movement in the Deep South?

In the year 1992, the quincentennial of the arrival of Columbus in this hemisphere, meetings all over the country celebrated him, but also, for the first time, challenged the customary exaltation of the Great Discoverer. I was at a symposium in New Jersey where I pointed to the terrible crimes against the indigenous people of Hispaniola committed by Columbus and his fellow Spaniards. Afterward, the other man on the platform, who was chairman of the New Jersey Columbus Day celebration, said to me: "You don’t understand–we Italian Americans need our heroes."

Yes, I understood the desire for heroes, I said, but why choose a murderer and kidnapper for such an honor? Why not choose Toscanini or Fiorello LaGuardia? (The man was not persuaded.)

The same misguided values that have made slaveholders, Indian-killers and militarists the heroes of our history books still operate today.

Our country is full of heroic people who are not presidents or military leaders or Wall Street wizards, but who are doing something to keep alive the spirit of resistance to injustice and war.

I think of Kathy Kelly and all those other people from Voices in the Wilderness who, in defiance of federal law, have traveled to Iraq more than a dozen times to wing food and medicine to people suffering under the U.S.-imposed sanctions.

I think also of the thousands of students in college campuses across the country who protested their universities’ connection with sweatshop-produced apparel.

I think of the four McDonald sisters in Minneapolis, all nuns, who have gone to jail repeatedly for protesting the Alliant Corporation’s production of land mines.

I think, too, of the thousands of people who have traveled to Fort Benning, Ga., to demand the closing of the murderous School of the Americas.

I think of the West Coast Longshoremen who participated in an eight-hour work stoppage to protest the death sentence levied against Mumia Abu-Jamal.

And so many more.

We all know individuals–most of them unsung, unrecognized–who have, often in he most modest ways, spoken out or acted on their belief’s for a more egalitarian, more just, peace-loving society.

To ward off alienation and gloom, it is only necessary to remember the unremembered heroes of the past, and to look round us for the unnoticed heroes of the resent.

Howard Zinn is a columnist for The Progressive, where this article originally appeared.