by Bob Zellner
The Wrong Side of Murder Creek
A White Southerner
in the Freedom Movement
Winner of the 2009 Lillian Smith Book Award
Bob Zellner
with Constance Curry
Foreword by Julian Bond
NewSouth Books
Montgomery | Louisville
NewSouth Books
105 South Court Street
Montgomery, AL 36104
Copyright 2008 by Bob Zellner. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.
ISBN-13: 978-1-58838-222-1
eBook ISBN: 978-1-60306-104-9
LCCN: 2008025962
Visit www.newsouthbooks.com.
With love to
Dad and Mom, who prepared me for the journey;
to my brothers, Jim, Doug, David, and Malcolm;
to my daughters, Margaret and Katie;
to my wife, Linda;
and to Maggie Donovan.
Contents
Foreword
Preface
1 - Growing Up in L.A. (Lower Alabama)
2 - Biscuit Man
3 - Race Relations
4 - The Huntingdon Five
5 - Under the Influence
6 - Freedom Riders in Montgomery
7 - The Highs of Highlander
8 - My September 11th Farewell
9 - Briefcase and Broom
10 - Murder and Mayhem in McComb
11 - Working On the Chain Gang
12 - Criminal Anarchy in Baton Rouge
13 - Organizing in Talladega
14 - George Wallace and Me
15 - John Brown: Live Like Him
16 - “This Is Not a Social Call”
17 - How Gladly They Stood
18 - Seeing Stars
19 - Seed Pod Explosion
20 - Train Wreck
21 - Goodbye and GROW
22 - Fundi: Passing It On
23 - Up South
Epilogue and Acknowledgments
Photographs
Index
About the Author
Foreword
Julian Bond
Although his life’s journey eventually would take him to New York, Bob Zellner was as Southern as MoonPies and RC Cola when we first met in Atlanta in 1961.
At the time, I was the Communications Director for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), an organization born from the ferment created by sit-in demonstrations in early 1960.
From the first, SNCC was an interracial organization. Bob Zellner was its first white field secretary, but Jane Stembridge, daughter of a white Baptist minister and a student at Union Theological Seminary, was the organization’s first employee. SNCC’s workers were “the new abolitionists” historian Howard Zinn described in the first book written about the group.* Zinn called SNCC “more a movement than an organization.”
Having surveyed the backgrounds of one-third of the SNCC staff in late 1963, Zinn wrote:
Of the six white staff members two were from the Deep South. The white youngsters and most of the Northern Negroes came from middle-class homes; their fathers were ministers or teachers or civil service workers . . . These are young radicals. The word “revolution” occurs again and again in their speech.
Like many other black and white Southerners drawn into the movement, Zellner’s inspiration came from his religious faith.
Born in “L.A.”—lower Alabama—John Robert Zellner was the son of a Methodist minister. Bob attended Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama. He and four fellow students at the all-white Methodist-related school became locally notorious as the “Huntingdon Five” when they outraged school authorities and state officials by daring to attend a civil rights meeting. Bob and his four friends took seriously a sociology class assignment to research solutions to racial problems. Despite their professor’s adamant orders not to do so, they attended a meeting with black students from what was then called Alabama State College for Negroes, and later an anniversary celebration of the 1955–56 Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Their “research” brought them to the attention of Alabama’s Attorney General, MacDonald Gallion, who warned them that they were “falling under communist influence.”
“Are there communists in Alabama?” Zellner asked incredulously. “No,” answered the Attorney General, “but they come through here.”
Bob Zellner was one of relatively few white Southerners engaged in the activist Southern civil rights movement of the 1960s literally from the beginning. The grant to hire him came to SNCC from the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), a progressive organization whose newspaper, The Southern Patriot, was frequently the only outlet for news from the civil rights battlefield.
It was Zellner’s good fortune that his guide and mentor in the world of anti-racist activism was a courageous white Alabama woman, Anne Braden, SCEF’s director. Anne and her husband Carl nurtured many young whites like Bob in the intricacies and difficulties of fighting rigid American apartheid in a world where almost all whites were hostile and many were dangerous.
It was also Bob’s good fortune that Connie Curry, another Southern white woman who knew and supported the student civil rights movement from its inception, agreed to work with Bob on this book. An accomplished writer who knows the territory, Connie has helped Bob tell his story in a compelling way. And he has a compelling story to tell.
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Bob that joined organized nonviolent direct action against segregated facilities. We conducted voter registration projects in Alabama, Arkansas, Maryland, Missouri, Louisiana, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Illinois, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi. We built two independent political parties and organized labor unions and agricultural cooperatives. SNCC gave the movement for women’s liberation new energy and inspired and trained many of the activists who began the “New Left.” SNCC helped expand the limits of political debate within black America and broadened the focus of the civil rights movement.
The son and grandson of Ku Klux Klan members, Bob initially was hired by SNCC to conduct outreach to Southern white students, explaining the civil rights movement to them and soliciting their involvement and support.
The Wrong Side of Murder Creek is a travelogue of civil rights hot-spots that Zellner frequented, from his inauguration into the movement in Montgomery, Alabama, the Cradle of the Confederacy; to Mobile and Talladega, Alabama; McComb and Greenwood, Mississippi; Albany, Georgia; Danville, Virginia; and other towns large and small, where the battles were fought.
In McComb, a small town in southwestern Mississippi—the most racially recalcitrant state in the South—he joined his black colleagues in a violence-plagued campaign against entrenched segregation. Bob was arrested and beaten into unconsciousness—not for the last time—when an enraged white mob, encouraged by the eerily coincidental presence of a racist schoolmate who had tormented Zellner at Huntingdon College for his racial liberalism, turned on him with lead pipes and baseball bats.
White civil rights activists faced unique torments. While Zellner’s black colleagues won respect and admiration in their communities, he and other white Southerners earned the hatred and contempt of their contemporaries. It took a special brand of commitment and courage to do this work, and Bob never lacked for either.
When his minister father broke with th
e Klan, Bob’s mother made white Sunday school shirts for Bob and his brothers from their father’s Klan robe. Bob writes that when things got tough for him and his name became well-known, drawing disapproval from many Alabama whites, his brothers all agreed to say—“Yes, he’s my brother, and I’m proud of it.”
Bob Zellner has been my brother since 1961, and I’m proud of it, too.
*The New Abolitionists by Howard Zinn, Beacon Press, Boston, 1964.
Julian Bond has been chairman of the NAACP Board of Directors since February 1998. He is a Distinguished Scholar in the School of Government at American University in Washington, D.C., and a professor in the Department of History at the University of Virginia.
Preface
Constance Curry
I recently spoke to a meeting of a black women’s sorority at Emory University, here in Atlanta. I talked about my time with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the early 1960s and the courageous black families across the South with whom I later worked as Southern field secretary for the American Friends Service Committee. These families, trained and taught by SNCC workers, were involved in school desegregation after the 1964 Civil Rights Act and voter registration after the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The Emory students were absolutely floored to hear that white people like me had been involved in the freedom movement. I assured them that we had been there to support a movement that young black people started and led—a movement that lasted a short time but changed this country forever. As I have traveled to other campuses these days, I have found the same thing—very little knowledge of the violence that pervaded such a short time ago and the history of the enormous student participation in the movement. All of this has reminded me of what Bob Moses said at the thirtieth anniversary of SNCC—that we needed to start writing our own stories, because history and historians will either not tell about it or will get it wrong.
Here is one such first-hand account, and it is unusual because it is from one of the few white Southerners who were directly involved with the student movement. I first heard of Bob Zellner when he submitted an application to attend the Southern Student Human Relations Seminar of the United States National Student Association in the summer of 1961. By then he had been at Highlander Folk School for a program and had been involved in student protests in Alabama. He brought an unerring dedication to freedom and justice to our group of eighteen Southern students, black and white, determined to break down segregation. We continued our friendship when he came to Atlanta later that fall to work with SNCC as a field secretary and to visit white schools in particular. He made it clear from the beginning that he was not there to further the “Negro” cause since he had learned from his own experience that violence and repressive laws were also a threat to whites’ choices in life.
Bob and I have continued our friendship here and there over forty-seven years. When he asked me four years ago to help him with his memoirs, I almost said “no,” because I know him well and knew it would not be an easy job. But I also knew it would be an exciting, worthwhile story.
In looking at our country today, it is hard not to be discouraged. Despite the astonishing gains made by the freedom movement of the 1960s, we are now facing a more sophisticated version of racism that thrives on the motivations of power and greed. The face of that continuing racism thrives in the schools-to-prison pipeline, in the criminal justice system, the health care system, and on and on.
We see stirrings among young people and students here in the fall of 2008 that certainly can give us hope. I sincerely hope that Bob Zellner’s story will be an inspiration for them to get out there and fight for the values that they know are just and right. I also hope it will be a trip down “memory road” for some of the well-known sisters and brothers who are mentioned in the book, by episode if not always by name, and will urge them on in telling their own stories. Many movement folks—too many to list—helped Bob and me so much with fact-checking, research materials, moral support, and in other ways; I thank all of you.
1
Growing Up in L.A. (Lower Alabama)
I was born in Jay, Florida, on April 5, 1939, at home in our small wood frame parsonage. I grew up in south Alabama with my Dad, my mother, Ruby, and four brothers—Jim, Doug, David, and Malcolm. My father, the Reverend James Abraham Zellner, was a Methodist preacher, which meant that we moved to a different church every three or four years. Daddy was raised in Birmingham, and he joined the Ku Klux Klan there in 1928 when he turned eighteen.
My grandfather, Daddy’s father, J. O. Zellner, was also a Klansman. Granddaddy worked in Birmingham for the Gulf, Mobile, and Ohio Railroad. Starting out as a telegrapher, J. O. eventually retired as a dispatcher. Maybe his work on the railroad, a place where segregation was strictly enforced in both the work force and on the trains, made Granddaddy a likely candidate for the terror and hatred preached by the Klan.
The Klan in Birmingham in the 1920s was an interesting combination of people and interests. With the railroad, the mines, and the steel mills, union-organizing, protests, and strikes were always a threat to the power structure. Klan violence against these demonstrations was historic and widespread. At the same time, the Kluxers held a wide appeal for many working-class whites as well as white ministers, judges, and lawyers who believed they could express their varied needs by joining the fluid organization.
When I was older and an activist, I thought it was ironic that leaders on both sides of the race divide often worked for the railroads. A. Philip Randolph was a sleeping car porter, as was E. D. Nixon, one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s mentors. Eugene V. Debs, the great socialist union organizer, was a railroader. I like to daydream about my grandfather, a white Birmingham Klansman, and E. D. Nixon, a black Montgomery revolutionary, working on the same trains.
As a child I knew nothing about the Klan and race hatred. I loved Granddaddy Zellner and Grandmother Bessie. She was a Carmichael before she married my Dad’s father, and I knew and loved my Great-Grandmother Carmichael, who I think was born during the run-up to the Civil War in the 1850s.
When Dad reached high school age he was sent off to the backwoods mountains of Toccoa Falls, Georgia, for boarding school. It was hard enough growing up in a Klan household—now he would be sent to Dr. Forrest, founder of the Toccoa Falls Institute, for training as a street-corner evangelist. The Institute was known as a place in the Bible Belt South that prepared God’s people to flesh out the call. Pupils were required on weekends to walk or hitch into “downtown” Toccoa and preach on the streets. Daddy shoveled coal into the heating furnace and worked in the hot kitchen making corn bread to help pay his way at the school.
It didn’t matter that Georgia only accredited the high school after Daddy graduated in 1928. He was headed to Bob Jones College in Lynn Haven, Florida, and they cared only that James was saved and preached the gospel on the streets. The college, founded in 1927, was an extremely conservative, fundamentalist, religious institution. My future mother, Ruby Rachael Hardy, oldest daughter of a Methodist minister, was one of the first students to arrive at the college and one of only two to graduate four years later in the depths of the Depression. Mom joked that she was valedictorian of the class, having “edged out” the other graduate.
Going to college amid the sandspurs, saw grass, and piney woods forest of Bay County in the Florida panhandle, the raw new campus could not have been nearly as foreign to Mom as it must have been for Dad. He grew up in the cold, dank, smoky steel town of Birmingham, and Preacher Boy Zellner must have thought College Point, as the campus area was called, was quite exotic.
Mom, born in 1910 not far away in Blountstown, Florida, located due south of the junction between Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, felt quite at home among the mosquitoes and palmettos. Her mother was a Spivey, before she married Granddaddy J. J. Hardy. She was thought to be a Cherokee, but since everybody in the South seemed to have a “Cherokee” grandmother, I always thought that Grand
ma Hardy’s Indian blood was mostly hyperbole. There was a story passed down of my grandmother Hardy getting on a mule and taking hams to my grandfather. He lived close enough that she could ride there. She had heard that his family had rotten meat and not too much of anything to eat. Another part of that family legend is that when he was young he attached himself to the Confederate Army as a drummer boy. I also found Zellners, most of whom were related, in Confederate history. One was a colonel from Forsyth, Georgia. Another was in Company H in Tennessee, and he was one of the few Zellner men to survive the war. Then there’s a gap in family history through the 1920s. It was during this period when a nationwide KKK resurgence occurred, and that’s when my father’s father joined.
When I grew up and became interested in the family tree, I was always puzzled that most any older family member could recite Daddy’s side all the way back to two Zellner brothers landing from Germany in Savannah in 1775. On Mom’s side things became fuzzy just past her mother and father!
“What about your grand- and great-grandparents, Mom?” I would ask.
One day Mom took me aside and said in a hushed voice, “Well, Bobby,” (she and everybody else called me Bobby until I was in college, and most still do back home), “since you insist on knowing about these things, I guess I’ll just have to tell you.”
Looking around like someone might be trying to listen, she whispered, “don’t you go around trying to pry into these things with anyone else in the family . . . but . . . your great grandfather, on my side, was a . . .” she paused to indicate how important this was.. “He was a woods colt.”
“Now are you satisfied?” she said, exasperated with herself. “You’ve wheedled the secret out of me. Don’t tell anybody I told you.”