The Wrong Side of Murder Creek

by Bob Zellner

Our “cell,” as we called it, met after school once or twice each week at Dauphin Way Methodist Church, where Jamie and her best friend Glenda Johnson were members. Dauphin Way was high church. Their minister had a “Doctor” in front of his name and he had served the congregation for thirty-five years. My Aunt Peg and Uncle Douglas were members, and they were the richest people among our kinfolks. The Reverend Dr. Adkins liked to fly in Uncle Doug’s Piper Cub and to fish with Uncle Doug on his cabin cruiser, The Flour Peddler. Until he shot himself with his own pistol, my Uncle Doug made a good living as a flour broker, servicing Gulf Coast bakers. We were never clear about the circumstances of the shooting but believed it was an accident while he was cleaning the gun.

  Our prayer circle met sitting on the carpet in an upper room at the church and we liked to think of ourselves as special disciples of Jesus, hiding in the catacombs. Periodically we would sally forth and do battle with evil. I liked that part best and considered racism and segregation to be among the worst evils. My best friend Ray Powell, a frat and Demolay brother, and Gordon Tatum, a member of my dad’s lowly working class Broad Street Methodist Church, were not as enthusiastic as me on the race question. Fastidious Gordon was embarrassed with Dad’s slogan blazed on the church marquee—“The Working Man’s Church, Rev. James A. Zellner, Pastor.” Race was taboo and class was too. Most of us in the cell were Murphy High juniors.

  By my senior year, 1956–57, our little prayer cell grew to a dozen or more regulars. I was brought up short one day when my French teacher congratulated me on being chosen to be a graduation speaker. I tended to think of myself as a struggling student because of the rough start I had in Slocomb, Alabama, with dyslexia, and not learning to read or spell until third grade.

  I thought they had made a mistake. It turned out that the selection committee at Murphy had simply listed the top one percent of the fifteen hundred or so graduating seniors to be speakers. Since those amounted to over a dozen students they announced there would be a speaking contest to select the best four to share valedictory duties. Jamie said that I should enter the contest and try to land a spot as a speaker. “You need to represent the church youth.”

  I told her that I had no idea I was up for such an honor and besides, I always got sick to my stomach if I had to make a speech, and, I finished, “I actually think they’ve made a mistake in picking me.”

  She wagged her finger and lectured me about going toward the things you fear. I knew she was reading Ayn Rand, so I asked Jamie if Rand was the one who said, “If it doesn’t kill you, it will make you stronger.”

  “No, genius, it was Nietzsche that said something like that.”

  “Not true,” I kidded her; he was misquoted. What Friedrich actually said was, “That which doesn’t kill you can really mess you up real bad.”

  Well, she talked me into entering and helped me write my speech. The whole cell got in on the project and Gordon, one of the smartest boys in school, came up with the idea that worked.

  “The students are going to vote after hearing all of you ‘stars,’” Gordon said. “The ones who make it through the first cut will be the ones the audience will remember. If it’s alphabetical, Bob, you will be last and that will help. But what will clinch it is that the students will remember the speeches that are funny and not boring.”

  So, to make my speech funny, I decided to describe a typical day in the life of a Stone Age teenager. Predictably, instead of driving his jalopy to school, as we did, Clyde, my mythical teen, rode to school bareback on his pet pink polka dot dinosaur. With the image of fur-clad Clyde bouncing along to school atop Pinky, trying in vain to hold on to his bulking stone tablets, I had them. They started laughing and didn’t stop. They laughed at parts I didn’t even consider funny. I could do no wrong. I knew what it meant to be “in the zone!”

  Needless to say, I won the first round going away. I don’t remember anything else about the contest, but I wound up in the final four. I actually do remember graduation day and the speech I made, a real snoozer, to seven thousand bored-out-of-their-gourds friends and relatives, seated uncomfortably on bleachers at Ladd Stadium. Faculty geniuses had decided it would be exciting to give each of us a verse from the school song to write our speeches around. Mine was:

  In days of old when Spaniards bold were sailing Mobile Bay

  A dream was born one early morn. That dream’s come true today.

  Now colleges and high schools too, may have traditions old,

  But none can boast the blah blah blah of Murphy’s blue and gold.

  The memorable first line of my valedictory speech went something like this: “From the very beginning Murphy High School represented the very best quality, blah, blah, blah. . .” It was never explained to us how someone during the days of the Spanish conquest was already thinking about Murphy High School. It was in the song so we thought it must be true. Maybe the song writer was thinking of Bienville and d’Iberville? But no, that couldn’t be. Those founders of Mobile were French.

  The event that involved all of the prayer group had occurred immediately before graduation. Growing up in small towns in rural south Alabama, I had always looked forward to graduation and the accompanying baccalaureate service. Now that I was to be a graduation speaker for this huge graduating class of some twelve hundred, I took more than a passing interest in the Murphy traditions surrounding commencement. Most of our cell members were native Mobilians, and I had only been there for the eleventh and twelfth grades, so I asked Jamie and Glenda when and where the baccalaureate service would take place.

  They replied, almost in unison, “Oh, we don’t have one.”

  Glenda linked pinkies with Jamie. “We said that together, didn’t we?” Glenda chortled.

  What exactly is a backalariet?” Jamie asked.

  “Murphy does not have a baccalaureate service in a church?” I was incredulous. “It goes with graduation. Always has,” I stated with finality. I had only been at Murphy for two years and had come from the tiny school in East Brewton to Mobile. How could Murphy High not have a baccalaureate? I got together a bunch of kids I knew from the Methodist church and we decided to petition the principal. I didn’t go to see the principal; I stayed in the background, and we got the service.

  The following fall, our core group—all Methodists—were off to Huntingdon College in Montgomery, which was the church school for our Methodist Conference. In the college, our Mobile group became the backbone of the progressive or liberal forces.

  3

  Race Relations 402

  In my senior year of college, I was given an assignment to study the racial problem and write a paper proposing some solutions. This was in a sociology course in race relations, and it was not an unusual project even for Huntingdon College in 1960.

  Founded in 1852 as a liberal arts college for Methodist women, our school was named for Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, an English follower of Charles and John Wesley. The campus—landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.—was green, shady, and cool. Its Gothic buildings gave the college an air of serious learning in the European mode. When I arrived in 1957, men were still few enough to be remarkable. I lived in Massey Dormitory—the sole residence hall for men.

  When the professor told us to research solutions to racial problems, we were supposed to understand that research was done in the library. We might look at Caste and Class in a Southern Town by John Dollard or at Tom Pettigrew’s research from Harvard, and of course there were Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma and C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow. If one were particularly diligent, one could read Frederick Douglass or even W. E. B. Du Bois. But to do original research, with primary sources? Here in Montgomery? No. In Montgomery in 1960, that could be dangerous. Well, if one insisted, one could pay a visit to the local White Citizens Council, and if one really wanted to extend oneself, he could go to the Klan office. They had plenty of literature on the subject
, according to our sociology professor.

  Five of us decided otherwise. One day we approached Dr. Arlie B. Davidson to discuss our plans for field work. Joe, Townsend, and I were from Mobile. We had graduated from high school together three years earlier and were best friends. Townsend—I called him “Tee”—was my roommate. John Hill, the youngest of our group, was a sophomore from a small Alabama town. William Head, a senior like the rest of us, was the intellectual of the group, an aristocrat from Union Springs, in the heart of Alabama’s Black Belt.

  “We’d like to interview Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to ask him about the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which is an approach that has been tried right here to solve the racial problem.” We wanted to investigate that particular tactic because it seemed to have worked in Montgomery and might be applicable elsewhere.

  As we told him this, Dr. Davidson’s eyes got bigger and bigger and he started to sputter.

  “That won’t be necessary,” he said, “I’m sure you have enough material already, and I’m sure you’ll all make extremely good grades. No, that won’t be required, so you just go and write your papers.”

  “But we want to do field work,” Joe Thomas and Townsend Ellis, said practically in unison, “This is sociology, right?”

  “Oh you can do some field work if you want to,” the professor bleated, “Haven’t some of y’all been to the Citizens Council and the Klan?”

  “Yes,” Bill Head said quietly, “we’ve gotten wheelbarrows full of ‘literature’ from them, but we thought it would be fair if we also go to the Montgomery Improvement Association.”

  The MIA, under the leadership of E. D. Nixon, the local NAACP president and head of the local Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, had been formed to conduct the bus boycott.

  “Go to Martin Luther King, the MIA?” Dr. Arlie B. said in a daze. “You can’t do that, why you’ll all be arrested!”

  Being young scholars and budding sociologists, our interest was piqued by the mention of arrest. Someone asked, “You mean we can be arrested for doing research? Are you saying we can’t go and meet with Reverend Abernathy and Dr. King?”

  John Hill asked if Dr. Davidson was forbidding us to go meet some students at Alabama State (the local black college) to discuss this “problem” with “the ones who are directly involved?” Our sociological imagination was being aroused.

  “No,” Davidson pleaded, “I’m not forbidding you . . . they are forbidding you.”

  “Who?” we asked.

  “They . . . the Klan and them . . . I guess,” our professor said weakly. “They won’t let you.”

  “Why?” we asked.

  “Why?” he said. “Are you asking me why? It’s self-evident, isn’t it?”

  “What’s self-evident?” we asked.

  “It’s evident,” he said, “that you can’t just go willy-nilly meeting with colored people in Montgomery. It’s against the law,” he blurted. “Don’t you know that?”

  “Actually we’ve already met Dr. King and Reverend Abernathy,” I spoke up for the first time, “and we didn’t get arrested.”

  “How on earth did you do that?”—a strangled scream from Dr. Arlie B. “Where did you meet them? When did you do that? I just hope it wasn’t on account of this course!”

  “In fact,” I said, trying to calm him down, “we first met earlier in the year at the federal court building; they were standing in the hall during court recess.”

  I explained how we had been there during the hearings when black ministers Ralph Abernathy, Solomon S. Seay Sr., Fred Shuttlesworth, and Joseph Lowery, along with Dr. King and the New York Times Company, had been sued for libel by Montgomery officials. The resulting landmark First Amendment case, Times v. Sullivan, started with an ad, placed by King and others in the Times, that had offended the officials.

  I continued, “We introduced ourselves, told them we were from Huntingdon and asked if they’d arrange for us to meet some students at Alabama State.”

  “Thank God.” Arlie B. breathed deeply. “Apparently you haven’t yet broken the law; that’s vertical integration . . . as long as you are standing up, it’s okay. You can stand up and talk to a colored person all day and not break the law. It’s when you sit down that you get into trouble.”

  The professor seemed to have forgotten about us while he rambled on about vertical integration. Regrettably, he trailed off just as he had managed to get our undivided attention; we wanted to hear more from our learned sociology professor about the different kinds of integration, legal and illegal.

  “Why?” we asked.

  “Because,” he started up again, surprised that we were still listening, “when you sit down with a Negro, or any person of color for that matter, the Ku Klux Klan and others may take exception to your sitting down and they will come and beat you up and that will be a breach of the peace, which you have caused, and therefore you will be guilty of inciting to riot.”

  “Why don’t they just arrest the Klan?” we hollered.

  “Look,” he explained patiently, “they can’t arrest the Klan; there’s too many of them.” Davidson told us that it would be much easier for the cops to arrest the few of us, and besides most of the time the cops and the Klan are the same thing, and he told us we shouldn’t expect the police to arrest themselves. Our professor looked like a person who had spoken too freely. I think he wanted to take the last part back but he didn’t, probably because he knew that we knew it was true.

  We tried briefly to rekindle the conversation but it was no use. I said something about doing a monograph on the different types of integration. I thanked Davidson for explaining that vertical was all right and that sitting was all wrong; then I asked him about horizontal.

  “Horizontal? What do you mean horizontal?” he asked.

  “Horizontal,” I said, “you know, the kind that results in all different shades of Negroes.” As he was turning away, I held onto his sleeve while I tried to explain that I had read one theory of race relations from somewhere in South America, Brazil, I thought, where miscegenation was advocated for long enough to do away with black people altogether. When I said it looked like they had been trying that in the South for some time, he pulled his arm away and headed for the door.

  Turning his red face toward us as he reached the door he said, “Don’t do it. I’m telling you not to do it. You got enough stuff, and God knows you are all taking this more seriously than anybody else. If you insist on going to see the nig . . . Nigras, it’s not my responsibility—you are strictly on your own and neither I, the department, nor this college, I’m sure, will take responsibility for you.”

  We were under the impression that the due process provisions of the Fourteenth, Amendment applied to Huntingdon. We were mistaken. If we had known what we were getting into, we may never have done what we did next. But we were young and naive, so we asked Reverend Abernathy to help us meet some students at all-black Alabama State, less than a mile from our all-white campus.

  Abernathy arranged it and told us when and where to meet Joe Louis Reed, a student leader at Alabama State. At the first meeting we were very excited because we knew we were doing something risky. We felt like conspirators.

  The meetings with the black students went off without a hitch. One reason these early meetings seemed so peaceful was that we had no idea we were being followed.

  The content of the meetings was innocuous. It was clear to the black students and to ourselves that we had no intention of engaging in any “action.” Earlier in 1960, the student sit-in movement had erupted in North Carolina and quickly spread across the South. Joe Reed and Bernard Lee had already led the Alabama State students in sit-ins and other protests. This thrilled us, but we considered direct action the job of the black students. We felt it was dangerous enough for us to simply gather information. Getting to know the situation was, on the face of it, strictly research—just sch
ool work.

  In the first meeting at Alabama State, after Reed introduced us, I explained to the black students, as I had to King and Abernathy, that even though we white students had, as individuals, sympathetic feelings toward the movement, we would limit our activities to carrying out research for our paper. We told the black students that we had been warned not to meet with them and not to seek out the MIA.

  Reed, unable to take his eyes off Townsend, who weighed around four hundred pounds, chuckled and said, “Yeah, I can see how you could get in trouble coming here. You all are not exactly inconspicuous.”

  Townsend spoke quietly, “It’s not that we mind getting in trouble, you understand; it’s just that we want to be on good grounds when we do get caught. You all have the support of your parents and your community—we don’t.” As it turned out, Townsend was mistaken about that. We had simply assumed that their parents were as proud of them as ours were embarrassed or outraged at us. We discovered from Joe and the other black students that some of their parents were extremely upset with them for marching and sitting-in. In many cases, our new black friends were the first in their families to attend college, and their parents were making huge sacrifices for their children to get an education. For instance, when John Lewis became a movement leader in Nashville, his sharecropper family in Troy, Alabama, was terrified. They feared economic or physical reprisals against the family.

  As the year went along, we learned there was to be an anniversary celebration of the victory of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Although Dr. King had moved to Atlanta in January 1960, he had stayed in close touch with the MIA and would attend events like the celebration. A week of evening mass meetings at black churches were to be followed by nonviolent workshops on Saturday and Sunday at Reverend Abernathy’s church. We talked to the students and later with Dr. King and Reverend Abernathy about attending some of the meetings. Dr. King assured us we were perfectly welcome, but we risked arrest; practically no local white people attended the mass meetings.