by Bob Zellner
The Hortons’ summer soirees introduced me to activists of the exploding Southern civil rights movement. I met Septima Clark, who would run, with the help of Highlander, the citizenship schools with Andrew Young, Dorothy Cotton, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I met Ella Baker, once acting executive director of SCLC, who became very influential in my life. Mrs. Baker, as the SNCC kids called her, had assured the formation of an independent youth movement inside the civil rights struggle—SNCC. She had become one of the adult advisors of SNCC along with Spelman College professor Howard Zinn and Connie Curry of the U.S. National Student Association in the spring of 1960.
I also met important unsung heroes, like Esau Jenkins, a black bus driver from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, a pioneer in the teaching of literacy and promoting black voter registration. He was continuing the work begun by New England schoolmarms who came South during Reconstruction to address the hunger for education among the newly freed men, women, and children of the former slave states. Jenkins required riders on his bus to learn to read, using the transit time between their island homes and Charleston, where they worked. First, large individual letters were posted in the front of the bus. When everyone mastered the letter, another was added until the alphabet was learned. Then words and later simple sentences were posted, leading to the first “book.” The book consisted of requirements and instructions on how to register to vote. The payment each student owed for learning to read was to recruit another person for the literacy class, and everyone had to become a registered voter.
At Myles and Aimee’s house I met Modjeska Simpkins, who became the board president of the Southern Conference Education Fund, and I met Candy and Guy Carawan, bards and troubadours of the movement—as of 2008 still singing and living at Highlander. Guy taught us an old Southern hymn that Zilphia Horton had first heard sung by tobacco workers on a picket line. The workers had sung, “I shall overcome,” but Zilphia changed it to “we shall overcome.” And for that song, as they say, the rest is certainly history.
Candy and Guy were busy spreading the news and wearing big holes in the bottom of their shoes. Along with Pete Seeger, Guy and Candy helped develop the powerful movement culture sweeping the South and later the nation. Candy, a close friend of freedom rider Susan Wilbur, was a student at Fisk, a white “exchange student” from California, and an earlier sit-inner and freedom rider. Guy was from Pomona, California, and they both talked a little funny with hard r’s and clipped speech. Candy, a blond, blue-eyed comedienne, had written a very funny song about going to jail called, “The Judge, He Went Wild Over Me.” Guy, tall and thin with his banjo, could be mistaken for a slack-jawed mountaineer right out of the Hatfields and McCoys. They were the first full-time movement people I met from the younger generation.
The 1961 summer program was the last act in the existence of Highlander at its Monteagle, Tennessee, location. During the fall and winter the state of Tennessee confiscated Highlander and systematically destroyed the facility, eventually razing the buildings and bulldozing the site. It is not recorded whether salt was sown in the torn-up ground. Myles Horton had always told anyone willing to listen that no organization or institution should last beyond twenty-five years. His theory was that if you can’t do what you set out to do in that time, you’re not doing something right. At one workshop that summer, billed as how to organize for the long haul, Horton described how in the early days he urged the Folk School board—which included Reinhold Niebuhr, Jane Addams, and Eleanor Roosevelt—to amend the charter to require Highlander to go out of business after twenty-five years. Myles could be very persuasive, but the board refused to go along. “That was all right,” Horton laughed, “because every twenty-five years or so the state comes along and destroys us anyway.” That was when he told us that our summer camp at Monteagle would be the last for the Highlander Folk School.
As we sat in the traditional Highlander circle, Myles told the life story of his institution. Then he said a new organization, the Highlander Center, would open in a big house on the river in Knoxville. If you’re a big overripe seed pod like Highlander Folk School and reactionary powers smash you, then seeds fly everywhere.
Listening to him, it was hard to be sad, but later in the bunk house, talking to my little brother Malcolm and the other boys in my charge, I realized that Myles, his wife Aimee, Guy and Candy Carawan, the staff, and board members had every right to feel flattened, but here they were—grinning, rubbing their hands together—looking forward to the next chapter in an exhilarating life. I tried to find out if Malcolm and his new friends in the bunkhouse were getting the lessons, but they only wanted to talk about girls. Malcolm asked what I thought about Tony Helstein and I said I thought she was pretty.
“Yeah, she’s bad,” he said. I thought, how extraordinary that my brother, who until now had never been outside of south Alabama, could have a crush on the daughter of Ralph Helstein, the president of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters Union from Chicago, Illinois, a man pilloried as a communist labor leader. Even more remarkable was the new vocabulary Malcolm was picking up from his black bunk mates.
Malcolm and I also learned that violence is never far beneath the surface in the South, especially when social change is occurring. Highlander was near the cliffs marking the eastern edge of the Cumberland Plateau. The achingly beautiful campus included a lake which sparkled in the clear mountain air. Swimming, however, was an adventure. The first time strangers appeared across the lake, I thought they were waving to us and maybe skipping stones on the water towards us. It occurred to me soon, however, that the puffs of smoke and the popping sounds meant that they were shooting at the black and white kids in the water. As the Red Cross-certified head life guard, I thought it best to order the campers out of the water till the shooting stopped. At dinner that evening, the summer staff announced amended swimming rules. “When shooting starts, everybody out.” In addition we recommended that each swimmer and his/her buddy find a suitable tree or rock to get behind. Snipers became another summer hazard like high wind or sudden electrical storms.
If even the isolated and relatively insulated campus was unsafe, then venturing into town was a trip. Myles and Aimee decided that the entire summer army—campers and staff—needed a break, so they planned a field trip to see Rock City. Many of the campers from the South, black and white, had spent their lives reading the giant slogan painted on the tops or sides of barns, urging that they “SEE ROCK CITY.” Some Southern mothers swear the first words their child ever read were, “thee wok thity.”
Aimee and Myles loaded up their little red English Ford convertible and the rest piled into an assortment of vehicles for the mountain ride to Chattanooga. Somebody shouted, “I want to see the choo-choo.” Another asked if he’d be able to see the shoe shine boy. Another wit asked in a loud voice, “The shoe-shine what?” “Sorry, the shoe-shine man.”
When our group ascended the mountain, it was clear that we were the first integrated gaggle of tourists to see these wonders. It was not long before some yahoo commandeered the public address system asking what the world was coming to when niggers could barge in where only white people belonged. We took the abuse stoically but when the whites began to organize into fighting groups, we thought it wise to group together for a strategic retreat, the adults forming a circle around the smallest children. Safely in the cars, headed out of Chattanooga, someone thought our feelings would be helped by an infusion of ice cream so we all pulled into a Dairy Queen. Since we were served standing up, the counter people didn’t seem upset with our group’s salt-and-pepper complexion. The rowdies, however, had other plans and some began harassing us. What we didn’t realize was that the more serious Klan types were preparing an ambush for us on the road back to Monteagle.
Just as the last camper grasped her ice cream cone an oily-haired local with rolled up tee-shirt sleeves slammed the child against the ice cream shed and pushed the cone into her face. As Susan Wilbur,
another of the counselors, and I took the tearful camper by each arm, the crowd began chanting, “Kill the nigger-lovers, kill the son’s a bitches . . .” Beating a second retreat, everyone loaded up in the nearest car. I remember being somewhat torn between wanting to protect my little brother Malcolm and a strange urge to keep a safe eye on my comely new friend Susan.
As our little caravan pulled out slowly from the Dairy Queen, we were careful not to lose any of our cars, even though we were followed by some of the hoodlums who hung out their car windows shouting insults, “Good riddance and don’t ever come back. Go back to New York.” When one shouted over the noise of the hurrying cars, “No, go back to RUSSIA!” we could hear cackling laughter echoing up the mountain road.
Then, without warning, rounding a curve, we were startled to see pickups and cars partially blocking the road, bright headlights pointed at us. In the lead car, Myles could see there was enough room for one car to get through. He waved us ahead at high speed. I remember shouting, “Roll up the windows and duck.” As the right rear window in our car was being raised, a Coke bottle whizzed through and shattered against the left window inside the car. Luckily we were in and out of the gauntlet in seconds. Everybody had their heads down and eyes closed, so, in our car, we were merely drenched with glass particles.
Those country boys proved to be good shots with rocks and bottles so the nurse back at Highlander was up late cleaning glass from eyes and fixing cuts and bruises. Every car in the caravan looked like it had been the loser in a demolition derby. I learned a couple of valuable movement lessons that night. Be cool under fire and make good decisions. Movement cars take a lot of punishment and being in a storm of violence and emotions binds people together—the foxhole effect. If you are being shot at together, you tend to become brothers and sisters quickly.
Another lesson, somewhat more complicated, was repeated frequently in my movement experience. A person with little familiarity with civil rights history might ask, “If you want to make good decisions, why go in an integrated group to see segregated Rock City to begin with?” What is difficult to understand is that the radicals, and especially the young people on the cutting edge of the struggle, made a decision to try to live as if the “beloved community” already existed. In other words we would take great risks to do ordinary things. What, after all, could be more normal than taking a group of young people to the top of Lookout Mountain, where one could see seven states? The only way our group differed from thousands of other pilgrimages to Chattanooga was that we were black and white together. Today, I am sure, not a head turns when tourist buses unload thousands of multicolored travelers to see Rock City.
The most exciting event of the summer was falling in love with Susan Wilbur. Already a movement hero, she was a member of the incredible Nashville student group which had such a stunning impact on black and white young Southerners. Nashville kick-started and energized the entire movement, ending the lull which followed the Montgomery Bus Boycott. I had seen but not met Susan earlier in the spring of 1961 when she and the other Susan, Susan Hermann, committing an act of revolutionary near-suicide, were on the first bus of freedom riders to reach Montgomery and the waiting Klan terrorists. The two Susans and Jim Zwerg were the only whites on the bus as the KKK thugs began methodically brutalizing the black, white, male, and female riders. John Seigenthaler Sr., the personal representative of the attorney general of the United States, tried to help some of the women escape. A group of white women with bricks in their purses were pummeling Susan and the other women while chasing them down the street away from the bus station when Seigenthaler pulled his car alongside. Leaping out, he ordered the women to get into his car. “I’m a federal officer,” he shouted.
Hesitating a moment, Susan pulled away, “Mister, this isn’t your fight—we’ll be all right.”
In that split second, they could have gotten away. As it was, Robert Kennedy’s personal representative was felled from behind by a pipe-wielding citizen of the rebel state of Alabama. Susan and her friends managed to achieve sanctuary of sorts by fleeing into the nearby post office/federal courthouse. Their would-be rescuer, bleeding and unconscious from the nearly fatal blow behind his ear, lay for more than an hour in the bloody, wreckage-strewn street, while the mob tossed broken news cameras, clothes, toothbrushes, suitcases, and college school books into garish mid-street bonfires. When Susan told me this story I thought that Seigenthaler, attorney general’s representative or not, was lucky to survive his trip to the Cradle of the Confederacy. I knew Susan and the others were also lucky to be alive and I marveled at her calm assertion that she would do the same tomorrow if it became necessary.
I told Susan my own story from the point of view of a non-terrorist member of the crowd at the bus station that day. This shared adventure got us introduced, but it was hormones and Susan’s beauty which took us the rest of the way. I was captivated by her red hair, and her healthy, outdoor complexion spoke of days on horseback in the Tennessee back country. She was ruddy and rosy red and her slightly up-turned pudgy nose with little freckles fit perfectly over her pouty and, I thought, extremely kissable lips. Lithe and shapely, Susan was less self-conscious about her body than any woman I had ever met. She was the first example I’d personally experienced of many women within the civil rights movement who were challenging both gender and racial boundaries. Maybe she came by it naturally; her mother, a working single mom, had obviously instilled in Susan an appreciation of female liberation even before that’s what it was called.
Susan had brought her jumping horse to Highlander to augment the folk school’s small herd. Soon after we met she invited me to saddle one of the Highlander horses and ride out to the cliffs with her. Deep into the farther pasture, we jumped the fence and rode along the precipice looking into the blue distance of the Cumberland Mountains. With an intense feeling of euphoria, I rode along behind this beautiful woman. That day and over that summer at Highlander, Susan introduced me to a level of relationships and intimacy that was new to me—natural and free from repressed guilt. I could not help comparing the experience of loving Susan with that of my high school and college romance with a girl I had assumed I would eventually marry, because that’s how it was supposed to work in those days. My earlier girl friend and I had been inhibited and frustrated, and as our college years ended it became clear that the security of marriage was really more significant to her than the mutual giving of a relationship.
Susan was nothing like that. Guilt and repression were not a part of her love equation. I was even more astounded and delighted when, on our first visit to her home in Nashville, her mother obviously was accepting of our affection for each other. Breathing a silent prayer of thanks for the people of the upper South, I was amazed at how different they were from the ones I’d grown up with in Alabama. The people of the Bible Belt participated in a lot of sex—but they always had to pay. Anything that much fun must be a sin and the wages of sin is death—and don’t you forget it. I could barely keep up with the changes occurring in my naive, country, and church-encrusted life. The atmosphere of freedom at Highlander, which placed a premium on respect for young people and respect for privacy, was unlike anything I had experienced before. That summer with Susan gave me the first inkling of what it was like to be grown up and free.
Trips to Nashville that summer began a pattern that was to last through my first period as a SNCC staff member. Between organizing trips and jail stays I always found an excuse to go to Nashville for a few idyllic days with Susan, my first mature love. It helped that Nashville had the most active local movement in the South in those days. Many of the early SNCC stalwarts were still attending college at one of the myriad institutions in the Athens of the South. Susan’s sister and her mother seemed to take it on as part of their duty to the movement to patch me up for the next round of action in the deep South. Nashville became a reliable and relatively safe “rear” area, specializing in R&R and spiritual renewal. The co
lleges and universities of Nashville served the purpose during the early days of the student movement that New Orleans later served when the action moved from the border areas of the upper South to the Deep South arena of SNCC’s middle period—when Mississippi burned.
The greatest favor Susan did for me was to introduce her trench mates—the black and white brothers and sisters with whom she had shared jail cells and death-defying freedom rides. Her sister was a student at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where Marion Barry was also a graduate student in chemistry. At the founding meeting in 1960 of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Marion had been elected temporary chairman. One weekend during the summer, Susan and I drove from Monteagle to UT to visit her sister, who suggested that we call Marion. The summer session of the university was almost over and I knew by then that I was going to work for SNCC in the fall. I was excited about the opportunity to talk to a SNCCer who had been there from the beginning. Marion Barry and other black activists had high respect for Susan and her sister who had made their bones in the struggle while most young white Southerners were either too timid or too reactionary to even dream of sitting in, much less courting death on a freedom ride to Montgomery, Alabama. Marion, the two Wilburs, and I found a restaurant near campus where we could talk and drink coffee. We were so high on freedom that we didn’t anticipate what was about to happen.
The four of us sat in a booth next to the front plate glass window, where we ordered coffee and doughnuts from a rather sullen waitress. As soon as she disappeared through swinging doors, an older man approached us and stated as though it was a clear matter of fact that we would have to leave. Identifying himself as the manager, he said that it was time to mop up around the booths as it was near closing time. We had chosen the diner because it had a sign out front which read, “We Never Close.”
While the manager frantically motioned to a younger man who approached with a pail of water and a mop, we quietly but firmly offered to move to the tables, out of harm’s and mops’ way. The young man, either slow or vaguely sympathetic, protested to the manager that, “We never mop before midnight . . .” The manager’s face flooded red, shouting that we were conducting an illegal sit-in (I wondered if there was any other kind). He promised to have us all arrested. Susan put her face in his and said through clenched teeth that we had not intended to have a demonstration. She told him, further, that we only wanted coffee but he had now embarrassed us and everybody else in the restaurant.