The Wrong Side of Murder Creek

by Bob Zellner

  “You’ve made it an issue so now we don’t intend to leave. Besides,” she said, “we thought you were already integrated, that’s why we came here.”

  All this time Marion Barry was trying to calm Susan and her sister. Thoroughly up in arms now with the bit in their teeth, the two of them were threatening to organize a twenty-four hour picket around the diner.

  “Be cool, be cool. There’s no real need to get arrested over this—let’s just leave now and we’ll deal with this backwardness later.”

  While Marion was trying to calm everyone, the unexpected happened. A man wearing a brown tweed jacket slowly rose from his seat and reached for the shoulder of the manager. We were moving towards the door when the manager slapped the stranger’s hand away and shouted to the cooks and waitresses, all of whom were peering from between the swinging doors, to call the police. “This man has assaulted me and I intend to see that he is taken to jail.”

  At first I thought he was talking about Marion, but I soon realized that Barry was trying to control this the tweed-jacketed man who was trying to grasp the lapels of the manager’s rumpled suit.

  “I most certainly did not assault you, sir, but I consider it an outrage the way you are treating this black man and his friends. I will not stand by and let you insult them in this manner.”

  It made Marion nervous for white people to be arguing; he gave me a pleading look as if to say, what should we do now? I must have looked pretty useless but I managed to whisper that whatever we were going to do we should do it quickly. I nodded towards four policemen leaping from their cars, heading our way. We wound up following the police down to central lockup to arrange bail for our protector who, it turned out, was a new professor at UT and unused to blatant racism. We told him that he would soon get used to it, or he could look forward to spending a lot of time in jail. The professor laughed and said he’d never done anything like this before. “Something snapped,” he said. “I’ve been under a lot of pressure lately. I just took my PhD exams today.”

  We gave statements that the teacher had not assaulted the restaurant manager, but they charged him anyway. Years later, when Marion was mayor of Washington, D.C., I asked him if he remembered the stranger who got so upset when we were thrown out of the restaurant in Knoxville. Marion mused, “That happened in 1961, I wonder whatever happened to that guy?”

  Highlander was also the scene of my first face-to-face meeting with Anne Braden. I had only talked to her on the phone up to then, and I don’t know exactly what I expected. I remember being mildly surprised at her easy Southern manners. Anne was passionate and intense without being overpowering. My little group at Huntingdon had become accustomed to feeling at total odds with “the Southern way of life.” It was comforting to recognize Mrs. Braden as being truly Southern (from Alabama) while holding such apparent non-Southern beliefs and opinions.

  When Anne had first called us at college (and I did consider it “us” and not just me), we were titillated with the idea that these “communists” we had so forcefully been warned against, would, of course, hold unorthodox views. Now here she was all soft Southern comfort, with a somewhat old-fashioned beauty that might grace an ad for the Clairol look.

  She played a role for generations of young Southerners that made us comfortable in opposing segregation and racial hatred. She did, in person, what Professor C. Vann Woodward, in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, did in print. They held that one could be both a good white Southerner and an active opponent of segregation.

  If Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. had convinced me to join the struggle, it was Anne Braden who showed me how to do it. In retrospect, Anne, more than any other person, can claim credit or accept blame for guiding me into the century’s most titanic clash.

  In the meantime, I had been accepted as one of the eighteen Southern participants in a program called the Southern Student Human Relations Seminar. It was sponsored by the U.S. National Student Association, and held on the campus of the University of Wisconsin for three weeks in August. The director was Constance Curry, and the advisor was the Reverend Will D. Campbell. Connie and Will built on the foundation already put in place for me by Myles Horton, Anne Braden, Clifford and Virginia Durr, Rosa Parks, Dr. King, and the students. The seminar provided much education on Southern history, movement issues, and I carefully read C. Vann Woodward’s book, wishing I had read it for sociology at Huntingdon.

  The human relations seminar was a watershed event for me, even though Connie told me later that she and Will were concerned that I might be “too advanced” for the other participants. This might seem strange since this was very early in my human relations “career.” About the only things I had done up to this time was the student activism at Huntingdon, observing the freedom ride in Montgomery, and working for the summer at Highlander. The idea that I might be too movement-savvy for the seminar, then, says more about the level of most of the participants than about me. The NSA, the YWCA, and the various church organizations were doing a fairly good job of providing entry-level experiences to young grassroots white and black Southerners. In my opinion the seminars run by Connie and Will were the best of these efforts.

  Having successfully scared all of us into reading the required materials and books, Connie and Will had the perfect opening for the seminar. We were all familiar with ice-breakers, but the Curry/Campbell dog-and-pony show was nothing short of a glacier-breaker. While Will plucked his guitar and sang along, Connie led out with a lusty version of the country classic made famous by Burl Ives, “Little bitty tear let me down, spoiled my act as a clown, had it made up not to make a frown but a little bitty tear let me down . . .”

  After that performance we had nothing to worry about. We could not say or think of anything more hokey. If we had worried about making fools of ourselves, it was now clear sailing. Will would shift his chew of tobacco from one cheek to the other and start another verse. Soon we were all singing along with the two of them like we had grown up together, which I suppose was the point. Will was always laid back with a mysterious air like he knew all about the night of the hunter. His black slouch hat and the old black preacher suit he wore spoke volumes about his attitude toward life, race, and everything else.

  Connie and Will were obviously having the time of their lives at the seminar, mentoring us youngsters and it was clear that they delighted in introducing us to the curriculum subjects and the writers, historians and others we met that late summer in Wisconsin. Madison itself was a major player in our education, many of us having never been out of the Deep South. I remember eating in the university dining hall. The food was exquisite. I had never had vegetables that still looked like their fresh selves. The peas were still green and the carrots still yellow, and even though they were cooked, they still had a snap and a crunch. At first I thought they were a mistake. Maybe the fire went out and the cook did not notice.

  During our down times when not in seminar, Will and Connie were nowhere to be found, so we explored the campus and the surrounding area on our own. I remember a Sunday afternoon when a group of us strolled the length of a long peninsula far out in one of the beautiful lakes surrounding Madison.

  Families and their friends were gathered around endless grills laden with the most delicious-looking and -smelling sausages. Everybody was turning up glistening cans and bottles of Milwaukee’s finest beers. I remember D’Army Bailey whispering to me not to stare so hard at the people’s food. That admonition was followed by the sotto voce observation that there were not many black people out on the peninsula that day. “Maybe they are all still in church,” he speculated. Bailey was from Louisiana and would become a respected judge in his adopted state of Tennessee. Memphis was more like Mississippi and Louisiana than the rest of the state. I like to think that Connie’s seminar gave him a giant boost up a tall ladder. D’Army may have learned from me and other white students that not all white Southern males are gothic throwbacks.
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br />   Eventually our seminar group approached the end of the walkway where we discovered a racially mixed group tending several grills. A few folks, black and white, with cane poles, stared intently at bobbing corks in the peaceful lake water. As we arrived, an older black women sang out, “I got one,” hauling in a decent-sized yellow perch.

  A black man hollered back, “Hold her, I’ll be right there.”

  Brushing corn meal off his hands, with the red apron around his waist, the old man reached for the wiggling fish. He took it to a folding table and began scaling.

  We were fascinated and I remember saying to D’Army, “Say, brother, who’s staring now?”

  A couple of young black fellows looked at us as if to say, “These old folk will never change.” I noticed that the younger men had rods and reels. Using the opening, I asked, “What y’all fishing for?”

  “Walleye,” he said, “or muskie. You can get a really big one here—if you have the right bait and equipment and know how to use it.”

  “And what’s that?” D’Army asked.

  “Live minnows, and this,” the other young fisherman answered, pointing to his shiny rod and reel. “Course the bait and the rod does no good if you don’t set the drag real light. One of these big ones hits, he can take thirty feet in two seconds. Set her light, let him run, and reel him in slow with your tip way up.”

  One of the white boys in our group said, “Keep yo’ tip up so you don’t give him no slack. Cut him any slack and you got no fish.”

  D’Army displayed his sense of humor when he fake-punched the young white Southerner and whispered for everybody to hear, “Y’all got a lot of experience in not cutting anything no slack.”

  Our laughing was interrupted by the sound of heaven when the old folks took pity on the six of us. “Y’all had dinner?” It was the older man who was scaling and frying the fresh fish. “Everybody here done ate much as they can hold. Plenty more fish, brats, beer, and potato salad Momma made. Want some?”

  A more rhetorical question was never asked. We descended on the table making the old folks happy. The young fishermen stuck their rods in holders and ambled over, intrigued with our obvious Southernness and being together. We described the seminar and they turned out to be university students from the South. They said to check out a meeting that week of the Socialist Club. I almost fell over: “You mean they won’t get arrested?

  “Not in Madison,” one of the students said.

  Back at the seminar Monday morning, we learned a little more about our hosts, Will and Connie. Will was born in Amite County, Mississippi, and had experienced a lot more than most coming from a born-again Southern Baptist background. I identified bone-deep. I had no idea where he was going, but I was willing to go with him. I was responding to something in Will that resonated with lots of young white Southerners. In the same way that historian Vann Woodward taught, through the writings we were studying at the seminar, that one could be a good Southerner and still oppose racial oppression and segregation—Campbell taught by example and his presence. I observed later that Will Campbell became a respected mentor of several generations of young Southern churchmen, through his writings, his witness, and his pulpitless ministry. I discovered that he refused to reject Klansmen and their families, pastoring them in sickness and at their times of death, performing their marriages, and baptizing their offspring. He also became a mentor, guru and sage to the Nashville music crowd who lived near where he settled in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee. This, I think, is particularly important because a right-wing, quasi-racist attitude was almost required if one was to succeed as a country music performer. A recent example of dissension which was severely punished by the industry was the treatment of the Dixie Chicks when they criticized President Bush.

  Connie, who had grown up in the South but was the daughter of Irish immigrants, seemed like a Southern magnolia at one moment and a stateless, regionless sage the next. She would be enormously important in my future life, already serving, along with Ella Baker and Howard Zinn, as an “adult advisor” to my organization of choice, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. It didn’t occur to us youngsters that Connie was just three or four years older. In the fall of 1961, James Rufus Forman would become the dynamo we called the SNCC executive secretary. Funny that we didn’t think of him as an adult, even though he must have been older than Curry.

  Being accepted for the seminar gave me a strange sense of peace and at the same time it quickened my pulse. The old saw about graduation throwing one out into the cold cruel world would not apply to me.

  When I was first talking to Anne Braden in the early spring of 1961, I didn’t know she and the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF) were on the lookout for someone to work on the SNCC staff. Anne mentioned the “white student project” to me during the first meeting at Highlander and gave me some history of the idea. SCEF people had been excited about the student movement when the first sit-in occurred in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960. Anne started thinking of getting Southern whites to see that civil rights was their fight, too. At the October 1960 SNCC conference in Atlanta, Anne had the chance to meet many of the new young SNCC leaders and realized that the group was firmly under the leadership of young Southern black men and women. The gathering also included over a dozen white Southern students. Anne realized that young black and white Southerners had an opportunity, through joint struggle, to forge more intimate and stronger bonds than any of their elders had ever had through “talk” meetings and socials.

  She initially hoped to convince Jane Stembridge, the first white Southerner to serve on the SNCC staff, to take on the job of “campus traveler” to white schools. Stembridge told Anne that she didn’t plan to remain on staff. SNCC could afford only one full-time worker and she thought it should be a black person that replaced her.

  Jane’s decision to leave was also prompted by the shabby treatment afforded veteran organizer Bayard Rustin, who was dis-invited to be the keynote speaker at the October 1960 SNCC meeting in Atlanta following complaints from several foundations threatening to withdraw grants.

  Though Bayard was close to Martin Luther King Jr. and had advised King during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, he was a socialist and had once been in the Communist Party. Worst of all, in some minds, Rustin was a homosexual. Looking back, it is strange how communism and homosexuality were given so much power by those who feared them and how they could be raised to taint the work of the civil rights movement.

  Anne also learned that debate had, in fact, roiled all summer about SNCC being associated with SCEF because of the “communist question.” SNCC decided to have her at the conference as an invited “observer.” Braden thought the best way to take the weapon of red-baiting and homophobia away from our enemies was to simply refuse to play the game. If liberals and movement people refused to red-bait themselves, the tactic could not possibly tear the left apart.

  Anne continued to look for a white person to be the campus traveler to white campuses, and I was thrilled when I was chosen in the summer of 1961. SCEF agreed to send SNCC a $5,000 grant to pay me a stipend and expenses, and after leaving the NSA Seminar and Congress in August, I returned to Alabama to get ready for a murky future.

  8

  My September 11th Farewell

  September 11, 2001, now called “9-11,” will forever be a tragic day in American history, but for me it also signifies the day in 1961 when I joined the freedom movement. The whole family had gathered at the Seven Z’s, our vacation cabin in Daphne, Alabama, on Mobile Bay. My father named the cottage after the seven of us Zellners; he thought the name was evocative of far-off seas and exotic places. It was a little summer beach cottage with one great room downstairs, which meant that the kitchen occupied one corner. Dad had built a small bedroom for him and Mom on the south side of the great room. An upstairs loft had lots of beds for the boys. The cabin was never locked, and all of our friends knew it
was open to them if they needed a place to stay. The cabin would be Mom and Dad’s permanent home when Daddy retired from the Alabama-West Florida Conference of the Methodist Church.

  That cool, gray September morning is sharp in my memory. I woke up early. Mom and Dad were asleep downstairs and my brothers were still asleep in the loft. Dad had reminded me to get up early for the trip to Atlanta. I considered waking up my brother Jim, but he was snoring so sweetly, I didn’t have the heart. He had driven almost all night from Durham in his little red beat-up old sports car. When he showed up, it hit me that the family was gathering to send me off as our representative to the movement. After taking a good long look at him sleeping there on the old sofa next to the stone fireplace, I slipped out of the house and headed over to the old Phillips place on my way down the hill, or “under the hill,” as the people in Daphne call going to the bay.

  Daddy had gotten the land for our cabin from our neighbor Henry Phillips. He and his wife, Bessie, had been life-long members of Daphne’s Methodist church, had raised a healthy family, and had acquired some land on their uncertain fishing income. A well-worn road through the pines led to the mooring where Phillips kept his boat and nets.

  Walking past their old house and the ice house where the fish were kept cold, I silently thanked old man Henry for making our cabin possible. When the Bishop transferred my father from the church in Daphne to East Brewton, Alabama, Henry and Bessie were distraught. We had grown close to them so Henry gave Dad the lot next to their house, because it would insure that we would be back.