by Bob Zellner
“I don’t know. I thought you would know.”
“How would I know?”
“Well, I don’t know.”
That’s when I learned that he was the executive type. He said, “Well, let’s see.” He was being very brisk and businesslike. He was wearing a dark gray shirt that was open at the collar, no tie, and what was probably once a blue blazer, now almost shapeless, with baggy pants that were shiny at the knees and at the seat, and a pair of shoes that were just about completely worn out. He looked rumpled like a professor. That was the way he always was. He was thirty-two—an older guy—and big, imposing, with a craggy, pockmarked face. Not a bushy Afro, but a fairly substantial curly Afro. You could tell right away that he was intelligent and quick. He was offhandedly friendly, but kind of feeling things out.
He opened the briefcase and said, “Oh, you know what’s in this briefcase? This is SNCC. Probably everything about SNCC is right here.” There were letters, minutes of the meetings, all the files from a year and a half since the organization was founded on April 14, 1960. The office file cabinet, meanwhile, was totally empty.
Then he said, “How long have you been here?”
I told him I had gotten to Atlanta on the 11th—five days before, and that I was staying at the Butler Street YMCA.
“You getting enough to eat?”
“Yeah.”
Then he said, “Well, let’s get down to business.” Then he reached over and opened up the tape recorder, plugged it in and put the mike up and then cued up the tape. He said, “I want to know everything about you, man, from the time you were born till right now. Don’t leave anything out.”
“That’s a lot of territory.”
“That’s right, it covers a lot of territory, ’cause I want to know what makes a white cat like you want to work with a black outfit like this.”
I think he taped it because he had a very strong sense of history. He always did. He would say, “Write it down, document it, keep records,” and he was also very security-minded. I was just flattered and thought he was interested in my situation, but he was practicing basic security. He needed to find out why I was there—what made me different, and also if I had the fire in my gut as a committed social activist, or was I there on a lark or as a spy.
I spoke with a thick cracker accent in those days. I spoke into the tape for an hour and a half or two hours. That was only the first session. We had several more sessions after that. We took a break for lunch, and then we talked all afternoon. He was pretty inquisitive, especially when I told my about my dad being in the Klan and about my granddaddy and his brothers being in the Klan, and also about my experiences in college, and how I had come to the attention of Anne Braden and other people who had recommended me for the job. I think he realized how wrong I thought things were and my disgust for it all and needing to get as far away from it as possible. The only way I could do it was to throw myself into the struggle completely. We probably taped for about six hours in all. When we were finished, he said, “I hope your story holds up.” The implication was he was going to be steadily watching. He didn’t warm up to me completely until after the McComb demonstrations and arrest in October. That was really how you became a SNCC person—by putting your body on the line.
At one point, I asked Forman, “Can we talk about how I’m going to do my job?”
“One thing you’re going to have to do is go to our next staff meeting. If you’re going to do this job, you’ll have to know what’s going on in SNCC so you can describe it and interpret it to people. I don’t know exactly when the staff meeting will be. Moses is in Mississippi. He’s probably not going to come here, so we’ll probably have to go to Moses. Just keep on coming here like you’ve been doing. I’m gonna be in and out. Keep taking the messages. In the meantime, why don’t you get in touch with Anne and set up some kind of itinerary for yourself, starting the middle of October. By then, we ought to have everything pretty well squared away. We’ve got to get a place big enough for our meeting—here or in Mississippi, and I’m going to be working on that. We’ve got a lot of people coming—probably over a dozen.”
I didn’t realize this was going to be the first full staff meeting. The meetings before that were called coordinating committee meetings, and were mostly attended by representatives of the various movements, like Nashville, Montgomery, Atlanta, and others across the South.
Then Forman said, “We all have to do the work. They call it shit work, but there ain’t no shit work. Some of it’s detail work, and some of it’s not, but we all have to do detail work. Anything you need, go down to the beauty parlor.” He went down there, got a broom and told me to sweep the floor, and to start in the hallway near them since they were always helping us out. He said, “The other organizing principle is wherever you go, leave it in better shape than where you found it, and you’ll always be welcomed back.” That meant either sweeping or sleeping, living in peoples’ houses and borrowing offices, all of that. Leave it in better shape than you found it.
He was a compulsive floor-sweeper himself. Wherever we were, he would find a broom and sweep or he would give it to other people and say, “We have to keep a neat place. Sweep the floor and write everything down.” He had made the point—he was the boss, and it was a novel situation: a black man in the Deep South as the boss of the white guy. I’m sure he said to himself, “White people have been handing black people a broom all their lives, so whenever I have a chance I’ll hand the broom to a white guy.”
In the days following my first meeting with Jim, I gave him my ideas and the list of contacts I had, and as the days went on, more people started to come to the office. During the next few weeks, I met many people around Atlanta and saw others like Connie Curry with the Atlanta-based National Student Association. I had first met her at the Human Relations Seminar in Wisconsin in August. Connie was well-connected because of her work with the Southern students who came to her seminar each summer. She and Ella Baker were the two adult advisors on the SNCC executive committee.
I have always had a special relationship with Bob Mants, whom I also met early on when he was a senior at Morehouse and used to come down to the SNCC office. We were similar in that we were both somewhat rustic and rough cut. I admired Bob because he had a very clear idea of who he was and he didn’t much care if someone disapproved of him. Bob took his Atlanta movement experience to southwest Georgia to work with Charles Sherrod and later to Lowndes County in Alabama, where he is still working four decades later, as is Sherrod in Albany, Georgia. Sherrod and Mants are among the very few who came from the outside but stayed in a community to continue their movement work. I see Bob from time to time in Alabama and he is still tall and beautiful and very youthful. Bob’s courage is well known so it is not surprising that his friendship with H. Rap Brown, who became chair of SNCC and later took the name Jamil Al Amin, remains strong as he works to get Rap freed from the supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.
I was working on a list of colleges and universities to visit where there were contacts who might be interested in SNCC’s work and in joining movement activities. Reverend Will Campbell gave me the names of campus ministers at black and white colleges, so I wouldn’t have to visit them cold. I did have to do that at times when I didn’t know a single soul there, but usually I would find one contact and if you found one liberal or progressive, they knew others. Unfortunately, it was such a small circle. The YWCA was always a good contact point. Many of the strong African American leaders in the South had been affiliated with the YWCA at one time or another. It was a way that they could do organizing and still have staff positions and salaries. Anne Braden and the whole SCEF network gave me contacts in almost every Southern town.
I started following up on some of the contacts I already had. I was also picking the brain of everybody I could think of in my Methodist network. There was a great deal of intrigue and curiosity and a real hunger for knowle
dge about fellow students from the other race, on both sides, but especially on the side of young progressive white Southerners. I was not totally aware of the intellectual ferment in the South, but one thing happening at the universities was testing the limits in ways that reminded me of what had happened at Huntingdon. Part of it was from reading authors like John Dollard, Gunnar Myrdal, Tom Pettigrew, and C. Vann Woodward. Their writings all pointed out the conflict between the American creed and its practice in the South and helped to convince a whole new generation of white Southerners that they could still be Southern and be against segregation. It showed them that segregation was basically a recent phenomenon in the South and didn’t go back to the antebellum period. Part of my thinking during the early period of campus traveling was to work out a modus vivendi and a rationale for the kind of project that we were going to do, and my feeling was that on every campus and in every town there were some progressive students who wanted to figure out their relationship to the battle forming around them. Could my work with white Southern students help them to deepen their involvement and, by example, maybe lead more of their peers to join the freedom movement? What should their contribution be?
Very early on after arriving in Atlanta, I met Casey and Tom Hayden. They had met at the National Student Association Congress in 1960 and were married in September 1961. They just sparkled together, because Casey had so many aspects that Tom didn’t have. First of all, she was gorgeous. She was very simple and very Southern, but translucent. She was blond, with cornflower blue eyes, a beautiful smooth complexion, a serene disposition, and an iron will. She was from Texas and combined impeccable manners, gentleness, and a fierce understanding of what was right. Casey always had a kind of otherworldly air, much beyond what she would have gotten from her church upbringing. She was concerned about social issues, but she wasn’t an intellectual. If you had to characterize Casey’s essence, it would be more philosophical, more existential, more spiritual, along with a fine intellect. Funny, warm, just open and loving without being demonstrative, she was just absolutely Casey.
Many of the white Southerners who were involved very early in SNCC had common characteristics and often it seemed that many things did not even need to be said. Most of my movement friends in the beginning were Southerners, black and white with similarities of age, outlook, and optimism. With our common church backgrounds, we had a certain way of dealing with each other in kind of a brotherhood-sisterhood manner. My cohorts were all intelligent and, without exception, very articulate. Our early staff members were compatible in both our religious backgrounds and important things like soul food and music.
I’m certain I had already met Tom Hayden at the NSA Congress in Wisconsin. He was working with Students for a Democratic Society when it was just a fledgling group. He was from Michigan and was preparing a series of SDS reports on the South. I think SDS had seen that the civil rights movement was going to be the most exciting way of mobilizing students all over the country. I was impressed with all of the SDS guys—their erudition, vocabulary, and the fact that they were just wonderful sharp debaters. He went to McComb after we were there in early October, along with Paul Potter of NSA. Tom was dragged out of his car and beaten in the middle of the street. A photograph was taken with him in a crouched position while he was being beaten by Billy Jack Caston, a nephew of the sheriff. Someone was hitting Tom with what Southerners call the jaws of the pocket knife, and he was bloodied up pretty good. Tom says that picture made him famous. His reports were eventually published in a pamphlet called “Revolution in Mississippi.”
Right after I met some of the SDS people, they got me involved with SDS on the national executive committee. I didn’t realize at the time that Tom was getting a lot of his inspiration from us, but I was getting as much inspiration from him and Al Haber and others like them in SDS and NSA. They opened up an entirely new world to me. Until then, the only thing I knew about politics was what I had read in National Review, and here were these guys and women who were in the center of political discourse about all the things I cared about—debating the issues, including the world situation. They had intellectualized a lot of things I had experienced and was trying to work through in a philosophical or an emotional way.
Tom had, and still has, a distinctive face with a typical Irish, red bulbous nose, even though he wasn’t doing drugs very often, or drinking a lot. His intellect was such that you really loved to be around him, and I think he took to me because I was his extreme opposite. He had grown up in a middle-class family and was the editor of the newspaper at a large university. I’m a back-country guy and went to a small college in Alabama, but we became fast friends.
SNCC had a tradition of women in leadership, but it was not so in SDS, even though there were some strong women. To me, it seemed that male chauvinism was worse in SDS than in SNCC. Some of the main early leaders in SNCC were women. Diane Nash was one of the strongest along with Ruby Doris Smith. Diane had hazel eyes, a light beige complexion and she was so sincere and intense but at the same time relaxed. I had seen her in a film, confronting the mayor of Nashville. It was an extremely powerful lesson, and I thought she was very brave. She would sometimes interject into our long discussions, “We’re going to do this because it’s the right thing to do.” She was very interested in the campus traveling because she thought white students would be the most open. I remember talking to her about how the lunch counter movement and the freedom rides had caught the imagination of the white students and a number of them had come on their own to join. She was not a bit flirtatious but all the men were in love with her anyway.
As I mentioned, the first full-time worker in SNCC was a white woman, Jane Stembridge, who came to Atlanta at Ella Baker’s request right after the first organizational meeting in Raleigh. SNCC had also voted to have Constance Curry on the executive committee in the spring of 1960—the first white woman in that role. Casey and Betty Garman and a number of SDS women did a lot of work in SNCC. There was always a chauvinism issue, but it is a reverse anachronism to look at those early days in terms of our present consciousness. Even then, SNCC status was measured in terms of “putting your body on the line,” and gender didn’t matter.
The movement people from the North impressed me as the most articulate that I’d ever met; I was intrigued and captivated by the sophistication and erudition of the black and white Yankees. For example, Tim Jenkins was national affairs vice president of the National Student Association. I think he was originally from Philadelphia, went to Howard University, came South a good bit, and really got involved in SNCC. He wore glasses and was a natty dresser. In that era, the overall impression most white Southerners had of black people was of servants, workers—largely poorly educated. But blacks in the movement used words and had ideas I’d never heard before. Tim Jenkins convulsed me with his wicked wit, and I’ve never forgotten his famous confrontation with William F. Buckley at the 1961 Madison, Wisconsin, NSA convention. A group of us were standing in the lobby outside a plenary session that was debating support for the budding student movement in the South. Buckley was saying that the Young Americans for Freedom, a right-wing group, would “out-organize and bury new groups like SNCC and SDS.” Buckley claimed the vast majority of Americans would defeat any attempts to change things in the South because, “we like it that way,” and “you can’t change ‘a way of life.’”
When Bill Buckley said that, a remarkable thing happened. Tim Jenkins, without moving a muscle, seemed to add inches to his lean frame, towering over the famous right-winger. “Buckley,” Tim spat out, “in the final analysis, in spite of your erudition, your blue-blood background, that statement simply demonstrates your persistent and malignant slave-owning, crypto-Nazi, Klan-minded, ruling-class, elitist, and unreconstructed reactionary mentality as well as your totally inability to exit the nineteenth century!” Tim said all this without taking a breath, without pause, without hesitation, without repeating a single word. Tim today is a black
William Buckley on the progressive side. He’s tall and handsome and extremely well dressed. I think he’s wealthy. He runs magazines, too. He’s still erudite with beautiful speech. He gave a speech at a SNCC reunion in Raleigh in 2000, and it crossed my mind that he was deliberately making it as obtuse as possible, so that we all would continue to recognize that Tim Jenkins has a great brain.
I was exhilarated to see a black man in the face of a powerful white man. In the South such language was practically a capital offense, and it occurred to me that my new friend, Tim, had not used a single obscenity and yet he had as thoroughly cussed Buckley as any mule skinner has ever dealt with his beast. National Review was the only political magazine I had ever been exposed to and now someone had expressed what I felt. I could happily die and go on to heaven.
I loved the big words that some of the Yankees used and I was glad they persisted in using them because it helped those of us educated in the South—black and white—to overcome a certain deficit of intellectual stimulation. I remember one meeting when Harvard-educated John Perdue, asked to report on his research of the power structure in southwest Georgia, began his remarks by saying, as he placed a large stack of papers on the podium, “On the power structure, I have compiled a voluminous compendium of information . . .” He was interrupted by groans, hisses, laughter, and shouting, “Hey bro, break that down . . . voluminous compendium . . . what the?!”
“Okay,” Perdue said dryly, “I have assembled a large stack of papers on Daugherty Country and environs . . .”
I gradually came to realize during staff meetings that not only was the campus traveling project under discussion at some of our meetings, but also the whole question of what SNCC was doing and its future. It took a little while for it to dawn on me that I was in on the ground floor. SNCC was in transition that year from a coordinating committee to full-time staff members like Diane Nash, Ruby Doris Smith, Charles Jones, and Charles Sherrod who were willing to give large batches of time to community organizing. I met Julian Bond, a student at Morehouse who, along with Lonnie King, also at Morehouse, had helped launch the Atlanta sit-ins and student movement. Forman convinced Julian in the spring of 1962 to join the SNCC staff as communications director and begin, among other duties, our publication, The Student Voice.