The Wrong Side of Murder Creek

by Bob Zellner

  All that fall of 1961, we would go to B. B. Beamon’s on Auburn Avenue for our meetings. Forman made an agreement with the restaurant that we could run a tab there and eat and meet in the back room. When Jim first introduced me to some other staff members at an early meeting, he looked down at me and said, “And this guy is Robert Zellner and he’s really all right. His accent is a little on the peckerwood side, but it’s okay because he is supposed to represent us on white campuses, hopefully. I suggested that he come to the staff meeting because if he’s going to interpret what we are doing, then he needs to know what we are doing. Anyway, he’s not so bad after you get to know him a little. I’ve already taped him for an hour or so, and I better tell you right now that his granddaddy was a Klansman, and his father for a short while; but I don’t think he is.” Forman’s hand shot out, “Only kidding, of course.” And he grinned at me.

  Those fall meetings were very long, and people would come in and out, some from out of town, many visitors from northern groups interested in supporting us—it was so open and inclusive—the real meaning of “the beloved community.”

  Ella Baker, one of our advisors, was always there. Ella had lots of influence, because she had been instrumental in the beginning when she worked for Dr. King and SCLC and had organized the original student demonstrators to come to Shaw University, in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Easter Weekend of 1960. She wanted to make sure that the student movement would be an independent organization, rather than being absorbed as a youth branch of existing civil rights groups such as SCLC or CORE. SCLC had provided eight hundred dollars to get the conference together and its leadership may have hoped to get SNCC as the youth wing of SCLC. Ella, in her quiet way, convinced the students that they needed to have their own organization. Her vision, and indeed ours, was not to have a central charismatic leader, but a series of local leaders in various areas, with a coordinating aspect from leaders and staff who would make some general policies.

  During those Atlanta staff meetings, everybody was smoking, and Ella had a bad asthmatic condition. She would sit by the door, and when necessary, she would go out and get fresh air. Ella was usually quiet so that you became aware of her immense influence and wisdom gradually. She always wore a little pillbox hat, like Jackie Kennedy, and a suit. She had sensible, classical clothes, and very few outfits. That was kind of the organizers’ way. We all had one good outfit and then jeans and some shirts. Most of us paid so little attention to our clothes that every six months or so people would say, “You know, this is too raggedy for you to be wearing. You need to get rid of it.” People told stories about Forman’s shoes. He would wear them until they were just in tatters, and we would connive to steal his shoes and hide them so he would be forced to go get another pair.

  I remember Anne Braden saying during the first couple of months of my work when I was visiting her in Louisville, “Do you have any clothes? Do you have a suit?” I had had some suits in college, but not anymore. So she went with me to get a suit and paid for it—$55—and she said they would just take a dollar or so out of my salary until I had repaid it.

  Early on in those Atlanta meetings, a continuing theme was emerging. Should we launch seriously into voter registration? Already two distinct wings were forming among SNCC staff. Prior to the fall of 1961 the predominant form of SNCC work was nonviolent direct action. Diane Nash and John Lewis, along with the majority of the Nashville veterans, favored a continued emphasis on direct action. Some saw demonstrations to be more militant than voter registration work and more likely to arouse the Southern grassroots. They were among the frontline troops who had lived through the lunch counter sit-ins and the freedom rides; most of them had been tempered to a brilliant resilience while coming of age in backwoods jails and prisons. They were convinced the Kennedys and their foundation contacts wanted to detour the struggle out of the streets into what was considered more sedate voter registration campaigns. The militants could see the seductiveness of the promise of big money and the hint that, since voting laws were clear, “the federal government can give you more protection.” It was like, you young people calm down and we will facilitate funds for you through all these big foundations.

  Direct-action SNCC people didn’t want voter registration to sap the spirit of the movement. They favored local activity that got underway quickly under the leadership of SNCC staffers like Charles Sherrod in southwest Georgia. They were not against voter registration efforts but felt it should be considered secondary, with the main focus on integrating the lunch counters, theaters, bowling alleys, libraries, and schools, and when appropriate to branch out to white-only beaches and parks—even to pray-ins in white churches.

  So, in the early days, the philosophy of SNCC was slowly being hammered out, and the heated and strong feeling on both sides—direct action vs. voter registration—was becoming quite evident. Some wondered if the organization would split into two different groups with some people doing what Bob Moses was doing already—organizing around voter registration in Mississippi. He had made so many good contacts with older activists there, like E. W. Steptoe, Amzie Moore, and Medgar Evers, and they were hungry for help. People were being threatened and killed for attempting to register.

  At one of our meetings, Ella Baker listened to all of the arguments and let things play themselves out, and then, in her usual style, when she felt it was time to reach consensus, she said, “Now, we have two apparently different philosophies and directions and thrusts here. Think about voter registration in Mississippi and Bob Moses setting up the mechanism to do it. Large groups of black people going to the courthouse and demanding to register—nothing could be more direct action than that. There’s no reason why we can’t have two different tasks in the organization—they can go on together and at the same time.” The policy that every issue be resolved by consensus was one reason why our meetings lasted so long. We asked if someone still felt unreadiness on an issue, would they still be able to go along with it, in the sense of democratic centralism. In this instance, we decided that it wasn’t necessary for the organization to split in two, which would have shortened its life considerably and diminished its impact on the general movement.

  The momentum for all activities and building the strength of the local people often happened at mass meetings at local churches, with music, music, music. The use of music to pull everyone together developed very early, and I found it extremely moving. It came to full bloom in the Albany movement in 1962, but whatever your ideological commitment or intellectual involvement, or your fears—the movement’s music leveled us all to the same emotional and spiritual plane. None of us have ever forgotten those songs, and in the shock-troop days, in dangerous situations, the music gave the people strength and courage—soul force. It also gave quite a bit of pause to the posses, state troopers, and police. For some people who were going to break up the demonstrations and do possible violence, they had to steel themselves to attack people while they were singing and while they were praying. A lot of the police would say, “Well, you know, I’m just doing my job,” and the demonstrators would confront them, “Are you a Christian? Do you think this is a Christian thing to do? Why are you mistreating us?”

  I was quiet during the SNCC staff meetings. I would talk to people during breaks and have conversations with people, but mostly I saw my role as getting as much information and understanding as possible, because they were the experienced ones, the veterans who had been through arrests, beatings, and prison. Sometimes there were a few other white people at the meetings—Connie Curry and Howard Zinn, who was then teaching at Atlanta’s Spelman College. And Casey and Tom Hayden might be in and out, and later Dorothy Burlage, who came to work with Connie in the NSA office.

  In the meantime, Jim Forman was keeping an eye on me—keeping me close to observe me and to prevent my doing anything foolish. I don’t think he trusted me until after McComb, Mississippi.

  10

  Murder and Mayhem in M
cComb

  I don’t remember exactly where I was when I heard that Herbert Lee had been murdered at the cotton gin in the town of Liberty in Amite County, Mississippi, on September 25, 1961. Lee had been working with Bob Moses on voter registration. But right after that news, Forman made the decision that we would have a SNCC staff meeting in McComb on October 4. McComb, Mississippi—that had to be the first time I had ever heard of the place. I had been working on my campus travel schedule for two weeks, but before I could leave on the tour I needed to know a lot more about SNCC. Forman said the best way to learn was to go to the staff meeting in Mississippi. Since Mississippi seemed to play such a large role in SNCC’s current activity, I figured I better start there, so I did some quick research in the Atlanta public library—starting with McComb. I felt guilty going into a segregated library, but we needed the information.

  McComb is in Pike County, located in the piney woods of south central Mississippi. Though I grew up in deepest darkest rural Alabama, I was afraid of Mississippi. My childhood was filled with blood-chilling stories of lynchings like that of Mack Parker, hung from a bridge in southern Mississippi, and Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Chicago child murdered in cold blood by supposedly grown Christian white men in Money, Mississippi, in 1955.

  McComb, from its founding in 1872, always was a working-class and agricultural town. The town took its name from Henry Simpson McComb, magnate of the New Orleans, Jackson and Northern Railroad, which had its terminus in McComb. The new town was formed while south Mississippi was still in the potentially revolutionary grip of Reconstruction. About sixty-one years before I first laid eyes on McComb, a Southern white man arrived who would do the most to shape McComb and the surrounding piney woods. His name was Captain J. J. White, and he had just been released from the Federal War Prison. Though most would not speak of it, it was assumed that White had been convicted of war crimes committed during what became known (or mostly unknown in American history) as the Fort Pillow massacre. The slaughter occurred when rebel troops commanded by General Nathan Bedford Forrest (later to lead the Ku Klux Klan) overran the fort, which was defended mostly by uniformed black Union soldiers. When the African American troops surrendered to overwhelming force and numbers, they were summarily executed.

  It was not reassuring to me to find that Captain White, a war criminal convicted of murdering black soldiers, was the one who built the sawmill south of town and the McComb Cotton Mills. Captain White’s mills, along with the maintenance shops of the Illinois Central Railroad (successor to the New Orleans, Jackson and Northern) and the McColgan Brothers ice house, were the foundation of McComb’s economy.

  The decision to meet in McComb set a precedent for SNCC to go to wherever the hotspot of activity might be. There was no meeting in a safe reliable space in the rear—you held them on the front lines, and the meeting became part of the front-line activity. When we heard about Lee’s murder, it confirmed what everybody had been thinking, that Mississippi was going to be a bloody affair—whites there weren’t going to allow voter registration without people forfeiting their lives. Forman told us, “Staff needs to gear up, get to Jackson on the evening of the third, get a few hours sleep and go into McComb before daylight.” With Lee’s murder, the police and Klan vigilantes would be on the watch for our coming in, so we figured the best time to go in would be three or four o’clock in the morning. Forman said for safety cars would caravan together from Atlanta to Jackson. At the time, we had no new cars. Everyone had raggedy cars. I had already gotten myself a used car for the student traveler project. Anne Braden helped me, and it cost $700. It was a green 1953 Chevrolet—raggedy, but a good fast car, with protective coloration.

  The point of the McComb meeting was to have the whole coordinating committee ratify what the core staff was suggesting—yes, we can do voter registration, and yes, we can do direct action at the same time. Staff members were becoming policy makers, determining the direction of SNCC’s work. They would then bring it to the coordinating committee for discussion, opinions, and a final decision. Events moved so fast that important decision were being made in the field by the active staff, to be ratified later. The immediate decision was whether Moses and the others doing voter registration would do it as part of SNCC, and the answer was yes.

  Nobody dreamed what that day in McComb would become.

  October 4, 1961, began for me when the Atlanta people drove from Tougaloo down to McComb. I was the only white person. Before daylight I could sit up, but by sun-up I had to be hidden, and I lay on the floorboard of the car. Every time we stopped for gas I’d be covered up completely. Once when I complained about the heavy, hot blankets—that we should have brought sheets, the others laughed and teased me about being a white cat feeling more comfortable in sheets.

  Driving to Mississippi, I remembered my recent trip to Atlanta from Alabama and found I was having an emotional reaction to the big houses we passed. I hadn’t seen those houses when growing up, They were the seats of powerful people, and I felt the same way about those houses that the average black Southerner did—they were totally alien, symbols of illegitimate power that I viscerally opposed. And they exercised that power over not only black people, but also poor white people. I had already developed a strong sense of populism—of being in favor of the little guy, and I realized I was off to do battle against the “big house.”

  On the way into Mississippi, I was also feeling the difference between my home state and Mississippi. In Alabama you would be wary and somewhat on guard, but that didn’t compare to everybody’s apprehension and tension the closer we got to Mississippi. The welcome sign at the state line depicted big magnolia blossoms, and it said, “Welcome to Mississippi, the Magnolia State.” The magnolias are redolent of the antebellum South and the big plantations. We also saw the signs on the edge of small towns—for Rotary and Civitan clubs, and there was one of a saw blade with a man on a horse, saying, “The KKK welcomes you to . . .”

  Whenever SNCC people went into Mississippi, there was a good bit of gallows humor. On this first time, I remember the feeling of quietness and the kind of tightening up. It was like girding for battle, then pulling within yourself so you wouldn’t be so exposed—putting on some psychological armor. In the car, it would manifest itself when an experienced veteran would say, “We have to be careful here. Watch the rearview mirror. Definitely do not exceed the speed limit, and don’t go obviously too slow.” Someone would joke, “Yeah, you know what a Mississippi liberal is? . . . It’s a man who will hang you from a low limb.” Then someone said, “Listen, if we really cared about living, we wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with.” There was always that kind of camaraderie. We were all in it together.

  From Atlanta to Jackson took us around eight hours. We left Atlanta in late morning and got into Jackson by dark. We went straight to Tougaloo College, an all-black college that became a favorite place for movement people to stay. It wasn’t exactly free territory, but it was relatively free—like sanctuary. There were three cars in our group, another couple that had gone on earlier, and another couple that were joining us later. In all, there were six or seven cars. We were pretty worn out by the time we got to Tougaloo. We met in the cafeteria for a little while, and then we all went to bed.

  It was an hour and a half to two hours to McComb. To get there by five, we must have left about 2:20 in the morning. The instructions were for the cars not to all go in one line but to always have two cars together. It was pretty quiet all the way into McComb, because people were continuing their sleep. I slept in a corner of the back seat so I could slip down on the floorboard very easily if need be. I put my head back, and it seemed that five minutes later we were coming into McComb. I remember wanting to see what it looked like, but the others put me under the blanket even though it was still somewhat dark. Looking out occasionally, I could see we were in a black section called Burgland, on a gravel road. There were shallow ditches on both sides of the street a
nd little picket fences, and there was a little store with pool tables on the first floor of the Masonic Lodge where SNCC had reserved the upstairs meeting room. I was anxious to get to our room, so I zipped out of the car and up the outside steps into the room which was about thirty by sixteen feet. It had four windows on the long side and no windows on the other side and one each at either end. The spare, austere room was furnished with several folding chairs and a couple of tables in one corner, an American flag and a Masonic flag, and several small cabinets. Somebody brought in some breakfast. I had no idea it was going to be one of the longest and most terrifying days of my life.

  People started coming in and gathering in little knots to say hello. “Oh, I haven’t seen you since Highlander.” “What’s this about so and so?” “What’s happening in Albany?” “Where’s Cordell?” “What’s Reggie doing?” “He’s on the way?” There was a lot of catching up. The few who I remembered meeting at various times, I went over to and greeted. They responded in such a way that I could tell they had heard a fair amount of discussion of me. Someone asked if I really thought I would be able to talk to white students about the movement. One comment really set up what happened later in the day. “You’re gonna have to be cool. You’re gonna have to stay out of things if you’re ever going to get anything done.” Bernard Lafayette always had a wry sense of humor. He said, “The white people are going to string you up, boy. They’re gonna be on your ass like white on rice. You better lay low or you’re never even gonna get to a white campus.”