The Wrong Side of Murder Creek

by Bob Zellner

  Once again I decided to help myself if I could without letting go of the rail. I’d wait until he just about got the eye where he wanted it, between his thumb and finger, and then I’d jerk my head in such a way to make the eye slip from between his fingers.

  The hysteria of the men around me seemed to reach a peak and they all started climbing on top of me. I supposed they reasoned if they could not pull me loose from that hand rail then they could weigh me down enough to break me loose. So they played how many grown men can we pile on top of Zellner. While they were piling on I realized I had reached the top of the flight of stairs. The last thing I remember was that my head was sticking out of the pile and rested on the top step. I literally could not move. I could do nothing to stop the big brown boot that crashed into my head again and again. Just before I passed out, I thought, “So this is the way I die—like a football being kicked in a scrimmage.”

  The next thing I was aware of was a man’s face in my face saying over and over again, “I shoulda let them kill you, I shoulda let them kill you!” I later learned that it was the police chief, George Guy, saying, “I shoulda let them take you.”

  Even before I realized I was in the police chief’s office I said in my calmest voice with as much authority as I could muster, “I’d like to make a phone call.”

  There was a whoop of laughter but I recall one voice that said, “For goodness sake let the man make a telephone call. Nobody knows where he’s at.” Then, I noticed for the first time that the mob had filled the corridors of City Hall. The open door to the office was filled with rough characters holding every known weapon. Both sides of the door were lined, it seemed, from top to bottom with squeezed red faces peering at me. One great joker kept hollering, “You think I can hit him between the eyes from here with this here wrench?” Then he’d shake his Stillson wrench at me and grin like he was a great friend of mine.

  When my eyes cleared up a little I repeated I’d like to make a call. We’d been trained to insist on a call and to never leave a jail willingly without first letting someone know where we were and where we were going. The chief said, “Why, you’re not under arrest. You’re free to go. Go on, get out of here.”

  He motioned toward the door and the crowd in the door parted leaving only the sweating faces stacked along the door jamb. I could tell the terror was about to begin again and I didn’t want to show fear so I said rather loudly, “I do not choose to leave and I insist on making a phone call.”

  “You insist, do you?” the chief said in a rage. He grabbed me by what was left of my shirt front and hurled me toward the door.

  “Get out of my office you dirty nigger-loving son-of-a-bitch. I only brought you in here cause you looked like a good nigger lover—a Goddamned dead nigger lover.”

  He shoved me into the hallway and I was swept down the hall and out the front door. I was thrown unceremoniously into a beat-up car which filled up quickly with men from the mob. They all had on white shirts—two in the front and two in the back with me. The leader was the driver, although he never said anything, and I don’t know to this day if any were law officers. The two in front were pretty old and beefy with big pot bellies and real red faces. To me, they seemed hard-core Klan guys. In the back were a couple of younger guys who were supposed to be in fighting trim—the very active Klan guys. I wasn’t tied up and wasn’t handcuffed either, because it might have signified that the police had some jurisdiction over me. They could easily say, “Well, he was in the courthouse, and he was mouthing off, and these people dragged him off, and there was nothing we could do.” This was a lynching in process as far as I was concerned, and I was the lynchee. They had a noose. They never put the rope around the neck. They just brandished it in front of me.

  Other cars and some pickups nearby roared to a start like everybody was going to drive the Indianapolis 500. Off we went into the countryside. My eye was really hurting now but I immediately asked where we were going. Someone in the car said, “If you’re lucky you might make it to the jail in Magnolia.”

  I had never been to Magnolia and had no idea where it was until we got to the edge of town and a sign pointing to the left said “Magnolia” six miles. The car I was in and the long caravan of pickups sped past the sign. Instead of turning left toward Magnolia we continued straight on out into the country. I became convinced I would not survive the day. Once again now, just like during the beating, a sense of peace descended on me and I marveled at the contradiction. When it seemed there was a chance I’d survive I’d become frantic and nervous with an overpowering sense of dread. When it looked certain that I would die I would become calm. These people had been trying to kill me all afternoon, and now there didn’t seem to be anything to stop them. At this point, however, I sensed some indecision on their part. Before it had been “Just let me at him. I’ll rip him limb-from-limb.” Now they didn’t seem to know exactly what to do.

  Somebody said, “Everybody saw us leave town with him.”

  “Yeah,” someone else said, “but ain’t nobody goin’ to do nothing to us for doin’ anything to him.”

  “That’s true,” another said, “but we can get some of the boys from Amite County to take him off our hands. We’ll say we put up a fight but they got him away from us anyway.” Another man from the front seat turned around and said with some glee, “Yeah, we can even black one another’s eyes.”

  Every time I’d try to say something they’d say, “Shut up, nigger lover.”

  A man who looked like my uncle Harvey called me a nigger-loving motherfucking Jew communist queer Goddamn Yankee from New York City. That was too much for me. “Look, friend,” I said, “Five out of six is not bad but I’m not from New York. I’m from further south than you are. I’m from East Brewton, Alabama.”

  That seemed to really piss them off but it did get their attention. I figured that they must know that I wasn’t a Yankee because Doc had been in the mob before and he must know these yahoos. He’s probably back there in one of those pickups, I thought.

  I don’t know why it seemed so important to me for them to know I wasn’t a Yankee; maybe it was because I was still convinced they intended to kill me. So I took the opportunity to look each of them in the eye and ask, “Do you think you are capable of killing me by yourself or do you have to do it like cowards in a bunch?”

  I was playing with their heads, because I was convinced that they were going to kill me, and I wanted them to know that it was a cowardly thing to do. This was not Southern justice. I was getting more and more Southern as I went along so I speculated out loud that there was not a man among them that could whip me in a fair fight.

  They started arguing among themselves, and the CB radios were working, and I knew they were in contact with somebody somewhere. “Well, we can’t just string him up. Everybody saw us leave with him. Is anything is going to happen to us? They have us hanging him, and I ain’t gonna do it. Let’s turn him over to those boys down in Amite County. None of them were in McComb.” This was the Klan way; they could call on an action squad that would come from somewhere else.

  They stopped the car, and, after removing some rails at a cattle gap, proceeded to the back of a cow pasture near some trees. Stopping under a field pine, a man from another vehicle, a rickety old flatbed wood truck, ostentatiously removed a rope with an elaborately tied hangman’s knot. For the second or third time that day I heard myself saying under my breath, “These people are overreacting. They’ve got to be overreacting. This is after all, for Christ’s sake, my first demonstration.”

  When they started arguing again among themselves I thought I had a chance. The few men and vehicles around me in the woods were outnumbered by the cars and pickups just beyond the ridge of the field back up on the road. Every pickup truck, it seemed, was equipped with gun rack and a long whip antenna. Then they loaded me back into one of the pickups and off we went again. This time they did take me to the jail in Magn
olia. It was a low, squat little brick building standing out in a yard under a huge live oak tree. It didn’t look big enough to be a jail, but then it occurred to me I had never been in a jail before. Just because it looked like a jail you’d have in a photographer’s studio to take joke pictures of Cousin Jane and Uncle Henry in prison stripes, didn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t a jail. Anyway, it would have to do because it was the only one offered to me. By the time the caravan reached the jail I realized that most of the entourage had quietly slipped away. I remember feeling some ambivalence toward the uniformed police who came forward to escort me to the cell. I thought, “Are they protectors or not? Is this part of an elaborate charade leading still to my undoing?”

  The next thing that happened was a trusty, a black prisoner, came by and proceeded to put about five or six mattresses in my cell, saying, “You might need these.”

  I realized he was trying to tell me something. But I said, “I think one is enough.”

  And he said, no, take them. He said there was talk about them coming into the jail for me that night. He said, “If they come with gasoline or anything like that, you get in the corner and put those mattresses over you and hold out as long as you can.”

  I realized I was still not safe. I was very touched that he was so concerned. I mean, he didn’t ask me who I was or what. But he knew what was going on. So then I had to sweat that out.

  I didn’t have long to collect myself and my thoughts in my cell before another uniform came to take me out. I had been trying to find a shiny surface to use as a mirror so I could assess the damage to my face and my body. The guard caused me to jump when he shouted,

  “Okay, let’s go!”

  I really didn’t want to leave that cell. My sense of time was totally screwed up. I didn’t know if I had been in there ten minutes or two hours. The guard opened a door to the outside and the daylight streamed in. I immediately went limp and fell to the floor. I did not intend to leave that building without maximum resistance, no matter how nonviolent I was supposed to be. The uniformed guard suddenly laughed and said, “It’s all right. The Feds want to talk to you.”

  Disbelief, fear, anger, relief, everything flooded over me at once and I realized my system was finally overloaded. I felt like a package, highly prized, and at the same time despised as something unclean. I felt that for hours since those moments on the City Hall steps I had simply been carried along by the tide, tossed here and there willy-nilly wherever the force would take me. Now I finally put my foot down.

  “No,” I shouted with determination, “I will not leave this building. I have not been allowed a phone call to a lawyer. If it is the FBI, as you say, then they can come here to see me.”

  “Okay,” the guard said with a grin and stepped out the door. In a conversational tone of voice he said to someone outside, “Here he is but you’ll have to come get him.”

  At that four crisply dressed look-alike white men with white shirts and ties peered in at me on the floor and said pleasantly, “We need the sun so we can take pictures.”

  They lined me up against the outside wall of the jail and asked me to face the low sun in the west. When they began taking pictures of my wounds I stood there rather numbed and thought to myself, “All this because I had the audacity to march with some Mississippi black young people.”

  The sheriff and assorted deputies and a few remnants of the mob were standing a short distance away when one of the FBI agents sidled up to me and whispered, “It was pretty rough out there on the City Hall steps, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said, “It was nip and tuck there for a while.”

  “Well,” said the agent, “we didn’t want you to think you were all alone out there. We got it all down. We took real good notes. We wrote it all down.”

  Suddenly I realized that the FBI had stood there through the whole thing and had taken notes. First they were gonna watch me being made into a greasy spot in the street by this mob and then they were gonna watch me being taken into the car, being taken off for my last ride. And I realized that they had recorded a lynching which for no reasons of their own hadn’t happened. And I was so mad I didn’t want to speak to them anymore. I never ever had any illusions about the FBI or the federal government from that point. That taught me more about politics in this country and about the Feds than anything I ever learned after that. I realized they had recorded my death and they had gotten a description of everybody. They were going to be ready to testify or whatever, but it wasn’t going to make a difference about my poor, damned body. So I went back in the cell.

  Years later when the FBI refrain, “We can’t protect. We can only investigate” had become a grim joke with us in SNCC, I thought back to that afternoon and realized the many times the cops could have stopped violence in its tracks with very little effort. The mob in McComb had constantly looked to the police for approval of their violence. The cops gave their approval and the federal officers did nothing to stop the violence. When that little FBI agent whispered in my ear I learned a valuable lesson. Never depend on the federal government. Especially never count on an agency headed by J. Edgar Hoover. I didn’t really want to talk to them after that. I’d take my chances with my Southern haters. I knew where they stood.

  The next person I saw was Jack Young, one of the few black lawyers at that time in all of Mississippi. He came down from Jackson. I didn’t realize it until later, but he was almost paralyzed with fear. He looked cool to me then, talking to me in jail. He asked, “How are you doing?”

  I said, “Fine, but I’m going to need a toothbrush, and a few supplies, some books and stuff like that. You know, whenever you get a chance.”

  He said, “What are you talking about?”

  I said, “Well, I guess I’m going to be in here a few days, right?”

  I knew there was a SNCC policy of “Jail, no bail.” If you got arrested you just stayed. We didn’t want to tie up a whole lot of money in bail. You stayed until you could work it out somehow. He said, “Bob, if you make it through the night, you’re going to be lucky. This whole state is mobilizing to get your ass. I don’t mean to unduly alarm you, but you have got to get out of here. We’re trying to get you bail right this minute.”

  So I said, “Well, okay, whatever Forman says, whatever you guys work out.”

  That’s my last clear memory of that day. I believe Jack Young got me out because I left the jail with him. I remember coming out with him and seeing his car, a new blue Cadillac. Someone had taken a glass cutter and carved “KKK” into all his windows.

  I spent that night at Momma Cotton’s house in McComb with Reggie Robinson, Diane Nash, Marion Barry, and Charles Jones. Most everyone else had been arrested. We left town before daylight and reached Jackson just as the sun was rising, rested up, and drove the next night back to Atlanta. It was a demoralizing experience for us. We viewed our return to Atlanta as a retreat. For me, it was my first demonstration and my first time in jail. Some of the others had been in sit-ins and on freedom rides. They’d been arrested before. But it was like nobody had been around the murderous atmosphere and mayhem of McComb. It had been very brutal.

  Ella Baker was instrumental in rallying the troops. We continued our staff meeting in Atlanta. We met for a number of days. We began to evaluate what had happened. And Miss Baker said, “It’s going to be rough now, you know. We just have to stick it out. We can’t leave. We’ve got to go back to McComb.” That was the last thing anybody wanted to do, but eventually SNCC staff did go back both for the trials and for continuing voter registration.

  Chuck McDew, SNCC’s chairperson, Bob Moses, the leader of the Mississippi voter registration, and I were the only “adults” arrested during the march and prayer service on October 4. We were charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Brenda Travis was sixteen at the time, and over a hundred students from Burgland High School walked out when Brenda was expelled for
being arrested in the sit-in at the Greyhound bus station. I felt like telling the judge that it was Brenda Travis who contributed to my delinquency. She was a much more experienced freedom fighter than me; this was my first arrest, her third.

  My father and I had decided to test the criminal defense system in Mississippi by trying to get a white lawyer to represent me. Attorneys Jess Brown and Young were among the few black lawyers admitted to practice by the state courts. William Higgs in Jackson was the only white lawyer in the state willing to defend civil rights workers and he was being banished from the state on a drummed-up morals charge.

  Dad and I discussed our plan with Jim Forman and my present lawyer, Jack Young. At my arraignment in city court I would inform the judge that I had fired Attorney Young due to the large case load he carried. I would explain to the court that the difficulty arose from the fact that no white attorneys would represent civil rights workers. Young and Brown represented most freedom defendants in the state and the burden was too great to allow an adequate defense for the hundreds in jail.

  The first date for our trial was in mid-November. Judge Brumfield began by lecturing us on race relations.

  “Before you came here, Bob [Moses], the races here in McComb got along fine. Now you outside agitators have spread discord and caused the community to separate. We had good relations between the races but you are leading these children like lambs to the slaughter, and if you persist, then they will be slaughtered.”

  Then Judge Brumfield said something that stuck in Bob Moses’s craw. “Isn’t it true, Bob”—always the first name, never “Bob Moses,” and certainly never “Mr. Moses”—that before you came to our town, several of our fine colored citizens had been allowed to register to vote? Isn’t it a fact that that happened right here in Pike County?”