The Wrong Side of Murder Creek

by Bob Zellner

  When I was called to stand and face the bench, the judge read the charges: disorderly conduct, breach of the peace, resisting arrest, and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. When he asked how I pleaded, I answered in a strong voice that I was not guilty.

  Brumfield looked up then and, seeing that I was standing alone, asked, “Are you represented by counsel, Mr. . . . Zellner?” I explained that I could not get a single Mississippi lawyer to plead my case.

  “What’s wrong with Jack here? Wasn’t he representing you?”

  “Yes, sir,” I answered, “‘Jack, here,’ as you refer to attorney Jack Young, no longer represents me.”

  “Why not? Isn’t Jack good enough?” Brumfield inquired.

  “Mr. Jack Young is an extremely good lawyer, Your Honor,” I replied, “But he and his associate, attorney Jess Brown, are handling almost all the civil rights cases in the state of Mississippi. Over a hundred of his clients are involved in this case alone. Mr. Young and Mr. Brown need some help. As you know, sir, these two men are incredibly hard-working and skilled at what they do. They are among the few Negroes admitted to practice in the state of Mississippi, but I am confident they are not the only attorneys competent to practice constitutional law.”

  Judge Brumfield looked more and more uncomfortable as I spoke to the court and the audience. The entire black community seemed to be present. “Young man,” the judge interrupted, “have you made any effort to obtain counsel or is this just your speculation?”

  Exactly the question I was waiting for—I pounced on it. Talking fast, I told him Dad and I had left no stone unturned to find a lawyer in Mississippi. I pointed to Dad who was sitting on the front row holding a folder documenting our contacts with John C. Satterfield, a white Mississippi lawyer who happened to be the current president of the American Bar Association. Brumfield sputtered and seemed to be looking around for help. While he was thus speechless, I took the opportunity to quote from Satterfield’s letter to me: “Attorney Satterfield’s letter reads in part, ‘Mr. Zellner you are a disgrace to your race. If you want to be a Negro, why don’t you just turn black? I wouldn’t represent you under any circumstances and I doubt that any white lawyer in the great state of Mississippi would either.”

  I went on that Daddy and I had written, phoned, and telegraphed more than a hundred Mississippi lawyers whose answers were substantially the same as Satterfield’s.

  Brumfield rallied in an effort to regain control over his courtroom. “Why don’t you just continue with Jack . . .,” since I had put him on the spot for not granting attorney Young the courtesy title of “Attorney,” the judge fumbled for words. “. . . your lawyer, the lawyer of record, you know what I mean?”

  “I know what you mean, Judge, but even you have to admit that this attorney is completely overworked. That’s why I fired him and I guess you will have to allow me to represent myself, unless you have a suggestion as to where I can find a good Mississippi lawyer willing to represent me in this important case.”

  “Me find you a lawyer . . .? This case is continued until the next term of court, and you, Mr. Zellner, better come with your lawyer!” The gavel went BANG!

  The judge didn’t want to hear from Daddy because he had written letters to the judge, the sheriff and Governor Ross Barnett demanding that I be protected when I showed up in court. Reverend James Abraham Zellner had done the whole Christian thing by telling each level of law enforcement that some advisors had recommended that I not even show up for court and forfeit the bond because it was too dangerous to appear. I had never given any thought to that option but Dad explained that we felt honor-bound to return for trial because that’s what we promised when I was bonded out of jail.

  Daddy had told them all, “I know you fine Southern gentlemen will guarantee the safety of my son. He has undertaken an obligation to return and you are sworn to protect him and his fellow defendants.”

  From then on, each time I showed up for a trial date and the judge found that I had been unable to get a lawyer; he continued the case until the next term of court. They never got around to trying me. I hope the bond money was returned to SCEF.

  11

  Working On the Chain Gang

  I came into the SNCC office early on a quiet Sunday morning on December 10, 1961. I was in Atlanta for a few days and eager to finish the plans for my next road trip to Southern campuses. Sometimes I approached a campus cold, with no contacts, but work was slow that way. A contact on campus or in the community saved a day of sitting around a coffee shop ferreting out the odd “liberal” or “concerned” student or faculty. Two names constituted a veritable network.

  I didn’t expect anyone to be in the SNCC office but there was James Forman—sweeping again, the executive secretary of our organization, pushing a broom. He looked up as I entered the cramped office. He usually wore a suit—always the same one; the cliché “rumpled” would have been a compliment to Jim’s suit. Having grown up in a Southern Methodist minister’s house, one of five boys, with a schoolteacher mother, I was acquainted with the look of a suit of clothes that could barely keep up appearances.

  With a gleam in his dark brown eyes, Forman extended the broom toward me. I accepted it, familiar now with his routine. “You may be a hero to the New York literati,” he laughed, “but here in Atlanta this morning, you ain’t nothing but a poor-ass SNCC field secretary. Everybody got to do his time on the broom. Keeps us humble. And since you’re white, you need to sweep a lot.” It was exactly like the first time we met a few months earlier.

  “Ain’t no ‘shit work’ in SNCC, it’s all just work,” Forman repeated one of his favorite sayings, sat down in front of the typewriter, and adjusted a stencil. His eyes betrayed, as usual, a generally amused expression. I remained so aware of his qualities—intelligent, opinionated, and prone to argue strongly for his position, he also possessed an acerbic wit and a disarming sense of humor. And as I had learned, he was endowed with immense physical courage and coolness under fire—a steady resolve that saved lives on occasion.

  I pondered again what my recent college mates would think of me now, being handed a broom by a black man to sweep a cluttered office full of broken furniture. I wondered what would amaze them more—the part about me sweeping or having a black boss? How many Huntingdon College magna cum laude graduates, I thought, took jobs wielding a broom at the behest of a Negro superior?

  As Forman began banging on the typewriter, he asked casually, “What you doing today?”

  I told Forman I was making some calls and lining up some contacts before heading toward Texas. When he didn’t say anything, I continued, “I thought I’d hit Alabama, northern Mississippi, and maybe stop at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville on the way over. Anne Braden’s got a couple of names for me there.”

  “How about going down to Albany?”—he pronounced it All-benny like they did in southwest Georgia—“They’ve been having a hard time getting started but now things are going to happen and Charles Sherrod and Cordell Reagon need help. We are going to have a little freedom ride.”

  I must have looked like I’d been hit with an ax handle. Jim looked me dead in the eye. “I know you need to go on the road and that you have to get to those campuses sooner or later, since that’s what the five thousand dollars is for, but . . .”

  “Sooner or later?” I said, thinking of the grant that the Southern Conference Education Fund had made to SNCC for my campus traveling. My job was to contact white Southerners and introduce them to the movement and try to explain what was happening. I had marched in McComb a few months before, where I was beaten, nearly lynched, and then thrown in jail, in order to become a part of what I was reporting. How could I explain the sit-ins and freedom rides without being a part of the action? In SNCC, one’s commitment was sometimes measured by the extent to which one’s body was on the line in the toughest places.

  “Several people are going, m
an, and I just thought you might want to go along. You know that Interstate Commerce Commission ruling was supposed to take effect last month. Look, I would not tell you to go. . . but we do need you. We want to make it pretty close to half black and half white. You remember that Sherrod came to McComb to help us out the day you and Moses and the rest were tried in front of Judge Brumfield? Now we need to help him out—we’ve been working on it about a week and we are going today.”

  “Today?”

  “I already got the tickets. We’re going down this afternoon on the Illinois Central and we’re going to integrate the train and Chief Laurie Pritchett’s white waiting room.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Besides you and me, there’s Tom Hayden; Joan Browning, one of our white volunteers; Lenora Taitt from Spelman; Norma Collins, our office manager; and Wyatt Walker not only advanced me the money for the tickets, but also said Bernard Lee—‘little MLK’ himself—can go along to represent SCLC. Oh yes, we’ll have international coverage on this freedom ride; Per Laursen is riding with us. And Casey Hayden will be going along as our designated observer.”

  Per was a Danish journalist writing a book on the civil rights movement in the American South to be called Grace and Grits. Laursen filed stories from time to time with various European news outlets.

  “Europe,” Jim was saying, “is more interested in us than these so-called newspapers down here, or in this country, for that matter. If we can blow the lid off Albany, we’ll get attention. We may have gotten our asses kicked in Mississippi. Hell, Herbert Lee was killed in McComb and that got six inches in the New York Times. But if we do this right, Zellner, we can kick ass in southwest Georgia. Okay?” I was still skeptical.

  ”You really should do it. I’ve called in our plans to the SNCC folk in Albany—when we’re arriving and so forth. Sherrod and them will have a crowd at the train station, and when Chief Pritchett orders us to leave the waiting room, we’ll just leave. There’s nothing he can do, and we will have proved our point that the government is not enforcing the ICC ruling for integrating transportation facilities. You’ll be back here in a couple of days ready to go back on the road. Nobody is supposed to get arrested. Try thinking of yourself as our secret weapon, a Southern white cat with stories of how SNCC is destroying segregation in the South. Run around the block, pack light, hurry back and be ready to go. Go! Here they come.”

  I ran past Tom, Casey, and Per Laursen as they entered the office.

  Tom and Per looked like they were going on safari. They were obviously ready to be arrested if necessary. Their knapsacks, no doubt, contained the regulation toothbrush, toothpaste, Kleenex, and a book to read. Casey was dressed in style, as always since, as Jim said, she was to be the “observer.” Observers were not supposed to attract attention; they avoided arrest so as to report to the press and headquarters.

  I was still housed in the Negro Butler Street YMCA, around the block from the Auburn Avenue SNCC office; I paid fifty cents a night. Rent was cheap because I didn’t spend many nights in Atlanta. I threw some things together—enough for a few days. I had already picked up the SNCC habit of keeping a toothbrush and a good paperback with me at all times, never knowing when jail might come, and a benevolent jailer would let you keep one or the other, or sometimes both.

  Back at the office the mood was festive. Everybody acted as though making an integrated foray into enemy territory was the jolliest occasion imaginable. Lunches were packed and everybody checked to see if their “jail clothes”—khakis, jeans and work shirts—were in order. We weren’t supposed to be arrested, but everybody remembered trips with James Forman that ended in the hoosegow.

  The train crew scowled at our integrated group, and the conductor asked us to move. When we refused, they let it pass. Most sane people were competent to segregate themselves, they seemed to think. Leave this crazy group alone and when they are gone, life in the South will revert to its quietly segregated correctness. It will be okay as long as the other passengers don’t get the idea that they can henceforth sit where they please. Most of our group slept or read, and some gazed at the Georgia countryside as it drifted by. I sat on the right side next to the window cradling a stack of student newspapers from around the South. I planned to scan them for evidence of any stirring of enlightenment on Southern campuses. I was pessimistic.

  Per Laursen relieved me of this duty by taking the aisle seat, whipping out his reporter’s notebook and asking me to fill him in on Albany. I suggested he talk to Forman since I knew very little except what I’d heard about the place. But Forman was dozing so Per asked me why SNCC was putting all of its staff into Albany. I filled him in as best I could. The staff had been together for only a short while, I explained, though most were experienced jail veterans seasoned in the sit-ins of 1960 and the freedom rides earlier in the year. The group had jelled when fifteen of the most experienced freedom fighters decided over the summer to become full-time organizers.

  Brenda Travis, age sixteen, Hollis Watkins, nineteen, and Curtis Hayes, age eighteen, had helped with Bob Moses’s voter registration campaign. This led to Herbert Lee’s murder in Liberty, Mississippi, and was followed by the Klan and police terror in McComb, which had welded SNCC together, hardening everyone’s resolve to become professional revolutionaries.

  Sherrod and Reagon, now patiently building the Albany movement, had both been involved during the summer in Mississippi. Our main “adult” advisor, Ella Baker, had counseled us to return to McComb as soon as we could rest a bit and lick our wounds and bruises. In all our discussions concerning the work in the Albany area, we had constantly reminded each other of the importance of digging in for the long haul. If the bad guys got the idea that a few days of violence and brutality could rid their area of those “Snickers and Slickers,” we would never be able to organize in the rural South, the location of the vast majority of black people. We did not intend to be run out of southwest Georgia the way the Klan thought they had chased us from southwest Mississippi.

  I reminded Per that all the SNCC people were not involved in Albany. Moses, SNCC Chairman Chuck McDew, and the others were still in jail in McComb. James Bevel and Diane Nash had just gotten married and were continuing the SNCC project, Move On Mississippi (MOM). Marion Barry, John Lewis, Julian Bond, and others were carrying on their duties. We were headed toward Albany because Forman thought our organizers in southwest Georgia deserved a shot at their dream—the total mobilization of a Deep South community to end all forms of segregation. And they had been successful so far, not just in mobilizing the young people but in building a community-wide movement. The kids took the lead in going to jail; now the adults were stirring. When children get involved, many parents tend to follow. I ended my monologue saying I was particularly interested in the work because Charles Sherrod was determined to prove that white organizers could function in even the riskiest field work. Albany was an example of our commitment to organize in a way that was consistent with our goal of the “beloved community.”

  I began stuffing papers in my bag. Per said, “Wait, I’ve got more questions.” The train slowed and he looked outside.

  “Okay, later,” I said.

  The train pulled into Albany’s Union Railway Terminal. Casey Hayden gently shook Forman awake and he was delighted to see his idea of the freedom ride working. He was often surprised when plans worked the way they were supposed to. After waking Jim, Casey discreetly exited from a different train door. Nobody in the terminal building looked like passengers. They looked like cops and there were lots of them, and they had allowed in only two SNCC people, Charles Jones and Bertha Gober, along with A. C. Searles from a local black newspaper.

  Seeing our SNCC comrades made the occasion feel like a homecoming. I remembered Charles Jones from McComb, his gorgeous bass voice singing, “Woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom.” Bertha Gober, an undergraduate from Albany State, wrote one of our freedom songs,
“We’ll Never Turn Back.” During the march in McComb we had sung her haunting, aching melody “. . . we have hung our heads and cried, cried for those like Lee who’ve died . . .” She and another Albany State student, Blanton Hall, had helped spark the Albany movement by being arrested in the white waiting room of the Trailways bus station at the beginning of the Thanksgiving holiday.

  Police occupied the white areas in the terminal, and Albany Police Chief Laurie Pritchett, dressed in a starched white shirt and sharply creased blue pants, came over to us and asked us to leave the station.

  Forman asked, “Does that mean that this facility is segregated?”

  “It means,” the chief’s voice rose sharply, “I’m ordering you to move on or be arrested.”

  We moved quickly, Bertha Gober and Jones steering us toward the white exit into bright December sunshine where we were soon surrounded by cheering people from the Albany movement who had been waiting for us in front of the terminal. They shouted approval of our test of Southern hospitality on Georgia’s trains. Pritchett reacted like a cat when the mouse is getting away. He had not counted on us leaving when he barked his order. About to board the cars and vans waiting in front of the terminal, our integrated group was becoming too much of an affront to the tightly segregated Albany society.

  Had we managed to get into the various cars and leave for the Shiloh Baptist Church where we were to attend a mass meeting, our plan would have worked. Just as it looked like we would get away, Pritchett’s temper got the best of him. He shouted, “Officers, move out!” and, to us, “Don’t move! You’re under arrest.”

  They grabbed and stuffed us into police paddy wagons and eleven of us broke into song, waving like we’d just won a big election. Along with eight of us from Atlanta, they arrested Charles Jones, Bertha Gober, and Willie Mae Jones, another Albany State student. The civil disobedience phase of the Albany movement was underway with a bang and a song. On the way to the Albany jail Bertha and Charles led off with a deafening chorus of “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around.” The metal walls of the paddy wagon reverberated with a new verse, “Ain’t gonna let Chief Pritchett turn me around . . . . “