The Wrong Side of Murder Creek

by Bob Zellner

  “Zellner, does anything ever happen in the godforsaken book, if you can call it that?”

  “No,” I replied, “It’s just that kind of book.”

  “Who would ever write such a book and what fool would ever read such a messed-up book?”

  “You were very interested in reading it.” I reminded him.

  “Screw you, Zellner.”

  “Oh wait, I left out the good part where the smart one has sex with an Indian girl.” McDew perked up. I now had his undivided attention.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that part, asshole?”

  “Wait,” I said, “Maybe it was the dumb one. The book said he was really good looking, blond, blue-eyed, that sort of stuff . . .”

  “I don’t care which one it was, just tell me about it. What about the girl, what did she look like? At this rate, I might as well go back to my candy wrapper. I still got it, you know.”

  “You better hold on to it,” I said. “I was lying about the Indian maiden.”

  “There’s no girl! Zellner, screw you.”

  I felt bad about holding out hope for Chuck when there was none, but the back and forth about The Riders of the Sawtooth Range had kept me from screaming for another hour or two.

  Eventually I did start screaming until they came. They just said, “No, your time is not up yet. Then I would scream some more. Finally, they opened the door and pulled their guns. “We’re gonna kill you,” the two ugly guards yelled.

  I said, “That’ll be a relief to me. You gotta kill me or let me out of here—both of us, because as long as I can scream, I will scream.”

  Finally, they let us go take a shower, but even that was part of the torture. They said, “We understand you’ve had enough. You don’t have to go back in there. We’ll put you in a regular cell. You get to take a shower every day. Everything is going to be different.” They brought us to the shower, and when they took us back they put us in the sweat box again. The heat was turned up even higher, it seemed.

  We were in the sweat box for the rest of the time. We were in jail about thirty-five days before SCEF raised bail for Chuck and me, but we had to leave Dion behind. McDew and I were indeed tortured, but Dion suffered a worse fate. He was repeatedly brutalized during the fifty-nine days of his original sixty-day sentence. SNCC then bailed him out just before his sentence was up, because if you serve your entire sentence, there is no appeal. His case was appealed over a couple of years, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to review it. This was unusual, because we usually won once we got into federal court. So Dion’s conviction in Louisiana was upheld, and the state agreed that if he would turn himself in to the Baton Rouge court, he would get credit for time served, they would suspend the remainder of his sentence, and he wouldn’t have to go back to jail. Instead, when his lawyers brought him back, the Baton Rouge authorities captured him and put him in the same torture cell for sixty more days.

  Some of us think that these folks who did things to us are like war criminals, and many of them are still alive. A few are being brought to justice now in high-profile cases. I used to think that maybe they led miserable lives themselves, but I really don’t think they ever drew an uncomfortable breath. Like Medgar Evers’s murderer Byron de la Beckwith later said, “Shooting that nigger was no more painful than my wife having labor pains.”

  Much later, at the bus station in Mobile, I ran into one of my fellow prisoners—the nice man in the tweed jacket. Our seats were back to back and he turned to me and said, “How’d you like the East Baton Rouge Parish Jail?”

  We shared stories and I learned the secret of how I survived Baton Rouge. It turned out he was one of my angels. First of all, he reminded me of their bringing me mattresses and telling me to make sure to stay in a corner near the front. He said that there were two or three people who were determined to watch my back and try to minimize attempts to hurt me, and they did it the whole time I was there. Then he said, “I am curious about one thing, though. You remember that first little guy who came up to you—with those blackened teeth? You wouldn’t have had a moment’s trouble if you had just knocked the daylights out of that little son of a bitch. We all knew you could have.”

  I had to explain to him that I was doing my best to be nonviolent in the tradition of SNCC, the group I worked with.

  13

  Organizing in Talladega

  Talladega, Alabama, was my first community organizing project for SNCC. They didn’t directly give the Talladega assignment to me—it was a stop-gap measure. I was in the Atlanta office between campus trips in the spring of 1962. Jim Forman abhorred any vacuum in work schedules, even if you said you needed a few days to write letters or do some research or rest.

  He said, “Well, go write letters or research or rest in Talladega, because I’ve been promising them that somebody would come over there. The students at Talladega College want to do some workshops because they are eager to integrate the lunch counters in that little town and they have some folks that are ready to go. I don’t have anybody to send over there.”

  “Don’t you think it would be better to send a black staff person?”

  “Yes, and I will, but since you have time, I want you to go over there. They want to have a speaker this Sunday at the convocation, and I want you to go and talk about McComb and your campus traveling. Just tell them about what SNCC is doing.”

  He gave me the name of a young woman, Dorothy Vails, who was student body president and head of the campus Social Action Committee. I went to Talladega on March 5, 1962, and spoke at the convocation. Dorothy introduced me, and I talked about SNCC. This was an all-black college. I got a really good response, and we all met afterwards and went to dinner at the dining hall. All the activist students came over and said, “When do the workshops start?” They asked if I knew how to do them, and I told them I had been in them and could get them started until SNCC sent somebody else from Atlanta. That Monday, I got wrangled into teaching the workshop. I found out later that they all thought I was a light-skinned Negro.

  One young woman came up to me at one of the workshops and said, “Bob, when Dorothy introduced you to speak at the convocation, I thought you were a white guy.”

  “What made you think that?”

  “Well, you look as white as anybody I’ve ever seen.”

  “People have said that. How did you know that I wasn’t white?”

  “The way you talk, and you’re a SNCC guy. And when you smiled, I saw your dimples. White people don’t have dimples.”

  It was touching when she came to me later on and said, “Bob, you are white.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I found out you’re white.”

  “Does it make any difference?”

  “I don’t know, but you’re white, right?”

  “Well, I was raised white, but I don’t really consider it a big difference.”

  “I’ve never met a white person I could actually talk to.”

  “You can talk to me.”

  “Can I ask you some questions? Can I smell your hair?”

  “Sure.”

  I leaned over, and she smelled my hair, and she said, “That doesn’t smell like chicken feathers.”

  “No, I hope not.”

  “I thought all white people’s hair smelled like chicken feathers.”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “When you take a shower and it gets wet, does it smell like chicken feathers then?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “My God. Can I feel it?”

  She felt my hair, and then she said, “That feels just like silk.”

  Her dad was a high school principal, and she was raised in a middle-class family. But she said, “We just have all these ideas about white people, and I’m finding out that almost none of them are true.”

  She sa
id she originally thought we put on something to make ourselves lighter. “I know now it doesn’t rub off, but for a long time I thought it did.”

  I said, “White Southerners are raised with just as many misapprehensions about black people, and none of them are true. In the end, we’re just people—that’s all we are.”

  I went back to Atlanta for a week or so and then returned to Talladega on March 17 with Joan Browning, one of the Albany Freedom Riders—also white. We did some workshops on the philosophical basis for nonviolence. We talked about satyagraha, Gandhi’s method of action which was based on courage, nonviolence, and truth. We pointed out that it took more courage to be nonviolent than to fight back in traditional ways. We discussed Tolstoy and Walden Pond and Emerson’s coming to see Thoreau when he was in jail for not paying taxes, and how when Emerson asked Thoreau what he was doing in there, Thoreau responded, “What are you doing out there?” Joan participated in some of the demonstrations, and after a brick was thrown through the plate glass window of the Greyhound bus station, where we were sitting, she said, “If I keep hanging out with you, Zellner, I’m going to wind up being killed.”

  As it turned out, I was the main SNCC person in Talladega for what seemed like months on end. Brenda Travis came to live on the Talladega campus while I was there. She had been expelled the day of the bloody McComb march, back in October of ’61, and then sent to reform school. She was released on condition that she leave Mississippi and go into a foster care home. A white professor at Talladega, Hermann Einsemann, kind of adopted her, and she came to live on the Talladega campus during this period.

  In some of the workshops, we role-played as many of the situations as we thought people would get into, starting with sit-ins. The role-playing was quite elaborate. We had all the cast of characters that would be at an actual sit-in—the sit-inners, the people running the lunch counters, the manager, news people, police, hoodlums, and observers. We set up the lunch counter, the stools and chairs, and then everybody would go through the scenario several times, so each person could play different roles, and sometimes it was so realistic that people would really get into it. A lot of times, you saw they loved to play cops, and they loved to play hoodlums. They made really good hoodlums. They knew all the words and actions. As a result, they were quite well-prepared for the violence to come.

  People would go on the sit-in depending on how they did in the workshop. The sit-inners were the high-status people. One young man, Edward White, was a firebrand, and he had always been in fights. That’s a good person to work with, but you have to go through a lot of training to get real discipline there. Everyone told him, “You can’t go because you’re gonna fight.” He said, “No, I want to be a sit-inner.”

  We’d go through the role playing, and he would take it for a long time, and then he would start fighting. It was so real. He’d get furious and go tackle somebody. Once the real action started, nobody would ever let him go. There were other jobs for him. On one of the sit-ins, he was acting as an observer. He was standing on the corner so he could see where the people were sitting in. He had all the telephone numbers to call to report what was happening—without being discovered. We observed that his cover had been blown, and the hoodlums realized he was connected, so they came over to confront him. Everybody was just holding their breath. The main hoodlum hit him so hard it knocked him through a plate glass window in a store. Later, the storekeeper charged Edward with “breaking and entering.” The guy who hit him then jumped through the shattered window and pounced on him, but Edward went into a perfect fetal position with his hands over his head, exactly as taught in the workshop. This gave time for other people to come and nonviolently get between Edward and his attacker. There was glass and blood all over the place, but he never fought back. He was the biggest hero that night at the mass meeting. We told him, “You did it. You are nonviolent. You can get through in the crunch.” After that they would let him go in the sit-ins.

  The Talladega students sat-in at all the local lunch counters. Talladega is a small town, and the college was its main economic support—even so, there was just egregious segregation. Students were needed as customers, but they couldn’t sit down at the lunch counter. There were continuing demonstrations, and lunch counters were later desegregated, but there was too much resistance while I was there. The whites mobilized the fire department, and deputized a lot of people, used fire hoses and dogs. It was an irresistible force meeting an immovable object. The power and strength of the movement were still building; much of it was happening in these little towns, but there wasn’t a lot of news coverage.

  On one particular April march to the downtown, we were going to see if we could march around the courthouse, have a short rally, and then march back to the campus. We were stopped as we got to the town square, and the authorities brought up the fire trucks. Sometimes you would make a decision on a demonstration based on the atmosphere or the temper of the crowd. Some of our people hadn’t been to the workshops, so it would be a short test march, and we wouldn’t challenge an order to turn around. When we were stopped, we had a brief prayer, but the police came and attacked folks at the head of the march. We decided that everyone who had been through the workshops should join hands in kind of a human chain. There were a lot of little children and community people. We would put them in the middle and walk back to campus that way.

  We began to walk, with the cops right behind us. The one behind me kept prodding me with his nightstick, and there was something so sharp touching me. He had taken a razor and attached it to the stick; it was ripping my shirt apart and tearing my back up. I didn’t want to cause anybody any alarm, so I just gritted my teeth and decided, as long as he doesn’t kill me, I’ll be all right. We walked a quarter to a half mile back to campus, and they pushed us through the main gate, and as soon as they did, everybody who had been on the outside, including the girls, started pulling their shirts up, and it turned out every cop had taken a pocket knife blade and sharpened it like a razor and embedded it into their nightsticks. They were cutting everybody’s backs to ribbons. That’s the kind of sadistic things the Alabama racists would do.

  That was one time when nonviolence came close to breaking down, because all the guys who had not been in the march were so infuriated, they challenged the cops to come on the campus. That was a real confrontation.

  There were some sympathetic reporters in Alabama, and occasionally events would draw national reporters, especially if violence was involved. If there was violence and it wasn’t covered, it was like it didn’t happen. They would put it in the local paper, and sometimes in the Birmingham, Mobile, or Montgomery papers. I also came to realize that I had become a lightning rod in Alabama and if a story involved me, it would make the papers.

  An interesting example was a day in 1962 when former Governor Big Jim Folsom had a political rally at the Talladega courthouse. Alabama in those days had a law that a governor could not succeed himself. Folsom had been out for a term and was seeking to return to the governor’s mansion; his major opponent was George Wallace. Folsom, as a progressive, populist Alabama politician, had a lot of support in the black community. We had a march planned the same day as the Folsom rally, and we didn’t want it to appear that our march was directed at Folsom. We decided that if asked we would say our march was not against Folsom but at segregation here in Talladega. So Folsom’s people moved his rally inside the courthouse. Per Laursen, the Danish reporter who had been arrested with us in Albany, was in Talladega. He was inside the courthouse and had an interview with Big Jim Folsom. He said to Folsom, “What do you think of the civil rights demonstration today?”

  Folsom said, “Well, I believe the people have a right to protest and have a right to petition the government for redress, but they do seem to be raising an awful lot of hell here, and I think it’s all on account of that Ralph Zellmer.” Julian Bond was speaking at the mass meeting that night. He heard about Folsom’s remark and thou
ght it was the funniest thing. For years when he saw me he would say, “Here’s Ralph Zellmer.”

  During the Talladega campaign, I was arrested for conspiracy against the State of Alabama. The arresting officers were state investigators. I was walking across campus, and all of a sudden the whole campus was inundated by state police cars. Troopers leaped out of the cars, screaming, “There he is, get him.” I didn’t want to actually run, so I kind of hurried off in the other direction. Students started skirmishing with the police, but they got me and dragged me down to a squad car. I had just gotten a letter from the U.S. Justice Department and hadn’t even opened it yet. It turned out to be about Eleanor Roosevelt who was conducting hearings in the Deep South with the Civil Rights Commission, inviting me to testify on state and local efforts to keep black people from voting. When they put me in the car, I still had the letter in my hand. Luckily the back window was open so I threw it for the students to pick up. It fluttered and went under the police car but one of the students dove under the vehicle, grabbed the letter and ran off.

  The former First Lady wrote about my eventual testimony in her last book, Tomorrow Is Now (1963). These days when my students find out that Mrs. Roosevelt wrote about me, they smile and ask if I also met her uncle Teddy. This is a quote from her book, “We must know what we think and speak out, even at the risk of unpopularity. In the final analysis, a democratic government represents the sum total of the courage and the integrity of its individuals. It cannot be better than they are . . . In the long run there is no more exhilarating experience than to determine one’s position, state it bravely and then act boldly.”

  I don’t know when the State of Alabama decided to move against me in Talladega. I think I was arrested so the authorities could justify banishing me from my home state. This was my first Alabama arrest, but I already had police records in McComb, Mississippi; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and Albany, Georgia.

  Alabama lawmen and politicians were embarrassed that I was from Alabama. They’d show the other states how to deal with agitators, inside or out. They planned to use my activities in Mississippi and Georgia to show a pattern of misbehavior justifying banishment.