by Bob Zellner
Politics aside, when a request for an injunction against our activities was filed in the Talladega circuit court, Alabama authorities were confident of getting a favorable ruling from a local judge. What they didn’t count on was that their legal maneuvers constituted such a gross violation of our constitutional rights that the National Lawyers Guild gladly offered us excellent pro bono representation. Many Guild members were radicals and libertarians who understood that civil liberties were always trampled in times of turmoil and struggle and must be protected.
SNCC, I remember, had zero money for bail and operating expenses, much less for high-powered legal defense lawyers. Thus it surprised the authorities when Lawyers Guild president Victor Rabinowitz, a renowned constitutional lawyer and partner of Leonard Boudin, defender of Castro and other revolutionary causes, came to little Talladega. Victor was accompanied by his partner, Joanne Grant, correspondent for the National Guardian, a leftist New York newspaper. Earlier, Joanne had accompanied Dorothy Miller to Moscow against the ban of the U.S. State Department; Joanne had continued on to Peking, China, a real no-no!
In some embarrassing ways the freedom movement had held the Guild, the Guardian, and people like the Bradens and Dombrowski of SCEF at arms-length. This tendency of the liberal left to red-bait those more radical than themselve was counterproductive. It became clear after the sit-in movement began in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960, and the freedom rides in the spring of 1961, that young people had the bit between their teeth. We were running away with the movement and had no time to look under beds for communists. If we found some, we were more likely to charge them rent or put them to work doing something useful in the Deep South. We had also observed who came through in the crunch—Dombrowski, the Bradens, and now the Lawyers Guild. Thus we cheered when Victor and Joanne showed up in Talladega.
The everyday slog and the relentless work load could get us down, so spirits always soared when outside help arrived to reinforce what we already knew—that what we were doing was important and that the word was getting out up North. The joy was even greater when the help came from a progressive Southern lawyer, who by definition had to be both courageous and slightly crazy to get involved in civil rights cases. One such lawyer was the outspoken Charles Morgan Jr. from rough-tough Birmingham. Victor was already comfortable with our legal standing, assuring us that the Bill of Rights applied even in the primitive backwoods courts of darkest Alabama. What Big Chuck brought was joie de vivre and utter fearlessness. Chuck was not bashful about letting the courthouse thugs and hangers-on know that he was onto their game. He’d been to enough rural courtrooms in Alabama to know that the “Courthouse Gang” was there to prop up the powers that be by hanging around to whittle sticks, spit tobacco, and glare menacingly—we called it “the hate stare”—at outsiders or anybody else the sheriff and the judge didn’t like.
Morgan went about his work in Talladega with such gusto that we felt less stressed. After court we gathered around him in his tiny motel room as he spun hilarious yarns of past exploits. “The other day,” Chuck said, “I had to go down to Greene County—that’s in the Black Belt—where I’m defending a poor black man. I told Camille, my wife, I might not make it back if the rednecks down there know about me ranting up here in Birmingham against Bull Connor. When she asked if I really had to go, I told her yes, if this man is to escape spending the rest of his natural life in jail for just trying to register. ‘What’d they charge him with?’ my wife asked. I told her it was carnal knowledge of a chicken, a tough charge to defend against.”
From the center of his sagging bed Morgan would lean over and put down his sweating glass of iced bourbon and branch water. He’d grab the phone and call the respected journalist Claude Sitton at the New York Times. “Claude, I got a report from the front.” Pause. “What do you mean what front? It’s the only front that matters right now—Morgan defending Zellner, the Bradens, and now Rabinowitz and Madame Grant—nothing but me standing betwixt them and the benighted lawlessness of the Great State of Alabama! My favorite kind of story, Mr. Sitton.” Another pause. “Sir, it certainly is news that’s fit to print. You ought to be down here to see it for yourself, but since you ain’t, let me tell you about it in living color.” Sitton was an Atlantan and the NYT’s chief Southern correspondent. He reported widely on civil rights from 1958–64. Morgan’s bantering with him was partly for our entertainment and also to make sure that our activities would stay in the national focus, thus bringing additional support and some measure of protection.
Rabinowitz and Grant had been added to the injunction when they showed up for my hearing. By the second or third day of the hearing, Morgan and Rabinowitz, with help from another volunteer attorney, Arthur Kinoy (later a co-founder of the Center for Constitutional Rights), had prepared a countersuit against the state of Alabama, Talladega County, et al. That morning our group, led by Morgan, had woven our way through the usual crowd of whittlers and spitters outside the courthouse. Inside, Chuck motioned for me to follow him down the stairs. We marched into the basement where many county employees worked, and he announced loudly with a big smile, “Mr. Zellner and I have just accused all of y’all of being white.”
Most of the time things in SNCC were so hectic and our lawyers were so busy trying to keep us out of jail or getting us out of jail that there was no time for preparing proactive suits. In Talladega, however, we were lucky to have these feisty attorneys working for us. So when Morgan impishly accused all the county employees of being white, he was deadly serious. Our counter-injunction asked the federal government to ban segregated courtrooms, all-white juries, and all-white judges and sheriffs. Morgan and Rabinowitz asked that all proceedings against civil rights workers and black voter registration aspirants be removed to federal courts.
The very next morning our entry into the courthouse changed dramatically. As Chuck and I approached the front steps and the waiting courthouse gang, he simply pushed his seersucker jacket aside just enough to reveal a huge gun snugly nestled in a beautiful brown leather shoulder holster. The gang parted like the Red Sea for Moses, and we sailed peacefully into the courthouse. As it turned out, Chuck was friends with the sheriff and had cleared this ploy in advance, but at the time his only comment was, “Zellner, maybe you know how to be nonviolent and survive. My mama told me, ‘Son, walk loudly and carry a big piece.’”
We were sworn to nonviolence in all our public affairs, but . . . we were kicking ass in the courtroom and it seemed that Charles Morgan Jr., Esquire, of Birmingham, was prepared to kick it on the courthouse lawn if push came to shove.
While I was in jail in Talladega, my brother, Jim, who was in theology school at Duke, came down to visit me, and of course, they wouldn’t let him see me. He said, “Can I at least give him a note that I was here?” The note said, “These damn sons of bitches won’t let me see you.” He was so naive, he didn’t realize they would read what he had written, and so they immediately confronted him with it. They said, “We should put you in jail for using profanity.”
After I left Talladega, in spite of the banishment, I would go back occasionally and speak to the students. Talladega proved to be a very good campaign with continued sit-ins and boycotts by the black community. By 1963, a year before the 1964 Civil Rights Act guaranteed equal access to public accommodations, a local agreement had been worked out to integrate the lunch counters. We found that white customers also stayed away in such situations because they didn’t understand what was going on, and the merchants saw their businesses just drying up. Sometimes, a merchant might want to integrate but was afraid to be the first. So the merchants would get together and say, hey, let’s all do it at the same time.
14
George Wallace and Me
My relationship, if you can call it that, with George Corley Wallace of Barbour County, Alabama, was a strange one. Alabamians of all colors were entwined with George and his wife Lurleen for years, no matter what
side or sides one took on the “Wallace Question.” He was a bundle of contradictions and peoples’ opinions and support or opposition to him changed with the seasons.
I have sometimes felt exasperated with the black people in my state and their actions and attitudes toward Governor Wallace. If any group ever had reason to hate a person, Southern blacks had it for him. When George had his last “change of mind,” right before meeting his God, the black citizens of Alabama, at least many of the older ones, welcomed him back into the fold like the long-lost lamb, the prodigal returned. They heartily forgave him, seemingly unmindful of the irony of being able to vote for one who had denied them the vote and basic citizenship for so long.
Virginia Durr and I often lamented that the largeness of heart of many of our black friends caused them to overlook or minimize the fact that our George had the real blood of real people on his hands. We felt that true forgiveness could only come after genuine contrition and a clear understanding of one’s wrongdoing, followed by a detailed confession and the sincere asking for forgiveness.
My position on Wallace’s “death bed conversion” was that the man had switched sides so often that he himself didn’t know where he actually stood. Before he died, when he was seeing Jesse Jackson and others, I thought of going to see him, but I couldn’t muster a large degree of forgiveness. He hadn’t shown me that he was honestly contrite. If I had seen him, I would have asked him if it was worth the bloodshed and mayhem that he encouraged and probably increased in order to have the political power that he had enjoyed for so long in Alabama—an unprecedented four terms as governor for himself; one for his stand-in wife. I would have asked if he had ever appreciated the contradiction of his “being for the little people” and then setting one group of them against the other, often using the power of the state against the group that was black. There’s a kind of justice in the universe, and he certainly did suffer after that guy shot him in Baltimore, but I didn’t really feel sorry for George. I think Wallace made the ultimate pact with the devil—“I’m gonna go against my own principles.” If I thought that he had been a dedicated racist forever and ever amen, it would have been a totally different thing, but he was not. He knew better, and that, to me, made his race-mongering twice as bad.
The younger George Wallace was an active Methodist layman and was considered somewhat progressive on both economic and racial issues. I often mused on the irony that Wallace was a member of the Reverend Sam Shirah’s Methodist congregation in Clayton, Alabama, and was the Sunday School teacher for Shirah’s son, Sam, who became a hero of the Southern freedom movement.
Wallace began his political life as a disciple of James E. “Big Jim” Folsom, the much-loved populist governor, and many of the progressives in Alabama wonder why George never picked up Big Jim’s common touch that would have enabled him to sidestep the “racial issue” as Big Jim had. Folsom, elected governor in 1946 and 1954, once entertained black New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell at the Governor’s Mansion in Montgomery. When complaints were made about Folsom drinking Scotch over there at the mansion with Powell, Big Jim said the charge was an untruth spread by his political opponents. “Everyone in Alabama knows what a damn lie that is,” Folsom is reported to have said. “They know I only drink Bourbon.”
So Wallace, following Folsom’s lead, started out in Alabama politics as a racial moderate. Smart alecks, of course, say that being moderate in Alabama in those years only meant that you didn’t believe in slavery. All in all, Alabama was/is a strange place. One peculiar thing about the state was that for some years during the early modern civil rights movement, the NAACP was banned in Alabama. After the NAACP was banned, Fred Shuttlesworth and his Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights emerged in Birmingham, and of course the Montgomery Improvement Association was carrying on. So protest activities continued, and Reverend Shuttlesworth was one of the great militants of all time—full of physical courage and an eloquent speaker.
Wallace lost his first run for governor in 1958, against John Patterson—the attorney general responsible for the NAACP ban. In that first campaign, Wallace adopted the moderate platform of his mentor, Big Jim Folsom, emphasizing farm-to-market rural roads, money and books for public school education, and he de-emphasized race even as the White Citizens Councils were rising in the wake of the 1954 Brown decision. Wallace came by his populism honestly, having once occupied temporary housing with his young wife and their first child in a renovated chicken coop.
Patterson, meanwhile, ran a typical Southern campaign of waving the bloody shirt and re-fighting the Civil War. It may sound strange to the modern ear, but that is how I grew up in south Alabama. My granddaddy, who lived much closer to the “War Between the States” than I ever realized, was fond of saying, “Why we could have whipped those Yankees with corn stalks . . . only they wouldn’t fight that way.” My history teacher at Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Dr. Chancellor, taught all his classes the same way—he re-fought the Civil War, which he insisted on calling “The War of Northern Aggression.”
Yelling “Nigger, Nigger, Nigger” was enough to give Patterson the keys to the governor’s mansion in Montgomery. After his defeat in 1958, George issued his famous pledge that he would never “be out-niggered again!” Thus began the segregation phase of Wallace’s political career, which would make his name known in every American household. Four years later he rode white supremacist fervor to victory, and in his January 1963 inaugural speech he famously declared, “. . . I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say . . . segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”
I am sure that Wallace was well aware of my activism as a student at Huntingdon, my meetings with Dr. King and Ralph Abernathy, Dad’s and my visit to Alabama Attorney General MacDonald Gallion, my visits with Virginia Durr, my time at Highlander, and on and on. One of Wallace’s first moves after being elected governor was to order Willie B. Painter, a state investigator, to follow me and arrest me when possible. To make sure Willie followed orders, George often sent his newly appointed chief of the Alabama troopers, Al Lingo, to make sure I was arrested. Lingo was a well-known Ku Klux Klansman who had worked in Wallace’s campaign, and he arrested me personally at least twice.
I was arrested by Lingo and Painter in January 1963, four days before George Wallace’s inauguration. At the time of my arrest, John Hill and Sam Shirah were both students at Huntingdon. John Hill had come back to Huntingdon and was trying to finish his education. Sam was an activist Methodist, and his minister father and mine were colleagues in the Alabama-West Florida Conference of the Methodist Church. Sam had been active in Birmingham along with others in this church network. He had been invited not to return to Birmingham-Southern College. He eventually became a SNCC staffer and a full-time organizer in the South.
The main legal problem with that arrest was the minor fact that it occurred four days before citizen George Wallace would become Governor George Wallace. After my arrest, Wallace became apoplectic when the federal government began an investigation. He did his best to intimidate local FBI officials and force them to drop the inquiry.
On January 8, 1963, I had been on SNCC staff a year and a half. I had been arrested in McComb, Albany, Baton Rouge, and Talladega. These arrests and the movement work they represented were adventurous and exciting and important, but I was still emotionally involved in Montgomery and was working with the students at Huntingdon College. Montgomery and Huntingdon were the spiritual heart of my commitment to a life of struggle and service.
I was committed to continuing the work I had started at Huntingdon—wanting the powers at my college to admit that students had the right to be involved in political and social issues of the day. In the fall of 1961 when the administration threatened to expel any student attending a Methodist youth conference at Lake Junaluska Methodist Center in North Carolina, I had arranged with the Methodist Student Movement president,
Wayne Proudfoot, to go to Huntingdon to report to the students who were forbidden to go.
Wayne, a Native American, told the students that Huntingdon could not keep them from attending a national Methodist meeting simply because the gatherings would be racially integrated. The progressive group of ministers around my father encouraged us to keep the pressure on Dr. Hubert Searcy to show a little backbone and stand up to the segregationists on the Huntingdon board. They would pressure the college from the inside while we applied outside pressure from the civil rights movement and the national Methodist network.
I continued this campaign by visiting the campus each time I found myself near Montgomery. I confess that I had no idea how far the school and the state would go to protect the tender ears of Huntingdon students from the historic battle for human justice raging around them. On the evening of the eighth I went from the Durrs’ house on Felder Avenue over to meet some students at the Tea Room, a café for students in the brand new college gym where the Huntingdon Hawks played basketball. I liked it there because I had been a strong supporter of the Hawks the year before, the first season on their new court.
The early evening was beautiful and balmy for a January night. There were lots of students about and even though Sam Shirah and John Hill and I were trying to keep a low profile, a low buzz began to develop. There was nothing overt, but I got the sense that a whisper was circulating and it was focused on our booth in the café. I had nodded to a couple of acquaintances, jocks from the team. They knew about my politics because Doc, the former team captain, had helped to beat me in McComb.