The Wrong Side of Murder Creek

by Bob Zellner

  Now it seemed they might want to complete Doc’s work. John tried to reassure me, “You have every right to be here. You are an honors graduate and just because they don’t like your movement work, they are not going to hurt you. This is America for Christ’s sake and Huntingdon calls itself a school for ladies and gentlemen.”

  I laughed and complimented John, who hardly ever said more than two words at a time, on his speech. I reminded him of the incident when a security guard had shot into mine and Townsend’s room. Sam said, “Just stay in here and you will be all right.”

  Just then, one of the friendly acquaintances came by and said in a low voice, “Zellner, don’t go outside.”

  “That does it,” I said to Sam and John, “I’m heading out; I did not mean to get you guys in trouble. Stay in here.”

  To their credit John and Sam walked out of the Tea Room with me. I told them I would try to see them later and I headed toward Fairview Avenue, the main entrance to the college where I could get a bus back to the Durrs’.

  I didn’t get very far because the courtyard outside the café looked like a set from the OK Corral. A group of jocks and townies blocked my way and behind them, lurking behind trees and bushes, I thought I spotted Dean Owens, the crazy ex-Marine who toted a pistol around campus and threatened everyone who was politically left of Eisenhower.

  Two or three of the larger jocks took a couple of steps toward me so I slowly took my good jacket off. The largest guy asked me in a fake-friendly voice what I was doing on campus. “You trying to start some more of your crap here, Z?” another asked. A voice from the back hollered, “Bob, you going to be nonviolent when we kick yo’ ass?”

  We traded a few insults until the big one, Henry, stepped forward like he was going to start in on me. “Okay, Henry,” I said like I was talking to only him. “You always wanted a piece of me when I was here, and now you think you can finally do it with little risk. But I tell you what, since it’ll be just you and me, I’ll give you your chance even though I have taken a commitment to nonviolence. Tonight, just for you, Henry, I will put aside my vow to nonviolence and mix it up like you want to.”

  “Now Bob . . .,” Henry started to say, but I interrupted.

  I looked at the others and said, “I know we are all gentlemen here and we know it would be unfair for me to have to whip a bunch of you at the same time, so, if you don’t mind, I’ll take you one at a time. Who’s first? You, Henry?”

  I caught a glimpse of the silver-haired Dean Turner in the background. I wondered if he and Dean Owens had quietly instigated this little reception for me in an attempt to break my habit of returning to Huntingdon.

  Henry had not shown any particular interest in continuing the confrontation since I used my Huntingdon-taught psychology to reduce the gathering from a mob to a collection of individuals.

  I continued to concentrate on the big one. “Well, Henry, what’ll it be? You game or should we put this off to another time more convenient for you?”

  I wondered if Henry was remembering that I had never been defeated in hand-to-hand combat on campus in spite of some tough plow boys who had come very close—closer than I wanted any of these yahoos to know.

  “Look, Bob, you got that martial arts and everything and besides we was just funning you . . .”

  Meanwhile, the crowd was visibly thinning and I could tell that the deans had remembered urgent business back at the office. John and Sam were still behind me so I turned my back on Henry and the rest and said, “Sam, John, buy you a cup of tea?” We strolled back to the Tea Room.

  Then things got serious. The three of us apparently remained in the café long enough for the deans to get hold of the police. We didn’t have much enthusiasm for long conversation so I gave them a quick report of SNCC activities and an update on the efforts of national Methodists to put pressure on Huntingdon to change its policies. I included information on movement efforts involving SNCC, CORE, NAACP, and SCLC to increase black voter registration. John and Sam made it clear they thought it would take a federal army to force the Black Belt counties to register blacks.

  Leaving the Tea Room the second time, I noticed that the courtyard and the parking lot were practically deserted. As soon as I saw the white state-looking car near the curb, I knew what was happening. The first thing I thought of was whether I had addresses, phone numbers, or notes in my wallet that might compromise any of my contacts. I slipped the wallet out of my back pocket and tried to give it to Sam.

  “See that car over there,” I nodded in its direction. “It’s a state police car and I am about to be arrested; take my billfold and keep it for me.”

  “Bob, you always dramatize everything,” John said. “You haven’t done anything—why would anyone arrest you?”

  “I’m serious, you fool. Take the damn wallet,” I hissed.

  Sam looked confused as a man suddenly emerged from the other side of the white car and headed in our direction.

  “Bob, could we talk to you for a minute?” I recognized Willie B. Painter, the state investigator who almost always followed me while in Alabama.

  “Who’s we?” I asked, trying to shield my efforts to get Sam or John to take my wallet.

  “Me and Mr. . . .” I didn’t get the name that Painter mumbled.

  “I have nothing to talk to you about, Mr. Painter. Good evening.” And I continued down the sidewalk.

  “Maybe you’ll talk to me, Mr. Zellner,” the other man said menacingly, getting out of the passenger’s seat.

  By this time I suppose John and Sam were in shock. The strange man told me that I would talk to him one way or the other. When I asked the meaning of the threat he explained that he could arrest me. When I asked on what authority, the man shouted, “Okay that does it, you are under arrest; come with me.” Holding my arm, he headed to the car.

  “You are arresting me on what charge?” I asked, offering no resistance. The strange man stopped and looked at Painter, who stared back with a pained expression. I suddenly thought that these two are not exactly on the same page.

  “Conspiracy against the State of Alabama,” he stammered. “That’s it—conspiracy.” Looking to Painter, he got nothing in return.

  “Conspiracy to do what?” I asked.

  “That’s enough out of you Mr. Zellner, get in the car,” he said, shoving me into the backseat.

  John and Sam were standing just outside the car staring in amazement at me in the backseat. While Willie B. ran around to the driver’s seat, I quickly rolled the window down and tossed my wallet onto the grass next to the curb right at Sam’s feet. I was sure that he could see it but I wanted to be sure. I leaned my arm out and pointed to the wallet and back to him. We drove off in a squeal of tires and left John and Sam standing there open-mouthed.

  No sooner did we leave than the car radio came on and a familiar voice—that of Floyd Mann, head of the Alabama Highway Patrol—commanded, “Willie B., don’t you have anything to do with arresting Bob Zellner.”

  “Uh oh!” I said loudly, “Does that mean you are in trouble, Willie?” We actually were on a first name basis—Willie B. had followed me for so long.

  “Please be quiet, Bob,” Painter pleaded miserably.

  “Well, if you can’t answer that question,” I replied, “How about telling me who this gentleman is?’ I nodded toward the man in the front passenger’s seat. Just then the radio squawked again and it was Floyd Mann, “Are you there, Willie? Do you hear me and did you hear me about Bob Zellner?”

  “I did, Chief,” Painter turned a paler shape of pink. “I heard what you said about Zellner, ahh . . ., but we’re on the way down to the county jail with him now.”

  On the other end came a “Damn!” and then silence. I could not resist saying quietly, “Hot dog, Willie, are you in big trouble?”

  As it turned out, the other man was Al Lingo. It was still four days be
fore Wallace took office, and Lingo wasn’t head of the highway patrol—yet. He was a Klansman, straight terrorist Klan, a mean, mean guy, on the way to that powerful position.

  The wallet left lying in the grass played an important role. Dean Charles Turner found it, or perhaps somebody found it and gave it to him, but he took it straight down to the police and of course they went through it.

  When we got to the county jail I was surprised to find that the county prosecutor was there, and I thought I heard the agitated voice of Floyd Mann coming from a room just off the booking area. I heard snatches of conversation. “What’s he charged with? The complaint is signed by . . .?” I heard a number of times the names Painter and Lingo.

  I noticed that Willie B. had disappeared and I was being ignored in the booking room, so I adopted the position that as long as my opponents are arguing among themselves, it was best to leave them alone. I thought I heard Mann say, “I’m not in this and I have directed Willie B. to keep hands off.”

  Suddenly somebody noticed me and hollered, “Get him out of here!”

  Somebody replied, “But he ain’t been charged.”

  So they picked some poor schmo who didn’t know anything about it to swear out the complaint. Along with vagrancy, they charged me with conspiracy against the State of Alabama. Of course, there was no evidence at all that I was doing anything. Even if I was, I wouldn’t be ”conspiring”—it would be totally protected behavior. They were convinced I was in Montgomery to organize demonstrations at Wallace’s inauguration, which I wasn’t. I wasn’t even consciously aware that he was about to be inaugurated, even though I had seen workers setting up bleachers for the inaugural parade—which turned out to be a big anti-civil rights Klan affair. I was only doing my SNCC job of campus visitation and talking to the students, but to the authorities that was the most dangerous thing I could be doing. They probably thought I was organizing against Wallace, as well. But sure enough, they were in trouble because I later sued them for a quarter of a million dollars—Willie B. and Al Lingo and George Wallace, because Wallace was still John Q. Citizen, hadn’t been sworn in as governor, and had ordered my arrest illegally.

  My good friend Clifford Durr was my attorney and soon after he arranged bail, I was charged with another felony, false pretenses. This arose because Dean Turner turned my wallet over to the police, who found in it a receipt for a camera I had bought at a local store. Forman wanted us all to have cameras, but they didn’t last very long because cops either confiscated them or broke them if you took the wrong picture. They would take the camera and smash it. I had just written an $85 check for a new one, a Retinal Reflex. I liked to have good cameras, and I liked to take good pictures. The police took the receipt for the camera from my wallet and went to the camera shop and picked up my check, which the shop had not deposited at the bank.

  Wallace and his prosecutors were delighted with the prospect of trying me on something other than the political charge of conspiracy. Conspiring to do what? They had no evidence of plans to demonstrate at Wallace’s inaugural. So their Plan B was to convict Zellner on a bad check charge and send him to the penitentiary for ten years. Maybe he wouldn’t survive the Alabama prison system!

  Chuck Morgan assisted Clifford Durr at my trial. Clifford in frail health and was exhausted, and Morgan was always spoiling for a civil rights legal fight. I remember at one point coming out of the courtroom and I had a cigarette in my hand and my hands were cuffed in front of me, and the photographer was there, and I didn’t expect the photographer, so I smiled and he took the picture. Chuck told me later, “No matter if you are acquitted or convicted or there’s a hung jury, never smile when you come out of the courtroom, because you weren’t supposed to be arrested to begin with.”

  When they took me to the jail, I guess it was the same jail Rosa Parks had been in, and Martin Luther King, and even Hank Williams a time or two. One of my classmates from Huntingdon was the brand new jailer. The newsmen interviewed him, and they asked how it felt to lock up his old classmate, Bob Zellner. I wasn’t treated badly at all.

  Cliff and Chuck had a good defense for the all-white, mostly male Montgomery jury. The prosecution said that I had purchased a camera for $85 from the pawn shop on Friday afternoon. Because I traveled so much, my SNCC paycheck was automatically deposited in Atlanta each week. The police wouldn’t let Mr. Erlich, the shop owner, deposit my check. Instead, the cops called the bank in Atlanta to see what my checking account balance was and were told that at the moment there was less than $85. But they were also told that the bank knew the account and knew that a deposit was made each Friday. The bank said the check would be honored. Nevertheless, that was the state’s case against me.

  “The check,” Mr. Durr argued, “could not be evidence of false pretenses since it was never presented for payment, nor was it ever returned for insufficient funds.” The prosecutors could not have it both ways. In closing arguments, Morgan marched his ample frame up and down in front of the hometown jury, waxing homespun as he asked each juror, “How many times have you, or your spouse, bought groceries on Friday based on the family paycheck that was to be deposited that afternoon?”

  Then in summation, Clifford Durr, as courtly a Southern gentleman as anyone ever saw, rail thin in his crisp seersucker suit and bending slightly forward because of his bad back, delivered the final blow. He asked the jurors, “How would you feel if the Governor or the police were mad at you and took the check out of your grocer’s hand, called your bank and then tried to put you in jail for ten years because someone at the bank said you didn’t have enough money?”

  However, long before Cliff drove these last nails into the coffin of Wallace’s case against me, Chuck had done something in open court that determined the outcome of the trial. It is rare that the opening shot is the one that decides the battle, but that is what happened. We had spent weeks asking the progressive ministers of the conference and their wives to attend my trial in support of a fellow Methodist in trouble because of an issue of conscience. We had asked them to be prepared to be called as character witnesses.

  Mrs. Francis McLeod, the grande dame of Alabama Methodists and the mother of a brood of charismatic and successful preachers in our conference, agreed to lead the charge against the state for trying to imprison me for ten years. This famous Methodist momma was the mother of Dad’s best friend, Reverend Fletcher McLeod. Another son, Powers McLeod, was everybody’s pick to be bishop someday.

  Chuck’s simple but brilliant maneuver, as the judge gaveled the crowded court session to order, caught everybody off guard. He stood and addressed the judge, “Your Honor, there are several preachers here with their wives who are character witnesses for my client, Mr. Bob Zellner. Mr. Durr and I have not had the opportunity to interview all of them. In the interest of saving the time of the court, if it please your honor, would you ask for them to stand so we may identify Mr. Zellner’s character witnesses? I don’t know how many of them are here.”

  Before the prosecutor could object and before the judge realized he was being poleaxed in his own courtroom, the judge asked the character witnesses to stand. Almost the entire audience stood up. Case closed.

  After that, the best the prosecutor could do was to get the jury to agree to disagree. The resulting hung jury turned Wallace the bull into a steer. Wallace declared, through his prosecuting attorney, that the state would try me over and over until they found a jury that would convict. To avoid this, they demanded that I plead guilty to anything as long as it was on the law books.

  I refused the deal and was prepared to go to trial again, but Clifford, to clear the books, agreed that I would enter a plea of nolo contendre. This helped the state save a little face, so the prosecutors selected “trespassing on the Huntingdon campus,” my own dear alma mater. Pleading no contest was a downside of this arrangement, but the fact that it helped prepare the way for my later suit against Governor Wallace and his enforcer, Al L
ingo, was good.

  I am told that the subsequent lawsuit, Zellner v. Lingo, is cited in law schools as a historic case, remarkable for what is not formally apparent from the official papers. Progressive and informed Alabamians were intrigued with the lineup of sides fighting the lawsuit: Wallace and his handpicked Klan top cop Lingo, along with the hapless state investigator, Willie B. Painter, on the defensive; fending off the attack from my side. Of prime importance was the federal judge who would be hearing my civil lawsuit over the denial of my civil rights—Frank M. Johnson Jr., the nemesis of Governor Wallace and already a certified hero of the freedom movement. No movie script could create a more dramatic confrontation. The second ace we had in the hole was outgoing Governor John Patterson, who had no more use than Judge Johnson for Little George. Patterson, certainly no friend of the movement, liked us beating up on his bantam rooster opponent. It was a great plan.

  Patterson would testify that he played no part in my arrest and might confirm that he had specifically ordered his top cop, Floyd Mann, not to arrest me. Mann himself, one of the bravest and most honorable civil servants produced by my state, was another ace in our metaphorical hand. As the then-head of the Alabama Highway Patrol, Mann would swear that he specifically ordered his investigator, Painter, “not to arrest Bob Zellner.”

  This lineup made our case in the simplest terms: Wallace and Lingo, both private citizens at the time of my arrest, had usurped the machinery of the State to carry out a private political vendetta. We should have sailed to a happy conclusion. Victory would have helped to clip the wings of the bantam rooster, and might even have helped to save my state the reign of terror which Wallace and his Klan helper subsequently unleashed in Birmingham, Selma, and other places.

  The press would have had a feeding frenzy off a courtroom clash between so many rivals. What a spectacle it would have been to see one famous segregationist, John Patterson, testify on behalf of an infamous civil rights trouble maker, just to skewer another segregationist, George Wallace! It would have been exhilarating to observe the tussle between the very decent lawman, Floyd Mann, and the embarrassingly odious Klansman, Al Lingo, who was succeeding Mann.