by Bob Zellner
Alas, all good dreams must end. My case was dismissed with prejudice by Judge Johnson before the trial began. My attorney, Ben Smith of New Orleans, filed some papers late. The judge, because of his history with Wallace, no doubt, felt he must follow every particular of the law. The technicality saved Wallace.
Zellner v. Lingo was the first of three lawsuits I have filed for redress of violations of my civil rights. The first two were in the heat of the battle, this one in Alabama in 1963 and another in Boston in 1965. Our lawyers then were trying to keep us out of jail or get us out of jail. The third was related to a run-in with state police over the Shinnecock reservation skirmish in Southampton, New York, in 2000, which I will discuss later.
Whenever I was in Alabama during this period I was accompanied by surveillance cars, twenty-four hours a day. Perhaps the most bizarre incident was in the spring of 1962 when they followed me from Montgomery, where I was staying at the Durrs’, down to Mobile where my grandmother was on her deathbed. My shadows sat out in front of my aunt’s house the night my grandmother died and then they followed us to Loxley, Alabama, a tiny town in Baldwin County, and terrorized everybody at the funeral. A lot of my relatives were George Wallace supporters, but they abandoned him after that. They said, “No matter what Bob did . . .”
My mother and father and all these relatives went to the police that were parked around my aunt’s house—of course causing a huge uproar in this tiny town—to track this dangerous criminal Bob Zellner at his grandmother’s funeral. Mom and Dad told the police that if they would get out of the yard, they would bring me to them after the service. Of course, the police didn’t move, and we left right after the funeral and they followed us all the way to Pensacola, way across the Florida line.
In the fall of 1962, I had a brief respite from Alabama violence and courts. Anne Braden asked me to go to the University of Mississippi, where James Meredith was attempting to enroll as its first black student. I had no contact with students in Oxford, but I did know the Episcopal chaplain, Duncan Gray. He put me in touch with Dr. James Silver, the historian who later wrote Mississippi: The Closed Society. My other contact there was the William Faulkner family. I stayed with Faulkner’s sister, and she told me the rules. I was not to talk about anything that I was doing in Oxford, and I was not to talk about William Faulkner. I did some work on campus and recruited a small group of students who were aware of Meredith’s pending enrollment. They later went and sat supportively with him in the cafeteria. I was on campus the day after the riots and shooting surrounding his enrollment; remnants of tear gas were still in the air and the ground was strewn with debris.
In the spring of 1963 it was back to another major confrontation for Alabama, George Wallace, and me. The William Moore March took place immediately before the SCLC Birmingham campaign. The march will remain clear for me forever. William Moore, a U.S. postman from Baltimore, Maryland, had decided as a matter of conscience that during his vacation he would walk from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, to deliver a letter to Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett. Moore didn’t agree with segregation, and he wanted to make a personal freedom walk. As he walked along he wore a sandwich board. The front said, “Eat at Joes”; the back said, “Both black and white.” He was shot and killed near Anniston, Alabama, where the Freedom Riders were attacked in 1961, he was shot and killed.
Moore’s letter to Barnett spoke of brotherhood and reconciliation. There was a slight lull in SNCC activities at the time, and we decided that a group from CORE and SNCC, which had been the two main organizations in the Freedom Rides, would take up William Moore’s march. We would start over in Chattanooga and try to complete the march to Jackson. We had a press conference in Chattanooga to kick things off, and away we went. We were all young and in shape. I’m not sure we even knew where we would camp or sleep each night, but we each had little backpacks. The whole distance was about four hundred miles. People came out to give us encouragement. One day, we stopped for a break and people brought us food. We had a two- or three-car support caravan with sandwiches and food. On one of those stops, a big black limousine pulled up, and a figure in a black suit got out and started coming around shaking everybody’s hands. We had no idea who he was until he came over and said, “Hi, I’m Billie Sol Estes. I want to wish you luck. I support your cause.” Apparently, he was a member of a biracial Pentecostal church.
I think there were five or six people from SNCC and five or six from CORE. One of the marchers was Sam Shirah, my old friend from Alabama, and he was chosen to lead us the day we were to cross into Alabama, because George Wallace had been Sam’s Sunday school teacher. Thus it was Wallace who would be directing Al Lingo as he met us at the state line. They had already made it clear that we wouldn’t be able to walk in peace across Alabama. We marched okay in Tennessee and Georgia, although we did have some opposition—no snipers, no serious injuries, but a lot of bottles, a lot of rocks. We just considered that par for the course.
We probably had two nights on the road before we got to the Alabama border. Sam Shirah put on the sign that Bill Moore had worn, and when we got to the Alabama line, the road was a little hilly and then it went into a little bit of a valley. There were hills on both sides of the road, and behind the fences, were huge crowds of people. They weren’t supporters. Most were Klansmen, rednecks—all hecklers. Al Lingo said, “You can’t come into the state of Alabama. If you do, you will be arrested.” Several of us decided that we were going to be noncooperative at this time. When we were arrested, we weren’t going to walk away or resist. We would go limp, and we wouldn’t cooperate with the trials or any other procedures. So Sam and myself and Eric Weinberger and one or two other people were in jail for about thirty-five days. The charges against us were inciting a riot and disturbing the public peace.
The rationale the authorities gave for our arrest was that if we had been allowed to walk, we would have all been killed. It was a “protective arrest,” which should not have carried a charge of a crime or punishment. Also, the ones of us who were noncooperative and went limp were shocked with cattle prods, which have a high-energy charge and burn you and cause you to go into spasms. When the police used the electrical charge on us, the crowd just went into a frenzy. They thought it was the greatest thing on earth.
It felt like being hit by lightning. It feels like your heart is gonna run away with you. It’s one of the worst pains you can imagine. But we weren’t going to cooperate. Our determination was stronger than the cattle prods, so they eventually dragged us into the paddy wagons.
We were housed in the Fort Payne jail. I remember the jailer’s wife, who seemed to be sympathetic, brought us corn bread, a big slice of raw onion, and buttermilk. That was our supper for practically every meal. I liked all three foods, so I had plenty to eat, but Eric announced that he was going to go on a fast, and he said he would not eat at all while he was in prison. I told him I would do my best to fast while I was with him, but every seventh day I would eat. I knew we were in their clutches, and they would like nothing better than for us to starve ourselves to death. He said, “It’s a point of principle for me.” He would have fasted to death. Eventually, they took him to the prison hospital and fed him intravenously. He was very close to death when they finally started feeding him. He wouldn’t drink much water, either.
A group of ministers came to get Sam and me out of jail to go and confront Governor George Wallace who was scheduled to speak at the annual Methodist conference at Huntingdon. So we left a few days before we were scheduled to get on bail. We must have looked like shipwrecked sailors, because Sam and I had not cooperated through the whole thing, and we had no clothes except the tattered ones we had worn from the beginning. We had no toiletries, and some of us had lost a tremendous amount of weight. I had actually eaten only five meals or so in a little over a month.
At Huntingdon, Sam’s mother asked Wallace, “Why did you arrest Bob and Sam?”
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sp; He said, “If I hadn’t they would have been killed.”
“Then, why didn’t you arrest the people who would have killed them?”
He smiled and said, “That wouldn’t have happened.”
Both Sam’s mother and father were good friends of Wallace, and some others in the conference attendees confronting him were former Wallace supporters, good solid Methodist folks from Alabama. We shamed him so much and so many people jumped on him about it that even though he was scheduled to make the major speech at the Methodist conference, he left the campus without speaking.
Years later, Mom told me a story about the clothes I wore to Huntingdon at that Methodist conference. She said she kept them for years in Dad’s old Klan trunk, the one he had made from a large hollow log. It was a beautiful piece of furniture where Dad kept his old Klan robes, his ceremonial Klan sword with the ivory handle, and the oath books with all the Klan secret rituals.
Mother told me that she often thought about those old tattered clothes I had at Huntingdon and how they symbolized, for her, the torture and degradation we had suffered at the hands of various Alabama Christian gentlemen. She took out the tattered old once-yellow corduroy pants and the raggedy shirt occasionally, wondering what to do with them. Every time she saw them she cried, so she said, “I finally took them out to the back yard and burned them. I felt better after that.”
15
John Brown: Live Like Him
SNCC was called to Danville, Virginia, in 1963 because the community wanted to integrate the library and the lunch counters. It was a segregated mill town. Reverend Hildreth McGhee and another young Pentecostal minister wanted to take on segregation. There were also some activists in the union, and they were interested in changes in the town as well. We started having workshops on nonviolence in one of the local churches. Avon Rollins, a SNCC staffer from Knoxville, and I were on the ground in Danville. We didn’t demand a lot from the movement people who joined us from time to time, other than the ability to be nonviolent when called for. We ran workshops training local people in nonviolence so they could join the sit-ins, marches, and other demonstrations. Other SNCC staffers spent varying amounts of time in Danville. Mary King came to work on communications; Ivanhoe Donaldson and Cordell Reagon helped with workshops; Dottie Miller and Jim Forman came in periodically to help with strategy and communication and as liaisons with legal people; most of the SNCC Freedom Singers came through at various times, including Bertha Gober, Matthew Jones, Bernice Johnson Reagon, and others.
The opposition in Danville was violent and often brutal. When the sit-ins and marches started, the cops deputized what seemed to be most of the adult white male population and supplied them with makeshift clubs. During a march, they would surround us with fire trucks and beat us. We had a lot of night marches, because people were in jail, and the whole black working-class community would become mobilized at a night mass meeting and then march to the jail.
Of 123 people in a march on June 10, 1963, ninety were hospitalized. The press was there but if the press took any pictures, the police and the deputized thugs beat the reporters and took their equipment. I had my camera, was not marching and was standing over with the press. Reverend McGhee and his wife were leading the march, and Dottie was in the march. They got to the jail and knelt down to pray. The police chief called in the table leg deputies, while fire trucks surrounded our group and blocked them in the alley. I knew they were about to beat everybody. All the reporters were standing there, but nobody raised a camera or took out a pad. I asked why no one was going to take pictures of the slaughter about to occur.
“Because they’re gonna break our equipment.”
Police Chief E. G. McCain was about to give the order, and the firemen were all standing there, so I thought I would just provide an example of what to do when you are a newsperson. I walked up real close and took a picture. The police chief said, “Okay, Zellner, you don’t value that camera very much.” He walked over and took the camera from around my neck. Holding the camera by the leather strap, Chief McCain smashed it on the ground three times. Each time, the crunch of it hitting the pavement gave me new pain. It had been an awfully good camera. Then he opened the busted back, took out the film and said, “Now, anybody else want to take pictures? No?” Then he arrested me, and he arrested Reverend McGhee, and they took us not inside the jail, but to the back of the jail and said, “Watch.” That’s when they turned on the fire hoses and started beating people.
Preparation for this kind of treatment helps when you meet it, and part of that was to be ready for whatever might happen, including getting killed. I particularly remember the fire hoses. When the water hits it’s disorienting because it’s more powerful than you expect. It just knocks you all over the place. It slides you along and skins you up, and it’s cold, and the force is so hard, it can break your bones. It can wash you into a brick wall or a pole or metal cans. You try to get into a group and hang onto each other. The main thing is to try to run from the area because you just can’t stand up under it. We learned to make a strategic retreat. I remember Forman prevented an assault one night on the steps of the city hall in Danville. Authorities had quietly let the deputies into City Hall even though it was closed and locked, fire trucks were in front of the steps, the sanitation workers were there with their table legs, and Forman went up the chief of police and said, “You can’t do this. There are women and children here, and enough people have been injured.” The chief gave us three minutes to leave and we left.
In a nonviolent situation, you objectify a lot by removing yourself psychically from the situation. More than once, I observed the effect on my own body and what was happening around me. I remember splintering glass from the fire hoses, because the water would knock the windows out, and I thought how stupid it was to be using the fire hoses against the people but to be destroying property and stores as well.
So, the cops stood there with their guns drawn on us and one said, “McGhee, your wife is out there, what kind of man are you? Aren’t you going to help her? Zellner, your girlfriend is out there. Aren’t you going to help her?” They literally washed Dottie under a car. Then, when she started to climb out, a cop hit her in the head with his stick. In the hospital that night were people with their breasts split completely open, noses split, eyes knocked out, ears ripped off. A local guy had a movie camera and took film at the hospital of staff sewing up person after person.
They charged Avon Rollins and me under a law known as the “John Brown statute”—inciting the black population into acts of war and violence against the white population. They also charged Dottie, Jim Forman, SNCC photographer Danny Lyon, and several other people who had been in and out during the summer. At an emergency meeting, we decided that all nonessential staffers under indictment should try to escape from Danville. We couldn’t afford the high bonds. Dottie, Forman, Mary King, and Danny Lyon were to leave. But somebody had to stay. SNCC wanted to leave what they called “a salt and pepper team,” so Avon and I decided to stay. We made our way to the church up on the hill and took sanctuary inside, because we reasoned that the cops wouldn’t come in immediately and arrest us on this John Brown felony charge.
Avon and I huddled in the darkened Baptist church, surrounded by some of the bravest local deacons. The others were spirited out of town. Like Albany, Georgia, Danville’s black community was mobilized from the preachers and teachers on down the line to the cab drivers and factory workers. The cab drivers arranged the escape by dividing the SNCC fugitives among a number of taxis, heading in different directions. When out of sight of the ever-present cops, Dottie, Jim, and the others would sneak into various civilian cars to be delivered into the countryside where a SNCC getaway car was stashed behind a country church. From there they sped toward Atlanta.
Two nights later, community people brought the film from the massacre to the church. Avon and I were going to try to escape from the church in the dark of night a
nd make our way through a gully to a nearby store. A cab would take us to a car out in the country. Then we could take the film to Washington so the world could see what was happening in Danville.
About two or three o’clock in the morning, Avon and I crept out the back of the church. We were about to go down a deep ravine into the gully. The cops were waiting; they turned the spotlights on us and just started shooting.
In a lot of situations, one looks back and remembers the funny part, and we don’t think back that we are out there in the middle of the night and the police are firing at us. I remember thinking, they couldn’t actually be shooting at us. You always think they are shooting in the air or something, and then you look and see the fire coming out of the gun barrels, and it’s all leveled directly at you. Also, you can feel the bullets whizzing around you. We didn’t know whether to run forward or go through the woods, because we were afraid that they would really hunt us down and kill us. So we decided to run around to the front of the church, hoping that someone would let us back in. The police were running behind us shooting at us, and not being familiar with the grounds outside the church, around one corner, we ran into a huge pile of cinders where they had emptied the pot-bellied stove. We both fell into the cinders, got up still running, and someone timed it just right and opened the front door of the church. We zipped inside, and they bolted the doors again. The police didn’t break in that night, and we felt that we were okay for a while.
In the years since, when I’ve shared the speaker’s platform with Avon and we tell about the escape from the church, he tells the story differently. He claims he hit the mountain of cinders first and fell down and that I left tracks all over his back—leaving him in the dust. I told Avon that might be so, but it only goes to show that he was leaving me behind until he hit the cinder pile.