by Bob Zellner
To be safe, we gave the film to an amply endowed woman in the church, and she put it in her bosom and took it away. The next morning the police broke the door down. We figured they would do that, and they captured us and took us off to jail. The John Brown charge was a serious felony charge and called for a high bond. The charge itself would no doubt be declared unconstitutional. It’s like sedition laws against labor people. They would arrest people on it, but they would almost never try people on it because they knew it would be thrown out. Police wanted to keep anarchy and sedition charges on the books in order to intimidate freedom fighters.
I found it ironic that they charged us with acts of war and violence against the white population, because the exact opposite was true. They had tanks. They shot tear gas and aimed the fire hoses. Any time we had a gathering, they were likely to surround us and beat people and tear gas us and shoot at us. The police had a habit of attacking whenever and wherever we gathered.
To relieve stress and keep everybody’s spirits together, the community held a series of small fund-raisers in the heart of the black community. Usually, nobody’s house was big enough, so the gathering would be in the back yard. Everybody would chip in and bring food and beer, and lanterns would be hung, and somebody would bring a little record player so people would be able to dance. A collection would be taken up. If the police found out where we were, they would mass a large force, try and surround the place, and try to catch everybody. The idea was to catch all the SNCC people and put them in jail. If you ran, they would shoot at you. One night, they surrounded a party and surprised us out of the blue. All of a sudden, they attacked, shooting in all directions. The amazing thing was that people weren’t killed. Everybody ran. I ran two or three houses down, and went into a house, and everybody jumped into closets and climbed under beds, but the woman of the house, seeing me, was terrified and said, “Oh no, you can’t stay here. Everybody else can be passed off as a relative from the neighborhood. I hate to do this, but you’ve gotta go. “
I said, “Okay, but the police are in the backyard. Can you let me out the front?”
She took me out the front door. The house was high up on stilts, and there was a hill, so one end of the porch was real low, and the other end was very high off the ground. When I went out the door, she slammed the door behind me, and the cops turned the spotlight on the porch and started shooting at me right away. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. I was there on the porch with this big spotlight, and the bullets were flying all over the place, so I ran down to the end of the porch. The low end of the porch was where the police were, so I had to take a chance at the other end. I ran down to the high end and just leaped into the darkness. When I hit, I rolled, and then jumped up and sprinted behind the house where there was a little outbuilding. On the left-hand side of the building, out of sight from where the police would be coming was a huge pile of brambles—bushes, briar stickers, and God knows what else was in there, snakes, broken glass, rusty nails. I thought my only chance was to dive into there. I was very athletic at the time, so I jumped as high as I could and turned a flip so I landed on my back in this huge pile of mess and immediately relaxed so I would sink as far as possible. I knew there would be a lot of settling noise. So I tried to get everything quiet before they were able to get around to me. They were shouting and shooting, shining the spotlights, but by the time they came near me I was settled in. They searched the whole back of the house, and some ran into the woods behind the house. It seemed like I was in there an hour or so. Then, after everything got completely dark and they were all gone, I was still afraid to move.
Then, I heard a tiny voice, “Psst, hey mister, hey mister. Mr. Bob, they’re all gone. Come follow me.” So I climbed out and this little kid took me through the woods to somebody else’s house that he knew, and they called somebody to come and retrieve me.
I have no idea how they missed me in the bramble patch. I was never hit by a bullet. Glass was breaking, wood was splintering everywhere from bullets, but I was a criminal trying to escape. When you’re in the thick of it, it’s like a soldier’s training. We were so well-trained and so disciplined in nonviolence. Actually, we had conditioned our souls to the point where we wouldn’t feel anger.
Over the course of that summer we were arrested five or six times, and on a lot of different charges. They would bring us up on disorderly conduct or disturbing the peace, or rioting. They would convict us, and they’d take us off to jail, and we’d have to make bail. Usually, we would serve some of our sentence, and before the end of the sentence, we would get bailed out so that the charges wouldn’t be moot, and we could still appeal. After one arrest, several of us were convicted and sent to the work farm near the town. By then, I was shell-shocked. I knew that I was exhausted, but didn’t know the depths of it.
One time, I was in jail with Danny Foss, a young PhD candidate from the Brandeis University sociology department. A fan of SNCC, he had come to Danville on his own when he heard about the summer’s activities. Every time I got arrested, Danny was arrested with me or he soon followed me to the cells. He had a disconcerting habit of antagonizing police in the jail. Generally, if we were in the jail, we would avoid this. But the cops would come in the cell and beat Danny and I would have to go over and try to nonviolently protect him. I wound up getting beaten myself. After one of these episodes, I told Danny, “I don’t mean to offend you, but we’re in jail. There are no news people around, no cameras, and these people want to beat the hell out of you anyway, so why antagonize them to the point where they do it? And unless you haven’t noticed, every time you get beaten, I do too. I’m pretty exhausted with all this crap.”
Danny, who had every neurosis imaginable, pinched his face in the most horrible way and said, “Bob, unless I’m in imminent danger of death, I sink into a deathly lethargy.”
I said, “Okay, that’s it. If you can’t work out whatever personal problems you have about this, I’d rather you have narcolepsy than continue on this path.”
Danny Foss got me to go to Brandeis University that fall. One day we were talking in the cell—at least Danny was somebody to talk to. He commented that I looked tired.
I hadn’t thought that much about it but I suddenly realized how I felt. I had joined the SNCC staff in the fall of 1961 and now I was coming up on two years of practically nonstop action.
I had been arrested in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, and Virginia and charged with everything from criminal anarchy in Louisiana to committing acts of war and violence in Virginia. I had been beaten, nearly lynched, and shot at. Was it possible to take a break?
Danny asked, “Do you think you can be serious about going to grad school for a while? Brandeis is a great university with a great sociology department.”
I had told him I majored in sociology and psychology at Huntingdon, and he reminded me that my good friend and jail buddy, Chuck McDew, had studied at Brandeis the year before. I told Foss that it would be a great dream but I couldn’t do it for a number of reasons. I still owed a lot of money for my undergraduate degree, I was planning to get married to Dottie Miller and, besides, it was July already and nobody would take me as a graduate student on such short notice. Danny’s pockmarked face was framed in a ray of late afternoon sun. The dark slashes the bars made across the high cell window bounced off his face, pulling the dark black hair of his big head down across his bemused expression. Danny was a New Yorker, a big momma’s boy, and the most intelligent student ever to grace any Brandeis graduate school.
When he told me the university was in Boston, or in Waltham, a suburb, I remembered a beautiful old Waltham watch I had at some point, and I must admit that the idea of studying in Boston, the city of “higher learning,” had a certain romantic flare. I realized later that smart Danny was letting me have time to talk myself into going. I told him how my Dad had always talked about the time he spent in Boston as if it was a fantasy, magical. Daddy ha
d sailed for Europe from Boston and later he returned as a young churchman to help defend Methodist Bishop Oxnam against charges of communism. Besides, I said to myself, here I was a poor preacher’s boy from deepest, darkest, backward Alabama, not exactly a hotbed of free thinking or real education, about to marry a beautiful, sexy, sophisticated, New Yorker. Maybe, I thought, Dottie, an honors graduate of Queens College, will be impressed if I land a spot at Brandeis. I had not thought much past us getting married. The fall after Danville might be a good time to change gears. I had not inquired about the SCEF grant to SNCC, under which I had technically worked the last two years. I might continue, but I sensed that Anne Braden and Jim Dombrowski already had some questions about my approach to the job. They thought I should spend more time on the road and less time in jail or heading up local campaigns like the current one in Danville. Forman, being my immediate boss, as SCEF and SNCC had both wanted it, was usually more persuasive than Anne, who was further away.
I woke from my reverie, thinking if this Brandeis thing works out, which it probably won’t (who ever heard of somebody applying in July for graduate school beginning in a few weeks?), Dottie and I could get a leave of absence or something. I knew neither of us had any intention of leaving SNCC. It had become, literally, for the both of us, our lives.
When Danny and I got out of jail in late July I told him that I did not plan to go to jail any more that summer because Dottie and I were getting married. I had already missed a couple of wedding dates from being indisposed behind bars. Miss Miller had let me know in no uncertain terms during my last call from jail to tell her that I was detained by the law, that under no circumstances was I to be arrested again. “By God, we are getting married. Get yourself to Atlanta. It’s all set up. Stay out of jail, at least until we are married.” I said something lame like she should tell Chief McCain that “under no circumstances was I to be arrested anymore.”
I had first met Dottie Miller on one of my times back in Atlanta. She was volunteering for SNCC in the evenings and working during the day in the research department of the Southern Regional Council, and we met when I was at SRC investigating some funding for SNCC. She was volunteering in the evenings in the much-needed communications program in the SNCC office. Dottie and her sister were the children of Barney and Sara Miller and had been raised near Gramercy Park in Manhattan. In early April 1962, I went to New York with Dottie and Bill Hanson, also of SNCC. Bill had his jaw broken in Albany and Dottie had arranged for her dentist father to work on Bill’s jaw and teeth. Dr. Miller was my future father-in-law. Barney, a white-haired distinguished-looking Englishman, raised in Leeds, still said “Cheerio” to all his dental patients and friends. Although Dottie’s parents met in Canada, they married in New York in 1934, but only after Barney, a qualified dentist, spend three unemployed and hungry years. Dottie was what was called a “red diaper baby,” a child of parents who were radicals or communists during the period from the 1930s to the 1950s. They were typically smart, efficient, and outspoken. She had first come South in 1960 for training in nonviolent resistance sponsored by the Congress for Racial Equality—CORE. She was arrested in a demonstration and served time in jail in a cell with other white women, segregated from her fellow activists, the rest of whom were black.
The South and the movement were always in Dottie’s heart. She returned to Atlanta in June 1961 to do research for the SRC, hoping to work eventually for SNCC, and she did become a SNCC staffer in June 1962. Of course, by the time we started courting, she was quite familiar, from doing research and writing for SNCC, with my work in McComb and Albany and on campuses all over the place.
When I got out of the Danville jail, I went to the lady’s house where I was staying in the black community, I took a long shower to wash the jail off, ate a delicious meal she had prepared for me and two ministers, and then slept for about fourteen hours. The next day I saw Danny being beaten as practice in one of our nonviolent training workshops in the basement of McGhee’s church. I reminded Cordell Reagon not to let anybody hit Foss too hard—that he had just gotten out of jail where he had been whipped pretty good. “I know that, Bob,” Cordell sang out, “but these sessions got to be realistic if these kids are gonna be cool while they are sitting down or going limp. “
“I know what you mean, Steve McQueen, but the boy has got bad eyes; he’s a scholar but he don’t holler. Brandeis can’t do without him, I hear, and we don’t want to return him with a detached retina to go along with black eyes and Coke-bottle eyeglasses, you know what I mean? Go easy or get in there and let them beat on you—you Freedom Singer, you.”
I pulled Danny up from the concrete floor and told him to go take a break. The only thing he said was, “Zellner, did you call Brandeis yet?” I walked away from the workshop with Danny. “No, I did not call yet. You are serious about this, right?”
Danny had been very patient and I realized that I had told him all my thoughts on the subject. He steered me to the battered old pay phone in the church basement and took charge. He had a pocket full of quarters and first he dialed the sociology department and had me talk to Dr. Maurice Stein. We had a good talk and Stein said time was short but he wanted me and I could still get in. Stein told me to call President Abraham Sacher. Danny dialed his number, too, and eventually he came on the line. When he figured out who I was, that I was with Danny Foss, and that I was applying late because I’d been demonstrating all summer and in jail much of the time, he assured me that the details were being worked out.
And they were. My tuition was to be paid and I was even going to receive a stipend for my living expenses. When I told him there were just a couple of details to work out—a SNCC leave of absence and getting married—he laughed and said that was fine, I had until September 23rd when classes started. “Welcome to Brandeis,” he concluded.
My head spun as Danny gave me a crushing bear hug with his puny, white arms.
The weeks following that phone call went by in a blur. I wrapped up duties in Danville, dodging the police as much as possible. My last act was to be a distant observer of a mass march to the police station, jail, and City Hall. It was to be a send-off to the hundreds of young people and adults of all walks of life who had endured our strenuous training workshops. I couldn’t afford to get arrested because I had a ticket the next day for Atlanta to get married to the brilliant and lovely Dorothy Miller. Needless to say, the police, using field glasses, spotted me on the hill near the staging church. They scooped me up and headed for the jail. I learned that they were tapping our phones and knew I was leaving to get married. The cops knew about Dottie and her part in the demonstrations earlier that summer; they had beaten her in the head. They all had a big laugh and asked how “Dottie” is doing. I’m sure they enjoyed my one phone call, which I placed to my fiancée in Atlanta. When I told her I would miss another wedding date because I had “accidentally” been arrested she said, “You better get your ass out of jail, make your bail and be here, because we’re getting married.” That was one time when I did get bailed out the same night, and I flew to Atlanta and married Dottie on August 9.
Julian Bond rounded up the minister by midnight that Saturday night, while all the SNCC people in town had a gala party. By wedding time many were drunk. Casey Hayden and Julian stood with us during the ceremony, James Bond, Julian’s brother, and Jane Bond, his sister and Dottie’s roommate, took over duties as hosts. Others in the wedding party included Tom Hayden and Connie Curry.
While all this was going on, thieves were outside stealing my clothes from the old green Chevy I had used for two years. We had planned to leave on the honeymoon immediately after the ceremony. We drove to Alabama to see my folks, then to New Orleans to see friends, then to California for fund-raising speeches, then to Corning, New York, for a speech at a conference, then to DC for the March on Washington, then back to Atlanta to finish up reports, collect a few remaining belongings, and close Dottie’s apartment. Then we drove to Brande
is for classes which started September 23, 1963.
While I was at Brandeis, Dottie was running the New England SNCC office in the basement of the Harvard Epworth Methodist Church, near the Harvard campus. Dorothy Burlage had opened an office there for the Northern student movement to raise money and awareness of SNCC. Dottie and I did fund-raising, recruited students, and supported SNCC while we were in the North for four semesters, but we returned South for the summer of 1964 and other major events.
In retrospect, Danville was an interesting campaign. The opposition would mobilize strongly as long as the movement people were mobilizing. Afterwards, there would be some accommodation to our demands, then a little backsliding and then more demands from us. At least by then, they knew what was possible for the community to do, and that there were a lot of very courageous and dedicated people in the black working community. The unions at the mills changed some of their behavior. They were also under pressure from different federal regulations and union rules, so seniority lists were integrated, and work fountains and work areas and lockers were integrated. The library and theaters and bowling alleys were nominally integrated, so a little progress was made.
But when I think back about Danville, I am still stunned by the amount of violence, pain, and suffering that confronted the movement. In Danville, the powers that be would do absolutely horrendous things and make sure no news got out, so the terrible events and injuries occurred as if we were in a vacuum. As always in the movement, “If it didn’t make the news it didn’t happen.” To me, Danville was one of the most consistently bloody confrontations of all the campaigns that I was in.
16