The Wrong Side of Murder Creek

by Bob Zellner

  If we thought he was getting a little old, we were in for a shock. Seeger ran from the wings hollering, “Zellner, give me that axe!”

  I was as amazed as the audience as he grabbed the huge axe and swung it fiercely at the log. WHACK!

  “Bring me a little water Sylvie, huh!” He’d chop that log. “ Bring me a little water, now” . . .Whack! Pete sang that whole work song whacking that log. Then he grabbed a banjo and picked while talking about slavery and working and protest songs and freedom songs. He would sing “Abiyoyo” or pick up the twelve-string and sing a protest song from the days of the Lincoln Brigade. When he got to present-day freedom songs he would talk about the SNCC Freedom Singers and motion for me to come sing with him. This was always the signal to call people from the audience to join us on stage and rattle the roof with our fight songs. Even after the last song, “We Shall Overcome,” with everyone crossing arms right over left and swaying to the music, the crowd would linger while people lifted up song after song, adding new verses about the march that day. Pete would smile and tap his foot at the end of his long leg and pick until we were tired out or it was time to hit the road for the next gig.

  That was the spring of 1962, more than forty-five years ago, and Pete and Toshi Seeger are still going today. I still get to sing with Pete on occasion. I believe he will last forever.

  On one leg of the trip with Seeger we were deep in conversation about singers and performers. Pete thanked Dottie for setting up the concerts and me for singing with him. He said that the Southern black freedom struggle was like fresh water to all manner of artists. “That’s why we, they, come down here to be with you. It is not just that they want to help. There is something here for them that they don’t get in their work and in their careers.”

  By the way, Pete said, there’s a guy down here now who is going to be a star. “He will take the country by storm,” Pete declared.

  We were excited and curious because we knew that Pete did not engage in puffery or hyperbole. Dottie guessed that it might be one of the Freedom Singers. They had already been a hit at the Newport Folk Festival. Our singing group consisted of seasoned organizers who shunned personal promotion, but we always thought the public might anoint one or more of them a star.

  “Not many people have heard of this singer, but he is a great poet and artist from way up the Mississippi River in Minnesota.” Some other SNCC folk were with Dottie and me and Pete in the car, and several of us asked in unison who it was. “Anybody we ever heard of?”

  “I don’t think so,” Pete smiled, “Unless you have seen or heard of Bob Dylan.”

  “Bob Dylan,” we hollered. We jokingly told Pete we all knew Dylan “and he will never amount to anything—you can’t understand a word he sings!”

  We told Pete that Dylan wanted to sing at all our events in Mississippi and the local people were always asking us what he’s saying and we can’t tell them because we can’t understand him either.

  Pete had been black-listed for years because of his progressive politics, but the man was right up to date. By early 1962, Dylan was beginning to make a name for himself in folk music clubs in New York and elsewhere. He had recently released his first album though few had heard it yet. But Pete knew Dylan would be massive, a true poet of the American and human condition. Soon we learned Seeger was right, and Bob Dylan joined our stable of stars.

  Seeger, Belafonte, and others organized benefit concerts at Carnegie Hall, Town Hall, the Village Gate and other venues for SNCC, SCLC, and SCEF. Often we were called from “the field” to the city to speak or generally help out at these events. The stars, Forman explained, wanted to see and hang out with the movement “stars.”

  One time in New York, I was assigned to accompany Dylan backstage and make sure he got to the cocktail party following the concert on time. That was where the heavy hitters with the big bucks were and they naturally wanted to see the stars like Bob Dylan, Belafonte, Poitier, Joan Collins, Ray Charles, Johnny Mathis, Tony Bennett, Marlon Brando, Lena Horne, Paul Newman, Nina Simone, and Joan Baez, to name a few who performed for us at various times. Donors also wanted to see the SNCC kids: Diane Nash, John Lewis, Chuck McDew, Ruby Doris Smith, and that white boy, what’s his name?

  We got through Dylan’s set all right but the audience kept demanding more and Bobby kept pouring it on. I motioned to him several times from the wings, pointing to my watch and making a drinking motion with one hand. He’d shake his head “No” as if to say, “You fool, this is the really important thing tonight.” Meanwhile, I felt terrible letting the organizers down.

  Finally, with sweat pouring off him, Dylan came into the wings for the last time. I said we really had to get down there to the party. “Money is important, too.”

  “I know, Zellner; I got to see a couple people first. Won’t be a minute.” Dylan wiped his face with a dry towel and opened the door to reveal a long line of people peering expectantly at the new star. This was the height of Dylan’s early white-hot fame; folks didn’t want to let him go. Bob Dylan didn’t want to let them go either. He spoke to each person until there were just two people left.

  I tugged at his arm, “Man, we really got to go. There ain’t going to be anybody left over there at the party.”

  Just another couple of minutes, I thought. Maybe we will be all right. Then it happened. The next to the last person in the line took out a ragged envelope and handed it to Dylan with a pencil, “Write me a song,” he demanded.

  Bob Dylan, the new big star on the American scene, stood without uttering a word for twenty minutes, writing on that sorry envelope. Needless to say we missed the entire cocktail party where he was to be the main attraction.

  Bobby handed the paper wordlessly to the geek, shook the hand of the very last person, and turned to me ready to go. I must have looked sad because, in an unusual show of feeling, he grabbed my arm and said, “Don’t worry, Z, I know where they’re going to be.”

  On the way in the cab, I found myself wondering what he wrote on the envelope. “What’d you write on it?” I asked.

  “Write on what?” he asked. He was sprawled out, his boots taking up half the back seat. It was like he had not the slightest idea what I was talking about.

  “The envelope. What did you write on the envelope?”

  “Oh, hey, I didn’t write nothing for the geek. I’m playing around with something on the war. It’s nothing.”

  “For a half an hour? Nothing?”

  “Twenty minutes,” he stated, as if it was the end of this particular conversation. Soon we were in the Village and sure enough, everybody, including the heavy hitters, was still there at a room off the Village Gate.

  19

  Seed Pod Explosion

  In the summer of 1964, the concentration on voter registration and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was part of a political strategy aimed toward the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City in August. I didn’t go to the Convention. I wanted to, but the decision had been made not to flood the place with SNCC people, and I had been present at so many major events over a three-year period.

  Black citizens were barred from the Mississippi regular Democratic Party activities, and there was very little Republican structure in Mississippi. As we built parallel political procedures within MFDP, there were a lot more candidates than had been in the mock election of 1963 and a lot more interest in the black community. The idea was to duplicate as much as possible the procedure of the established Democrats in Mississippi so the MFDP could go to Atlantic City and challenge the credentials of the “regulars.” Our people would be true Democrats, in supporting both the presidential candidate and the platform—not true of the segregated regular Mississippi Democrats.

  Lyndon Johnson was fighting for support of the regulars, but it didn’t make sense—most white Mississippians, regardless of party, were going for Barry Goldwater. Johnson could have had an histo
ric conversion, but he was too much into the old politics to see what an opportunity was before him. He didn’t want to alienate the South, and he opposed our challenge on narrow political grounds just to be reelected. He sold his soul for a mess of pottage, as the Bible says, and it is one of the historic crimes of this past century that as a supposed protégé of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Johnson was unable to support the MFDP challenge. He’d come out of the political milieu in the South where other people had helped prepare the foundation for the civil rights movement. So here’s this idiot who has a chance to be one of the great political figures of American history and says, “Oh, no, I need to be a politician rather than a statesman.”

  At the convention, we had congresswomen and men along with some senators supporting our challenge. The MFDP enjoyed tremendous grassroots support in the Deep South demonstrating clearly that we could organize a new Democratic Party in the region. Lyndon Johnson put Hubert Humphrey in charge of destroying our MFDP challenge and in facilitating a compromise—that the DNC would seat two of our delegates, but they didn’t even leave it up to the MFDP to choose which two. Great pressure was brought to bear on attorney Joe Rauh Jr., Representative Edith Green, and all the labor people who supported the challenge. The DNC just pulled out all the stops to intimidate our supporters. The SNCC and grassroots leaders said, “You have to make up your own mind.” Fannie Lou Hamer and the local leaders said, “We didn’t come here for no two seats.”

  The compromise offered little at the time, but the challenge insured that in the future Mississippi would no longer be able to send a segregated delegation. These stirrings finally broke the back of the Dixiecrats; after that there was a major political realignment, the South becoming a Republican voting bloc as white Southerners left the Democratic Party. In 1968, further efforts to challenge the Mississippi delegation ultimately led to rules changes. But the national Democrats were not adept at doing the grassroots organizing they could have done on the basis of those rules changes—they missed the implications possible in those changes. Rather than alienate Hard Hat Joe and returned Vietnam war veterans, they could have made common cause with them and tried to do what we did later on with the GROW Project. We said working people, black and white, need to get together now. The upper-class Democrats, the McGovernites, and others misinterpreted what working-class support for the civil rights movement could have meant for the party. National Democrats didn’t have a united-front class strategy, which laid the groundwork for getting the hell beat out of them for years and years by the Reagan-Bush strategists. Republicans were able to convince working-class white people that they had their interests at heart and built a Republican structure on the basis of a backlash to the civil rights movement. George Wallace was actually the architect of the present-day Republican Party. Also, by then, identity politics and black nationalism were entrenched, leaving little hope for a grassroots effort of black and whites uniting on a progressive strategy.

  In some sense, our Atlantic City challenge had a negative impact. By 1964, people had already been on the front lines for two, three, or four years. They had been beaten and battered. There were a lot of deaths and much trauma. Also, we didn’t understand battle fatigue at that time, so a great deal of cynicism began to set in after the summer of ’64; we harbored anger because the nation’s response to the murders of Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman was strong only because two of them were white Northerners. If it had been three black workers it would just have been adding three more to the list of martyrs that had gone before.

  But in the great scheme of things, Atlantic City was a tremendous success. It broke the back of massive resistance in the South. Mississippi was still resisting school desegregation and black voter registration. Bringing hundreds of mostly white middle-class students from across the country, then challenging the seating of the regular Mississippi Democrats at the Convention, captured the imagination of progressives all over the world, similar to the results of the Freedom Rides in 1961, when young and old came from all over to be imprisoned in the notorious Parchman Penitentiary. Afterwards, they went home or joined the SNCC staff, arousing a lot of national attention. So after the summer of ’64 there was a tremendous seed-pod explosion of people who had had searing experiences in Mississippi. Steeling them as organizers, it gave them a lifelong Holy Grail of social action and involvement. People like Mario Savio went back to Berkeley to start the Free Speech Movement because of his work with COFO in the summer of ’64. SDS was of course much affected by SNCC all along, and the Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC), mobilizing white students, was given a tremendous boost by Freedom Summer. Some of the students went back to help Cesar Chavez organize farmworkers. Marshall Ganz dropped out of Harvard for the SNCC staff and went on to work with Chavez, later returning to Harvard a well-educated man.

  SNCC pushed Martin King to take a strong stand on the war, while Julian Bond’s Georgia Senate struggle helped launch the antiwar campaign. The women’s liberation movement was reinvigorated, to say the least, by the civil rights movement. It is unfortunate that some scholars have made careers on characterizing SNCC as a bastion of male chauvinism. Many early abolitionists made horribly racist statements, so much so that scholars today would read them out of the movement. Much of the sixties movement was progressive on “the woman question,” especially SNCC. To apply today’s consciousness to the words of progressive men and women who were organizing fifty years ago is not good scholarship. Stokely’s rap about the position of women in the organization being prone has been knowingly misinterpreted, while Casey Hayden’s answer is not nearly so famous. She responded to the widespread belief that SNCC women were expected to clean up the freedom house by saying, “Don’t be ridiculous, nobody cleaned up the freedom house.

  A strange and contradictory thing about the women’s movement and SNCC was who did what and why and when. I did more cooking than most women did, and I don’t remember women bringing me coffee or doing a lot of cleaning. Some complaints might be valid but some are based on the notion that, relatively speaking, SNCC men were supposed to be more conscious and aware than other men. They were and are often held to a different standard. But just look at some of the strong women—Fannie Lou Hamer, Modjeska Simpkins, Diane Nash, Anne Braden, Joanne Grant, Ruby Doris Smith Robinson—who were active in the movement and were unquestioned leaders in whatever organizations they affiliated with. Ruby Doris was our boss and ruled with an iron fist.

  I was present at the Waveland staff meeting in the fall of 1964 when Stokely made his infamous statement. He was doing one of his traditional raps, one line after another, and the question came up about the women’s memo on their role, and he said, “Well, everyone knows that the women’s position in SNCC is prone.” It was meant as a humorous statement, and we all laughed. Academicians now ask how we could joke about something like that. Well, we joked about death, we used the word “nigger,” we joked about everything. Then you have wits like Chuck McDew, who says that Stokely’s comment shows his basic conservatism, because there are many more positions than prone. We were having meetings for days and Stokely just said something that popped into his head, and then we went on to other issues. If you talk to someone with absolutely no sense of humor and no understanding of the situation, you can’t explain it to them, because the more you try, the worse it gets.

  Every male in 1964 and 1965 was a chauvinist and they may still be. I am a male chauvinist because I grew up in this paternalistic, male-chauvinist society. I’ve struggled with my male chauvinism for years, and as a feminist, I consider myself slightly more progressive than the average American male. Certainly, Stokely Carmichael in 1964 was a male chauvinist, as were all of the men in SNCC, but the women in SNCC were uncommonly free to exercise leadership and did. I found in SNCC, you didn’t do leadership based on your official position—you were a leader on the basis of what you did. Women were often more powerful than the men, especially in local communities.

 
I sometimes have difficulty explaining to middle-class white people, especially women, that we had a lot of strong women leaders in the local grassroots movements who were constantly reaching back, bringing men forward saying, “You need some leadership.” I try to explain the totally different situation in black male society back then. One must understand the historical emasculation of black males and the threat of lynching to grasp the widespread female black leadership, particularly in Southern rural areas. Another example is my theory about white men, racism, and sexism. A man in this society who is not a racist or sexist is rare indeed, being steeped as we are in paternalism and one of the most virulent forms of white supremacy in the history of man’s inhumanity. When Imus protests that there is not a racist bone in his body it is a big mistake. It’s much easier to say I am a racist and a sexist struggling to overcome my afflictions.

  I am a racist, because I grew up in this racist society. I have struggled with my racism for more than fifty years, but I’m still a racist.

  20

  Train Wreck

  After Freedom Summer, Dottie and I went back to Boston and Brandeis in the fall of 1964. It was incredible, but we soon ran into none other than Willie B. Painter. We were walking home from a SNCC party and passed a dark doorway, and I saw Willie B. standing there. I said to Dottie, “Don’t look now, but Willie B. Painter is standing in the door back there.” She said, “Bob, you have lost your mind, this is Boston, he is in Alabama.” Then we heard footsteps coming up from behind, and Willie B. caught up with us.

  He said, “Bob, what are you doing in Boston?”

  I said, “Willie B., I have a strange sense that you know what I am doing in Boston.”

  Unbeknownst to me, George Wallace was speaking at Harvard Law School the next night. He had campaigned in 1964 for the Democratic presidential nomination. He had already lost, but he loved the spotlight and was still traveling around speaking whenever he had the chance.