by Bob Zellner
Willie B. said, “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow night.” I wasn’t aware that Wallace was going to speak at Harvard, so I just said, “Well, you may see me, you may not.” I wouldn’t give him any information—period. Then when I found out about the speech and realized that Willie B. was concerned about me showing up at Harvard, I didn’t want to disappoint him.
I decided to do a little organizing. Some SNCC-connected Harvard students told me that the law professor who was moderating Wallace’s appearance would bend over sideways to protect a guest from hostile questions or verbal attacks. Demonstrations were outlawed. But the SNCC students arranged a place for me to sit near the area where the microphone would be set up to take questions from the floor. A large student would get to the mike first and I could hide behind him to avoid the possibility of Wallace recognizing me and refusing my question.
Wallace gave his usual spiel—pugnaciously “sending a message to the pin-head bureaucrats” in Washington. He said the American people were fed up with being bused and punished with affirmative action. He bellowed that if he were president, he would bring the nation back to a true respect for the God-given right of the various states to shake off the tyranny of the federal government. The governor claimed race relations were fine in Alabama because everybody liked it as it was—where everyone knows his place. As for all this talk about violence and voting—why everybody who wants to, in peace-loving Alabama, can vote.
At the end of his tirade the first student asked a softball question. Wallace answered and the boy stepped aside. I looked up and said, “Governor Wallace . . .”
Before I could continue, he spun around and sprinted toward the back of the stage. Moving slightly to my right, I looked past the lectern to see what George was doing back there. I saw him dart down some steps to huddle with a uniformed Alabama trooper on one arm and Special Investigator Willie B. Painter on the other. The instant Wallace bolted, the moderator began pounding the gavel, shouting, “I rule that question out of order.”
I shouted back along with half the audience that no question had been asked. “I don’t care,” the professor screamed, looking for the disappearing governor, “I rule that question out of order, now sit down!” I stood my ground and the audience began chanting, “He didn’t ask a question.” Others shouted, “How you can rule a question out of order that was not asked?” After all, they were law students.
The professor finally allowed me to go ahead with my question. I said, “Where’s Governor Wallace? I saw him disappear down the stairs. Maybe he doesn’t want to be asked a question by me. I’m Bob Zellner with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. I’m from Alabama.”
Then the students started chanting, “Make him answer. Make him answer.”
As this was going on, Wallace was being led slowly back to the podium. It probably didn’t look good for the Fightin’ Judge to run from someone totally unknown to the audience. George peered at me over the lectern and the professor told me to go ahead. So I asked a rather convoluted question, but it made the point. I said, “Governor Wallace, in your talk, you said there’s good race relations in Alabama and there’s no persecution of black people and black people can register to vote in Alabama. In light of that, how can you explain . . .” and I mentioned a number of cases like the Birmingham church bombing for which he bore almost direct responsibility. I mentioned all the martyrs in Alabama, the times people were arrested around the rights of black people or attempts to register to vote. “How can you explain all that if there are good race relations in Alabama?”
He said, “Bob Zellner, I don’t have to answer any of your questions.” Then to the students he said, “This man has been in practically every jail in Alabama.” Suddenly there was thunderous applause, not for Wallace, but for me. It wasn’t so much for me, as it was against Wallace. Immediately, I thought, “Oh, Jesus God, now the papers are going to say that Wallace got a standing ovation from the students at Harvard.” There were Alabama reporters and the state troopers traveling with him.
Afterward, I called Virginia Durr in Montgomery and told her to get the papers the next day because they were going to say that George Wallace got a standing ovation from the students. She said, “They’re that crazy?”
I told her the story, and repeated, “I guarantee you the reporting will be a standing ovation for George Wallace at Harvard University.”
To this day people ask me if in my confrontation with Wallace, the students gave Wallace a standing ovation. In fact, one of the headlines of the Montgomery paper was, “Zellner loses in bout with Wallace.” That’s how familiar they had gotten with the small rivalry between George Wallace and me.
Wallace had reason not to want me at his speeches. Every time he ran for president, I organized a truth squad, and wherever he went, we would go there. I had organized events at his rallies before, and I was always popping up at unexpected places right in his face.
While we were in Boston, the police sent regular reports on me and Dottie to police in Alabama. This is recorded in the files of the Alabama Sovereignty Commission. Willie B. Painter bragged that he knew everything there was to know about me. When he emerged out of the doorway that day on the Boston street, he introduced himself to Dottie and said he hadn’t had the pleasure of meeting her before, but he did know where her parents lived in New York.
I stayed in Boston for the fall semester and the spring semester. I was arrested and beaten during the Selma March activities in 1965, but I was in Boston at the time. Although SNCC had been organizing for a few years in Selma, the big campaign came in 1965. The main organizing that spring was by SCLC, but John Lewis and others from SNCC were among those beaten so badly on Bloody Sunday on March 7, 1965. The violence was so stark that people mobilized around the country. We headed up the organizing in Boston for the response to Bloody Sunday. We had been sending truckloads of food, books, and clothes from Boston to Alabama and Mississippi, but after Selma, we began to organize politically by having demonstrations at the Federal Building. We were seeking federal intervention in Selma and the creation of a national climate for protection of the marchers and passage of a voting rights bill.
Boston was a good place to organize, because there was a tremendous infrastructure of supportive students and professors as well as long-time liberals and progressives. We had strong groups at Harvard, Radcliffe, Boston University—all the major colleges and universities. The outrage over Selma was palpable. We organized an informational picket and then upped the ante by springing civil disobedience on the Boston federal offices. We did workshops and training as if we were conducting sit-ins, including ACLU-trained observers and legal aid in reserve. We began by blocking the doors of the federal building. If they weren’t going to allow black people to vote or protect marchers down South, we would shut the building down. Our group sat in the revolving doors and on the sidewalk in front of the doors. Of course, the police tried to clear us out, but at my door, we linked arms and legs. Our mass entanglement was tremendously strong, and the cops got frustrated. It took a lot of them to break it, and they picked me out as one of the instigators.
When the cops tried to break me loose, one did his best to break my finger and my wrist. We had a lot of observers, and so I said to one of them, “This policeman is breaking my finger and wrist.” He immediately stopped, but when they were carrying us to the police vehicle, we all went limp. That really made them mad. Even though there were TV lights and cameras going and radio people everywhere, this cop raised his fist back and hit me in the face as hard as he could. Bam! I was so nonviolently mad, but all I did was keep him in focus so I could read his badge number when my eyes cleared up. I then called out to the observer, “1859 is the badge number of the person who just hit me.” The cop then shoved me into the vehicle, and four or five more cops climbed in and started beating me like a punching bag. I was seeing stars and passing in and out of consciousness. Noel Day, one of our black civi
l rights workers who pastored a church in Roxbury, came piling in like a football player, knocking cops in all directions. He put his body over my body. Then they started beating him. When they got me to the jail, they did their best to clean me up a little. They called the jail doctor, and I was so beaten up, I couldn’t speak and I couldn’t see, but I could hear. The doctor said, “This man is seriously injured. You have to take him to the hospital. I will not have the responsibility.”
“Well, we can’t take him to the hospital like that. How are we going to explain it?”
I guess they didn’t think I could hear, but I did and the doctor said, “I don’t care how you explain it, but you have to take him to the hospital.” They took me to the hospital and wheeled me in on a gurney, and I heard the people in the ER say, “My God, what happened to him?” and the police said, “We don’t know, put it down as a routine automobile accident.”
This was Boston, Massachusetts, in 1965. This was another case where we sued. We had all the witnesses, and the badge number and the names of the cops. It never went anywhere. I don’t even know whether complaints were filed against the cops. We were so concerned about keeping the movement going that I don’t even think we pursued it, and our lawyers didn’t go forward with it.
After Danville and Boston, I believe I began to question nonviolence. By the summer of 1964, a degree of disillusionment was setting in among some long-time workers. The murders of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman in Neshoba County fanned the flames. We had faced such unrelenting brutality for a number of years, as well as the basic indifference of the federal government. The Feds would do something only when absolutely forced to do so. It was hard to take the hypocrisy of the government, still putting themselves up as the leader of the free world, the bastion of democracy. We got along better with the Klan and the killers and the terrorists, because they made no bones about what they were doing.
Very few politicians, Southern or national, had the courage and willingness to stand up and take the cost. They apparently didn’t believe or see that they could have gotten a tremendous boost from such activities. Even the little tiny bit that they did has already put JFK and RFK into the pantheon of greats, but what could they have done if early on they had said, “Look, there’s laws against killing people for wanting to register to vote. I’m gonna put you in jail, George Wallace, we’re not gonna pussyfoot around with you, we’re gonna put you in jail if you stand in the school house door against a court order, and then we’ll have court, we’ll let a judge decide whether or not you’re to be punished.”
But instead the killers and the bad guys got off more or less. Can you name a single Southern official, except the small fry, who was ever charged with a civil rights-related crime, much less tried and convicted?
In ’64, I remember that there were debates in the Freedom Schools about violence versus nonviolence. I was one of the few people in SNCC that continued to defend the nonviolent position, but mostly as a tactic or strategy. I wasn’t so sure of it as a philosophy of living, any longer. I still believed in dedication and selflessness and giving your life up for the cause, but I was becoming in a sense a little more revolutionary, because almost every nonviolent guru or philosopher has said that the only thing worse than not being nonviolent in the struggle is not struggling.
I remember specifically testing the waters on nonviolent strategy in ’64. Because I had been so closely involved investigating the murders of the civil rights workers, at the funeral for Chaney and in the days following, I went around and polled people—if you want to consider going to kill Rainey and Price, talk to me. Nobody seriously considered it. I probably was motivated by grief and anger and a certain degree of cynicism, and it probably wouldn’t have been a good thing, although I often wonder what those murderers and killers and terrorists would have done if some of them had suddenly started showing up dead.
In the summer of 1965, after the birth of our daughter Margaret Rachel on July 20, Dottie and I came back to Atlanta to full-time SNCC duty. Dottie worked in the communications department with Julian Bond while I joined Jack Minnis in the research department. Jack was a brilliant and creative strategist. We were researching voter registration laws and the laws on independent political parties growing out of the problems we were having in Mississippi, and attempts to form a political party in Lowndes County, Alabama, where Stokely and others were working. The Alabama Democratic Party was symbolized by a white rooster and the slogan, “White Supremacy, For the Right.” A black panther was chosen as the symbol for our Lowndes County Freedom Organization (because it can eat a white chicken). It later became the symbol for the more militant national Black Panther Party. At some point, Stokely brought a drawing of a black panther to Dottie. He asked her to “fix it up” a little because it was a big scraggly line drawing. So Dottie evened out the lines, made the whiskers a bit more upstanding and inked in the body, so that it was entirely black. We were quite surprised to see that panther drawing appear on television some weeks later, and of course, one still sees it in many contexts.
The summer and fall of ’65 were some of the toughest times to be in Atlanta, because we were old hands and the tension between whites and blacks was getting worse. There was a big influx of former volunteers coming on staff and working on projects. I felt bad about it because everybody would go out of their way to say to Dottie and me, “You know, when we’re talking about white people, we’re not talking about you.” I would have to say, “Well, I’m white people, so you are talking about me.”
It was confusing. I thought back to when I first joined the staff in 1961, and Forman and some others found my race useful because many of the young people working with them in the rural areas had never met a sympathetic white person. Most of the SNCC staff had been in colleges and universities, so they had met a few whites and saw we weren’t all peckerwoods, a term sometimes used by blacks to describe whites. A peckerwood in the pantheon of shibboleths or epithets in black terminology is about the lowest form of white humanity. It beats white trash and cracker. All those folktales and the great superstructure of the racist ideas were peeling away during the movement until you finally came to say, “We’re people.” A truly great feeling is a flash of genuine color-blindness. I don’t know if you forget or if color becomes so totally irrelevant because you’re simply relating to each other as human beings. When I talked about SNCC brothers and sisters, people would sometimes ask what color a particular person was. I found myself sometimes pausing to remember, color not being uppermost in my mind. Maybe my presence was useful. In addition to working to recruit white Southerners, it might be useful for SNCC to point out in the black community that Zellner was on the staff. “He’s white and Southern, too.”
The rising anti-white sentiments in 1965 didn’t anger me so much as challenge me. I had never had the relationship with black staff that some of the northern volunteers had. I carried very little guilt on my sleeve; sometimes a guilty conscience could be a troublesome by-product of liberalism, a crude description of which might be, “beat me for I have sinned.” I had long since done away with my “liberalism,” and I didn’t recognize any particular feelings of guilt. I was doing everything I could do. My closeness to black friends was person-to-person. Black people easily spotted white guilt. Some would take a whack at it. In Danville in ’63, Ivanhoe Donaldson slugged my friend Daniel Foss. Danny was a bumbling Brandeis intellectual, but he had detached retinas. He had already been beaten by the cops and for Ivanhoe to lose control enough to slug this guy was like slapping a baby or something. I told Ivanhoe if he ever laid another hand on Daniel Foss I would put down my nonviolence long enough to break his neck. Ivanhoe was okay about it—that is how we were. If somebody said something insulting to me personally, I would just say, “You don’t treat me like that. Don’t treat me as a category. I am not a category. I am a person.”
But by 1965, there was a kind of exceptionalism growing, the nationalism was growing
, the anti-white feeling was growing, but they kept saying it applied to white people, but not to Dottie and me. Also, the struggle was on between people wanting more structure in the organization and the so-called “freedom high” group. There were gender divisions, class divisions, and philosophical divisions—how free to be and how organized to be. Then, of course, there was Vietnam, and SNCC took an early position against the war. When Julian Bond was elected in 1965 to the Georgia House, the other representatives refused to seat him on the basis of his SNCC activities and opposition to the war. Jim Forman and I accompanied Julian to the well of the Georgia House of Representatives when he was denied his seat. Of course, he was ordered seated by the U.S. Supreme Court the following year.
I believe that informers or government agents, black and white, had been in our SNCC meetings and activities since the beginning. Sometimes the white informers would be the more radical voices. Jim Forman had trained us so well at the start that we almost always could tell who the informers were. In 1964, we did a lot of screening for summer project recruits. Dottie did a careful job in vetting people who might be informers in New England. We would discreetly tell each other that we suspected certain people. I remember Jack and Jill Schaefer in New Orleans who were part of a group, the Red Collective, and they turned out to be agents. They had an airplane and a newspaper, and all kinds of funding with no visible means of support. When Wounded Knee happened in 1973, they went up to join the most militant group of American Indian Movement folk. They were police agents.
The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission formed in 1956 to spy on integrationists and civil rights activists. When its files were finally opened to the public in 1998 they revealed that some of the informers among us were employed by the Commission itself. One of my really good friends was identified as a police agent by a fairly reliable person, and I don’t really know whether I’ll ever know the truth and how to treat it.