The Wrong Side of Murder Creek

by Bob Zellner

  We became increasingly aware of agent infiltration as our problems and issues increased after the summer of 1964. COINTELPRO certainly coordinated their agent provacateurs in SNCC. COINTELPRO is an acronym for “Counter Intelligence Program,” an illegal FBI operation to investigate and disrupt “dissident political organizations” in the U.S. Covert operation have been used throughout FBI history, but formal COINTELPRO operations of 1956–71 were broadly targeted against organizations that were considered to have politically radical elements. In the FBI’s view, this included Dr. King’s SCLC, certainly SNCC, and supposedly white supremacist groups like the Klan. The founding document of COINTELPRO directed FBI agents to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” the activities of these dissident movements and their leaders. Never mind that this was unconstitutional.

  When Dottie and I returned South in 1965, the agents in and around the Atlanta SNCC office seemed to encourage divisiveness and confrontation on the black/white and other issues. Sometimes you would know who the agents were, but it could also tear the organizations apart trying to guess about people. Another COINTELPRO tool was misinformation. They would use informers or anonymous calls or send anonymous letters to make accusations against certain leaders and those accusations would appear to be coming from another leader. They would also interfere with the marriages and domestic situations of individuals. One example was during Stokely’s marriage to Miriam Makeba, the famous singer from South Africa; they would send letters to Stokely saying that Miriam was having an affair with one or another African leader. The letters suggested that he commit suicide. Time and time again they would either expose an affair that someone was having or they would make it up whole cloth. In one situation, a national Black Panther Party member supposedly put a gun in Forman’s mouth—probably instigated by government agents. In some cases, the government agents would go into a volatile situation and urge people to go further in their actions so they would cross the line into illegality. We assumed our office phones were tapped and we know for sure our home phone was tapped after we moved to New Orleans. The telephone person actually came to the house and told us the phone was being tapped from downtown and had requested that it be monitored. We found tacks in the driveway or there could be snakes in your mailbox or car, or sugar in your gas tank. A lot of COINTELPRO moves were so skillful that I’m sure they have never seen the light of day.

  Part of the tactics included the use of drugs where they would induce a temporary psychotic state in people. Forman once was stuck in a psychotic state for a long time. I didn’t use any drugs because I was convinced that with so many arrests, if they ever arrested me for use or possession of drugs, I would never see the light of day. But I did drink. I once attended a conference in Connecticut and had some kind of episode that lasted two or three days. I don’t remember drinking anything more powerful than beer, but I was so out of it that I sensed somebody had given me some LSD or something.

  In February of 1966 Dottie, Margaret, and I moved to New Haven where I worked as the campaign manager for congressional candidate Robert Cook, a Yale sociology professor. The offer came as a blessed relief. We could remain on the SNCC staff and manage the campaign for Cook. He was an early peace candidate, and we had support from Harry Belafonte, Dr. Benjamin Spock, William Sloane Coffin, and Senator Wayne Morse.

  Forman thought the move was a good idea, as a way of keeping the Northern communications going and continuing my work with students. I wound up organizing a good number of students to go South on various projects. Robert Cook didn’t win. His emphasis on peace was too early to get traction, and he was challenging an entrenched incumbent, Robert Gaiamo; we only got about six percent of the vote. But we did form AIM, the American Independent Movement, to run Cook’s campaign and did a lot of good organizing. AIM remained as a force for a long time around New Haven.

  While directing Cook’s campaign, Dottie and I began developing a plan for organizing poor and working-class black and white people in the Deep South. The project eventually became GROW, or Grass Roots Organizing Work, and it lasted for a dozen years organizing black and white woodcutters (Gulfcoast Pulpwood Association), factory workers (Masonite in Laurel, Mississippi), and poultry workers. Informally, we also called it Get Rid of Wallace. Originally we wanted GROW to be a SNCC project, feeling that it was time to move into the white community of the Deep South. Great power, expertise, and experience had been generated by the civil rights movement, spearheaded by SNCC, but by the end of 1967 the organization was in the process of pulling out of Mississippi and voting to become an all-black group. As the first white Southern field secretary for SNCC, I was to become the last to leave.

  I never felt any personal animosity from Stokely or any of the old hands. I did feel it from some of the newer people that I didn’t know very well, especially the people concentrated in the Atlanta office. In fact, Forman told me later that if we had hung on just a bit longer, things might have been different. It was ironic, because the Atlanta project reflected some of the most virulent anti-white feelings and many of the staff there were fired shortly after I left. Forman felt that if we had stuck it out, we would have been able to weather the storm altogether. I don’t think so. I think it was a historical shift.

  The general staff meeting at Kingston Springs, near Nashville, in May 1966 was the first since our meeting at Waveland in November 1964. I believe it was the first time that the subject of the position of whites in SNCC came up as a specific agenda item. I was not at that meeting. Stokely replaced John Lewis as chair, and it marked a huge shift in the organization. It was a strange story. At first, John was reelected unopposed. Then, later on when there was a much smaller group present, Worth Long proposed that they reopen the question of SNCC chairperson. Worth was not on the staff at that time, but he was a close friend of SNCC.

  It is a comment on the informal nature of SNCC that some non-staff person could ask for the reconsideration of something as important as who would be chairperson. In any case, it was reconsidered and Stokely was elected. The changeover was quite dramatic, because it meant different philosophies and methodologies for the organization. John Lewis had played a key role in so many battles for so long, had good relations with Dr. King and SCLC, and had many white friends. John Lewis lived by the SNCC dictum that the individual was not to be the leader, the individual was not to be the star, but you represented the group, and you were the spokesperson for the group. Any searching for personal charisma, personal stardom was anathema to the old-line SNCC folk.

  Some jokingly called Stokely “Starmichael” during Freedom Summer and again after he became chair. He had a different way of doing things. It may have been what was called for, because at that point there were a lot of changes going on. We had a huge Atlanta office and infrastructure and printing presses and a fair amount of income. It was the changing of the guard from the old religious orientation to the new political. Nobody at that point could envision what the new political direction was going to be, except that we could feel the undercurrents of white-black tension. History, in my opinion, has not dealt adequately with this schism in SNCC, because a lot of people who argued that it was a good thing for SNCC to be all-black based their stand on the possible takeover of SNCC by white people. That is an argument on which someone would have to try hard to convince me. Maybe the new breed of white people in SNCC, who were mainly SNCC volunteers from ’63 and the summer of ’64 coming in and showing a fair amount of arrogance and lack of deference, could have planted the seeds of that fear of takeover. But my view was that even up to 1965 and 1966, SNCC leadership was firmly in black hands and properly so. Any white person in the organization who ever had any influence at all, knew who led SNCC. A few whites had been in positions of leadership in some of the field offices, but very few.

  I think John Lewis’s ouster was another evidence of the organization becoming more political and more Northern. Stokely was a respected organizer.
He had a lot of the SNCC attributes—impeccable physical courage, great showmanship, great creativity in terms of organizing and tenacity to go in and get the job done. He also was articulate and sometimes glib in a way that John Lewis never was.

  Kerhonkson, New York, in December 1966 was the last full staff meeting that any white staff persons attended. The Kerhonkson meeting was held at the Peg Leg Bates Hotel. Forman had arranged with Peg, as his friends called him, for us to meet there cheaply in the off-season. Peg’s country club, which he started in 1951, was the first black-owned resort in that area—at an old turkey farm in the Catskills near New Paltz. I was there. It was the dead of winter. The meeting unfolded like Greek tragedy. Everyone played their parts and the outcome seemed inevitable, which is one reason, maybe, that it turned out the way it did. Dottie did not go to the meeting. I drove up with Ella Baker and Joanne Grant. I must have felt pretty numb on the drive up, because I kept thinking that Joanne and Ella were treating me almost like I was sick and only they could bring me comfort. Probably I didn’t fully understand that the die had already been cast and SNCC would become all-black. This is somewhat understandable because many in the movement had shielded Dottie and me from the harshest of the anti-white attitudes which had been growing in our organization. Perhaps they wanted to make an exception in our cases because we had been with the movement so long.

  Driving north to Kerhonkson, I felt the oppressiveness of the cold dreary day. Old snow lay on the ground and along the roadways it had picked up the black tinge of car exhaust and burnt tire rubber. Conversation inevitably turned to what we could expect to happen at the staff meeting. Ella asked, in a roundabout way, if Dottie and I had been treated all right. I told her everything was okay with us but I had heard other stories of poor treatment of whites.

  I told them, “I’m probably not going to hear a lot personally, not only because everybody wants to spare us, but I let it be known a long time ago that I don’t play liberal. I didn’t come South to help black people, I was already here, and I got involved to free myself. Old SNCC buddies know I don’t take shit, I can get that from white folks I grew up with; I don’t have to take crap from black folks, too.”

  Joanne was slightly exasperated, “We know that Bob, but what have you heard about others?”

  “It’s only hearsay,” I said, “But after the experience we had in Mississippi in ’64 and this recent stuff, some of the staff vowed never to speak to a white person again. That is understandable in a way. I never did figure out how black people found the grace to put up with the treatment this country has dealt out without going crazy or killing somebody.”

  Just before the vote was taken to end white involvement in the SNCC staff, some veterans expressed sadness over our departure. One leader was heard to say that he felt bad because Bob and Dottie had been in the thick of the fight long before many of the people voting to dismiss them had been in the organization. I thought that was a shuck and jive and tried to keep the focus off us personally and concentrate on the principles involved. It was clear to most that I understood concerns that SNCC was becoming too white following the summer of 1964 when many white Mississippi Freedom Summer Volunteers came on staff. What I did not agree with was the fear that our organization might be “taken over by white people.”

  My experience was that white staff exercised influence in the organization only to the extent that they appreciated and abided by the principle of black leadership. Old hands were clear that this was proper leadership for a primarily black organization working on mainly a black agenda. When white volunteers displayed arrogance and a take-over attitude, they didn’t last long in SNCC. What, then, was the driving fear? How, exactly, could white people “take over” a black-led organization?

  To me, the fear (felt primarily by newer staff but also by some old hands) had to do with SNCC’s image in the national black political, activist community. The fear was that nationalists would see SNCC as a white-dominated organization. It is ironic, however, that at the same time our group was moving toward a more exclusivist position, Malcolm X, after a trip to Mecca where he saw blue-eyed Muslims, was moving away from a simplistic black-white dichotomy to a more revolutionary and inclusive stance. That meant that Malcolm, having split from Elijah Muhammad, was willing to work with all who were going his way regardless of color. It is instructive also that the Black Panthers, the “ baddest dudes” on the block, made it clear that they intended to work with all revolutionaries, regardless of color.

  With the clarity of hindsight, it seems now that we made a mistake. By 1966 and 1967 SNCC was being battered from all directions. The federal government, through COINTELPRO, played a role, but the fears and distrust it created may have been little more than nudging SNCC to go ahead and do what it was already inclined to do.

  In the introduction to one edition of his book, SNCC: In Struggle, Clayborne Carson asks a probing question which I think has never been adequately addressed by movement folk. He posits that the civil rights movement, and SNCC in particular, had made brilliant use of three tools that helped to bring about revolutionary change in the Deep South: 1. nonviolent direct action; 2. long term grassroots work in local communities; and 3. an interracial staff. Carson’s question to the movement was, when these potent weapons were largely discarded in the late sixties, by SNCC and other nationalists, what did they offer in terms of strategy and tactics to take their place?

  Another part of the puzzle that led up to the decision at Kerhonkson is the background on two key organizational decisions made before the one on white exclusion. I should make it clear that I agreed and still agree with both prior decisions—even as I disagreed with the final one at Kerhonkson.

  First, SNCC was the first major national civil rights group to formally oppose the war in Vietnam. Many people, even some who personally opposed the war, thought it was a mistake for SNCC to take on the war issue because it might distract from our concentration on ending segregation. The second wound SNCC inflicted on itself, in the opinion of some, was its policy position affirming the right of Palestinian self-determination. There had always been a strong alliance between Jews and African Americans because of the Jewish tradition of upholding justice and the practical view that if black people are not safe in the country, then Jews can’t be far behind in the persecution sweepstakes. The Palestinian decision may have been a turning point affecting that long alliance.

  Some see the series of three ground-breaking decisions as nails in the SNCC coffin. Others think that the first two could have been survived, had not the agreement to become an all-black staff given SNCC’s disaffected supporters an easy way out. Most observers and participants do agree that the three steps taken together spelled the eventual doom of the organization. Maybe many of our supporters were already looking for the exit and the nationalist turn simply greased the skids.

  Some people from the Weather Underground were in the general area of the Kerhonkson meeting. There was a lot of drinking going on—for some of us probably to numb our hurt. The main issue was the black-white question, and almost all of the white people who were there felt handcuffed in a way. We wanted to make our position clear, but we didn’t want to “fight” for it. We felt if we lobbied and organized and cajoled and maneuvered against the vote to become all-black, our work in the movement would be rather meaningless. So we said that we would participate in the debate very carefully and mildly. It was still painful. My basic position was that SNCC shouldn’t be an all-black organization—that we should continue to struggle with the issue inside the organization. For me, the work was always against black and white separation. Also, on the argument of fear of white people taking over the organization, my question was, what white people? I was one of the most influential whites within the organization, but I wasn’t going to take over anything, wasn’t interested in taking over anything. Dottie wasn’t either. We were always clear about where the leadership in the organization rightfully belonged.r />
  Some bizarre stories followed the Kerhonkson meeting—that there were certain restrictions on staff relating to white people and that some black staffers vowed to no longer speak to white people. A white woman friend told me that while she was traveling home from the meeting in a car with some old and close SNCC friends, a black woman in the car passed her a written message rather than speak to her.

  Some accounts say the white people left SNCC soon after that meeting, but Dottie and I remained on staff for a while. We were still living in New Haven and had already developed the GROW proposal. We proposed to do the project as a SNCC project, and I attended my last SNCC meeting in Atlanta in May 1967 to discuss this. Rap Brown had been elected chair to succeed Stokely, but I never felt any personal animosity from him. I always considered him, like his brother Ed, a wonderful, beautiful, gentle person. I also knew Willie Ricks, one of the most vocal of the black power advocates, who changed his name to Mukasa and also refused to speak to white people. Here again, it was strange, because I had a good personal relationship with Willie, Rap, and Stokely. Later on when we had the GROW project going, Rap was in jail in New Orleans, because they said he had carried a rifle on an airplane. I was based there, so I would go visit him at Parish Prison. At one time, he chuckled and said, “Zellner, it’s kind of ironic that we kicked your ass out of SNCC and now you’re the only one who will come and see me.” Some of those who adapted the strong nationalist position also said that it was not personal and that it didn’t mean that they couldn’t be friends with white people. In fact, the Panthers had a pretty good attitude. White people couldn’t be Panthers, but the Panthers would work with white revolutionaries.