The Wrong Side of Murder Creek

by Bob Zellner

  I presented our proposal for the GROW project in Atlanta in May, 1967, saying we would like to do it under SNCC. The negotiating went on with me in one room and the SNCC Central Committee in another room. Some people complained that I had made it into an emotional issue. Both the Kingston Springs and the Kerhonkson meetings suggested that white people in SNCC should organize in the white community. We agreed with that, and I wondered why I and others hadn’t moved to that position earlier, but it was more complicated than it sounds. I had been reluctant in 1964 and 1965 to develop a white organizing project because first of all the thought was terrifying on the face of it. For those of us who had been in SNCC organizing in the black community for so long, were we now to go to the very people we had been ducking and dodging and who had been shooting at us and beating us all the years and say, “We’re gonna organize white folks now”? How could you work with white people without them stringing you up?

  SNCC, however, by 1967 was mesmerized by the image of being all-black, and lots of influence came from relative newcomers who didn’t know us very well. Admittedly, I came rather belatedly to SNCC with this plan for the GROW project which we had been working on for quite some time. We had been developing it with people in SCEF and the people we were working with in New Haven and other advisors and people around the country. It was a well thought-out project to target poor and working-class white Southerners and help them think about changes to improve their lives, and the need to link up with the expertise and the experience and drive that existed in the black community; perhaps they might even try to reach their goals together.

  I presented these ideas to SNCC. I said it was arguable that black people can be organized as black people without it being a negative formation, but anybody would agree you can’t organize most Southern white people as white people and have anything but a racist group. So white people had to be organized in conjunction with blacks in order to combat their racism and so they could see what they had to do to destroy the superstructure of oppression and privilege and segregation. We told them it needed to be done by SNCC because we now had the expertise and the contacts in communities to demonstrate the power developed in the black community—the same power to offer to poor working class white people, so that both groups could go forward together.

  Our proposal was in the face of the pell-mell rush toward black nationalism. Even though we had the example of Malcolm X, the great prince of black separatism and black nationalism, moving toward a more inclusive position, SNCC, having started as integrated, was moving in the opposite direction. That was the train wreck that we had.

  Dottie’s and my long history with the group gave us the temerity to make our proposal. The debate then came down to whether we could do the project in some special staff status where they could still say that SNCC was all-black. It was not a very open debate and some people opposed to being all-black were fairly quiet. It boiled down to wanting to make an exception for “Bob and Dottie,” and the GROW project. I wasn’t willing to do it. Dottie wasn’t willing to do it on the basis of principle. What they proposed was that we remain on staff but not come to meetings. We found this unacceptable. First, SNCC had never demanded that anyone accept second-class status. Why should we? The next proposal was to come to the meetings but not vote. Our answer was the same. They were trying to avoid telling us that we were off the staff. I said to Forman, “You’re my leader, what do you think we should do,” and he said he couldn’t recommend anything. I later told him that if he had laid out any strategy or tactics that had an end game we both agreed on, I could have absolutely gone along with him. If he had said, “Let’s just temporize on this for a certain time. There are forces that we are dealing with, and afterwards we can go on,” I would have been willing to wait, but he always said that I forced the issue and lost. Bill Ware was one of the main people who was agitating for programs and staff to be all-black. He is one of the people who has been identified in various ways as an agent provocateur.

  From the beginning of the discussion Dottie and I had made it clear that we were going ahead with the project. The only question SNCC had to answer was whether we would do it with or without them. When my comrades said no, I realized it was my last day in SNCC. It was huge for me, because I had been on the staff since 1961. SNCC was our life. It was our existence. It was our total identity. We didn’t realize the extent that our souls had belonged to SNCC—that we were road warriors. I was only twenty-seven, but with a tremendous amount of experience crammed into five or six years. With the GROW project, we were looking at more years of intense organizing and at the end of that . . . who knew; we had no sense of what it would be like to live in a normal workaday world, no concept of working at something that didn’t require total dedication. It was like being cast into outer darkness, because SNCC was our family in a very strong sense.

  We were lucky in moving from the SNCC staff to a welcoming SCEF staff, where we had an autonomous project and could raise our own money and establish our own policies. But it was never the same again. It was like the end of the most important years of our lives, but we realized that there’s no way to be twenty-seven and have the best years of our lives behind us.

  Forman and some others kept in close contact with us after we left and did some work with our project. We always had an integrated staff at GROW, and all of our community projects were integrated. As time passed, I grew more supportive and had a greater understanding of Black Power. Even as the black nationalism tide rose, I realized that it was a political position. There were positive and negative things about it, but I probably accentuated the positives. For one thing, I wasn’t going to second-guess any of the black people in SNCC. They were intelligent, autonomous people. It was hard to realize that the whole thing was in the process of falling apart not only over nationalism, but on a lot of other fronts. One of the things that is unique about my story is my longevity on the SNCC staff. From early fall 1961 until I left in 1967, the last white staffer to go, there had been only the four semesters of respite at Brandeis, and even then I was speaking on SNCC’s behalf at least three times a week. Because of this variation of places and assignments, I participated in possibly more and more varied campaigns than anybody else except Forman, who was involved in almost everything. Six years is a long time to be so consumed with such a variety of campaigns in such a variety of locations, while always focused on survival, especially after I was told that specific people were supposed to kill me. Richmond Flowers, a relatively decent attorney general of Alabama, told me once that he didn’t know how I survived so long.

  Over the years, I have felt some estrangement from a few individuals from early SNCC days. But now, when we all get together, no matter what the feeling was back then or during the changes, we are still intensely together. The years and months fall aside, and we are SNCC again, and some people kind of stand back and marvel at the phenomenon of our still being so close. Some now are very outspoken that it was wrong of SNCC to eject us, but generally it’s the people who felt it was wrong even at the time. Nobody who felt it was right at the time has now come and said, “I was wrong about that.” I still have to intellectualize it at times, because it was so personal and so painful.

  I also mulled over, when I had some distance, the arguments over whether SNCC should be more structured or less structured. In the early days of SNCC, I would think back to Myles Horton’s admonition that no organization should last longer than twenty-five years; SNCC lasted about ten (ironically, Highlander recently observed its seventy-fifth anniversary). Those last years were painful times for many of us, and people dealt with it in different ways. Some people went to Vermont and got naked, others drank a lot—some did both. We went South and organized.

  21

  Goodbye and GROW

  The end of SNCC could have been devastating for us, as it was for some, but we had work to do. So we took the advice of Joe Hill, who said, just before the State of Utah murdered him by firi
ng squad in 1915, “Don’t mourn, organize!” Dottie, Margaret, and I moved to New Orleans in 1967 to get the GROW Project underway. James Dombrowski, Ben Smith, Virginia and Walter Collins who also lived there, and the vast SCEF/SNCC network helped purchase and build a residential workshop center to support our field organizing. We had seed money from SCEF and raised other monies mainly from foundations, because we founded a group called Deep South Education and Research Associates. We bought a beautiful three-story house on Napoleon Avenue with banana trees in the yard and a cabana in the back. It was about four blocks from the Mississippi River, in the heart of the Crescent City. It cost $28,500. Prices were depressed because everybody thought a bridge was to be built across the river and would blight the beautiful neighborhood. We outfitted it with thirty-eight bunk beds, a large library meeting room, and a restaurant-sized kitchen.

  We picked New Orleans because it was close to Mississippi and Alabama and was a relatively safe area. We didn’t want to spend time and energy on security that might be necessary in a rural area.

  Our daughter Cathrin Ruby (Katie) was born in New Orleans on November 18, 1968, making us an organizing family of four. We lived on $600 a month which was more than our SNCC salaries had been.

  The staff grew as the work grew, bit by bit. In the early days we were five. We had begun the project with the idea that SNCC- and SCEF-related folks in the New Orleans area would work with us and come on staff as funds permitted. Jack Minnis lived in New Orleans with his wife, Earlene Gidrey, a school teacher from Cajun Louisiana, and their two young sons, Jacque and Pierre. Like many movement spouses, Earlene brought home the bacon while her mate saved the world. Minnis had served as the highly respected SNCC research director. Jack had, like Dottie and me, stuck with SNCC until the end. When GROW began getting off the ground, he was delighted and threw himself into the work with his usual brio and creativity.

  The general idea for GROW was to use the Highlander model for our center and to begin organizing work, starting with any contacts that we had, which would be basically in the black community. We would then branch out and try to find receptive and sympathetic white people. Then we would network from that. New recruits would win others to the cause and the freedom fire would spread. Our very first effort failed to catch fire. Starting with Fannie Lou Hamer in Ruleville, Mississippi, who was familiar with some poor white people from the Delta who either worked in Head Start centers or had their kids in them, we found people who had crossed the racial barrier and thrown their lot in with the black community. It turned out they were so poor and so desperate their involvement was mostly a dead end, but we did meet some interesting people.

  Ike Traxler, for example, lived on a bayou between Ruleville and Rosedale. He said he paid “a lot” of rent for his house, $5 a year, but it was worth it, because the water was full of gar which he could catch and eat so even when he didn’t have a penny, his family could survive. Ike eventually was stabbed to death in a barroom fight, but we met a lot of his relatives, who worked raising chickens. They were receptive, and we learned that poor white people often accepted help or friendship from wherever it came. They were all so poor. We stayed with them during the winter in houses so ramshackle the wind blew straight through. Some of our staff were Northerners, so that was a tremendous education for them. One of Traxler’s nephews went barefoot even when the ground was frozen, and he had no toes on either foot. Our photographer took this guy’s picture and asked him, “Ralph, what happened to your toes?”

  Ralph said, “I chopped them off cutting kindling.”

  “You mean all at the same time?”

  “No, at different times.”

  Their stoves were usually a thirty-gallon oil drum and the fuel was used motor oil. This was why so many of those houses burned up. The can was in the corner of the room. They would start a little wood fire in the bottom of the drum, and then they’d drip the oil on the fire. Soon there was no wood left—just the oil dripping in.

  But we didn’t have much success organizing these poorest of the poor, and we came to the conclusion that as receptive as they might be, especially in the Mississippi Delta, their greatest need was for a good social work system. GROW couldn’t provide that. Instead, we were already looking for factory situations or unions or strike situations that would bring us in contact with the white working class. One day a guy came through who was on the boycott circuit. He was boycotting a particular make of pants and said he had been to a union hall in Laurel, Mississippi, where the workers were on strike at a Masonite plant. He said 20 to 30 percent of the people in the hall were black, and the rest white. He said it was a wildcat strike and the strikers weren’t getting a lot of support from their union. They had a picket line set up, and scabs were coming across the line. We decided to get involved, and that’s where we made our organizational breakthrough.

  A lot of white people, including Bob Analavage and Jack Minnis, came on the staff. We went up to Laurel in a little old VW bug, so here we were crammed in, and accompanied by a big black German Shepherd named Deacon (after the Deacons for Defense). On the way we talked about our plans and decided not to tell them right off who we were, but if we went to a second meeting we would have to tell them, because the FBI would be there and would blow our cover anyway. When we drove up, we were told to find the main gate of the plant and the union hall would be right across from the gate. Then we realized that we had Louisiana tags, and the union people would think we were scabs. In fact, they started throwing stuff and hollering at us, so I immediately jumped out of the car and acted friendly. “We’re not scabs, we came up here to talk to you guys.”

  They showed us where to park and introduced us to one of the union guys, Orange Harrington. We said we heard about the strike and that we just wanted to come up, wish them good luck, and see if there was anything we could do to help. They couldn’t think of anything, but they were very glad that we had come and that we weren’t scabs. They added that it would help if we could do anything about the scabs coming in from New Orleans. We asked who the president of the union was. His name was J. D. Jolly and they said we could meet him the next weekend—to set up a meeting with him.

  We went back home and started researching the plant and decided to go up to Jackson to meet with Claude Ramsay who was head of the AFL-CIO in Mississippi. He told us more about the strike and the issues. Litton Industries planned to open an automated shipyard in Pascagoula, so they needed to break the contracts of all the craft unions on the Mississippi coast, a powerful but splintered group of organized working people, black and white. Craft unions were weak because each looked after only their narrow craft interest. The union at Masonite was different. It was a strong CIO industrial union, originally organized by the Wobblies. So this was to be the opening gun in a unified attack on all unions in Mississippi. He said the guys in Laurel needed all the help they could get.

  We asked if Ramsay thought they’d be receptive to us when the found out we were former SNCC people and affiliated with SCEF; we felt we needed to tell them up front. He agreed and gave us the name of their lawyer, who turned out to be the lawyer who argued the case for the regular Mississippi Democratic party in 1964, who would recognize who we were. Then he picked up the phone and called the guy. “I got Bob Zellner and Jack Minnis here, and they’re interested in helping you all out. They want to know if there’s anything they can do.” The guy said to send us down.

  It was a really messy situation because it was a wildcat strike and no support was coming from the International Woodworkers of America. It appeared that the national union might get into bed with the company, and they were Klan-baiting a lot of the local union people. Ramsay told us that evidently there were some real bad Klan guys in the union—compatriots of Sam Bowers, the head of the White Knights of the KKK, one of the most violent of all the Klan groups operating in the 1960s. Bowers had started the White Knights because he felt the other KKK groups were too moderate; he was one
of the murderers of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman in 1964 and of Vernon Dahmer in 1966. Ramsay told us to be careful about a guy named Herbert Ishey, that he was one of the executioners for the Klan and very active in the union.

  We went to Laurel and met with the lawyer. We said we wanted everybody to know who we were and that we felt black people and white people needed to get together. He said, “I know, but the people over in the union hall need help, and I’ve called them and they are waiting for you now. Go talk to them and be sure to talk to a guy named Herbert Ishey.”

  We debated going to the hall but finally concluded that if we were going to do this work we had to go. If we were afraid of the Klan or a simple thing like dying, we would not be in this particular line of work. We went to the hall, and a lot of union guys were standing out in front. They were very quiet and very white. Orange Harrington was standing there, and I greeted him. He said, “Hi, how are you doing? They’re waiting for you in the back.”

  They took us into a room, where about twenty white guys were sitting around a big oval table. He introduced us to Mr. Jolly, the union president. I introduced us by name, then explained that we now worked for SCEF after spending years on the staff of SNCC. “Mr. Jolly, we’ve all been jailed, charged with everything from trying to overthrow the government to being communists. We want you to know who we are and where we’re coming from. Our organizing project is called GROW, which stands for Grass Roots Organizing Work, and I might as well tell you, because the FBI will, that we also call it Get Rid of Wallace. We work with black and white people who believe they are stronger working with each other rather than against each other. If we can help you, we want to.”

  He introduced us to the people at the table, and the last guy was Herbert Ishey, a great big guy with a cigar box in front of him, and as he kept flipping the lid, I saw something thing very heavy and blue and metallic in there. Ishey raised his fist and hit the table and he said, “Goddammit, I don’t care who you are. We need help from wherever we can get it. You think you’re the only ones who have trouble with the FBI. They call us Kluxers. We don’t care, commies or Kluxers, we need to get together.”