by Bob Zellner
So that was the way we started out in Laurel.
I stayed with Herbert Ishey probably more than anyone else in Laurel. Two years later, he wound up running for office in Laurel on the same ticket as Susan Ruffin, who was the leader of the civil rights office in Laurel. When we started organizing with the Masonite workers and later on with the pulpwood workers, there were red-baiting stories in all the major newspapers. Later we had working class rallies with as many as two thousand black and white people out in a cow pasture—old Mississippi rednecks with the whip antennas and Wallace stickers on their trucks, standing next to black folks, all of them talking about how the power structure was holding them down.
There was a pulpwood strike at Masonite about a year or so after we started, and we opened an organizing center in Laurel called the Workingman’s Committee House. One night about 2:30 a.m. we were striking at Masonite and trying to keep the pulpwood from being brought in. The train crews were union and wouldn’t take the pulpwood in as long as there was a picket line, so we had to keep the picket line up twenty-four hours a day. I was taking coffee down to the picket line, and three big burly wood cutters said, “Come here, Bob, we want to talk to you about something.” I walked over where they were.
“We want to talk to you about this communist thing. Come with us.” They started walking down this dirt road. I knew that a Wackenhut guard had been killed down that road about two weeks before. Every now and then you ran into a situation like that, where you’d love to beg off, but I took the walk with them. We stopped and were smoking cigarettes and chewing tobacco, and I said, “What about this communist thing?”
I knew it was bugging them. They told me that they had looked it up and as far as they could tell they were communists, because it said people should share and share alike and that everybody was equal. We had been saying to them, “No matter if you are a communist or a Klansman, your behavior is what counts. If you’re going to have a strong union, you must have black and white in there. You know you don’t want black people crossing the picket lines, and you can’t have segregated drinking fountains and bathrooms and lockers, the way you had before. You can’t have segregated seniority lists. You have to do more than you ever expected to do, but when you do that, then you have strength and they can’t beat you.”
The GROW Project was successful. We had seen it all along as a pilot project to discover what techniques would work, and we proved that it could be done. We knew from the beginning that it had to be done on a material basis. We were studying Marxism, and we knew that an idealistic approach alone would not work. Any kind of appeal to conscience, brotherhood, or Christianity had to be superseded with a practical, down-to-earth, material approach—you lose money from segregation, both white and black have poorer schools, poorer work conditions, play, health care, housing. When you get together you win. You believe that if your behavior changes your ideas will change, because you will see that there’s no difference and that people are equal. That was in fact what began to happen.
One of my duties as co-director of GROW (Dottie was the other director) was to shepherd our supporters “to the field” whenever they chose to visit the project. Supporters included people like John Heyman, head of a New York foundation, or individual donors. Jim Dombrowski had impressed upon me the importance of updating supporters on developments, advances or defeats. He had introduced me to Ethel Clyde, from New York City, the heir to the Clyde Steamship Company, who was an avid supporter of the Southern Conference Educational Fund. She had come to New Orleans in 1954 when Virginia Durr was hauled before the Eastland Committee on suspicion of being a communist. Ethel picked up the tab for Cliff and Virginia’s hotel room and all the restaurant bills she could reach and even the expenses of Virginia’s lawyer from Montgomery.
When Virginia had told me the story of that sojourn in New Orleans, she said it was impossible to enjoy the city because of the stress of the trial, her concern about Clifford’s health, and her fear of what Mrs. Clyde might say to her very conservative Montgomery lawyer. At one dinner she swore she heard Ethel say to the lawyer, “Are you a communist? I hope so because I owe my great health and long life to it. I’ve enjoyed it immensely my whole life.” Virginia said she later found out, after making discreet inquiries, that what Mrs. Clyde had actually asked the attorney was, “Are you a nudist?”
Mrs. Clyde was elderly when I met her and she kept saying to Dombrowski, “I’m too old for any new friends.” Jim assured her that he would come personally “when GROW needs money, but you will be excited about what Bob and his young people are doing in Mississippi.”
Anne Braden had introduced me to Corliss Lamont and his wife, Margaret. Corliss LaMont’s father was a partner of J. P. Morgan. The library at Harvard is named after Lamont. Anne also introduced me to John and Sylvia Crane, whose name was famous for appearing in the toilet bowls of America. They were heirs to the Crane plumbing fixture fortune. Other supporters taking a special interest in our work with poor and working class white and black Southerners included the Rockefeller Brothers fund, the Haymarket fund, writers Bert and Katchia Gilden, and many others who had been supporters of SNCC. I am sure that some funders turned to GROW because of disappointment with SNCC’s decision to become all-black, but even so they were justifiably excited about our well-planned attack on racism at its roots. We were taking on the Klan in its own bailiwick, the poor and working class from the Deep South outback.
Two great supporters who were with us from the beginning were Sue and Richard Cummings, owners of a fancy fabric company in Los Angeles. They donated all the fabric we needed to dress the windows, doors and seating of our great big house in New Orleans. Once we were settled in and field work got under way, our reports to SCEF, broadcast to the movement and the nation, spurred Sue and Richard to pay us a visit. They arrived in their new Cadillac Eldorado convertible and we squired them around New Orleans, retiring about 10 p.m. while they continued prowling Bourbon Street. Bright and early next morning, a Sunday, they were up and raring to go to Laurel, site of our most active project with the Masonite workers. On the two-hour drive to Laurel, I told them the details of the project. I reminded them that many of the people we were working with now had recently been Klansmen and some were still making up their minds. Others were attending both meetings, ours and theirs. I cautioned Sue and Dick to look at what people were doing, not what they said because “the last thing that changes with white Southerners who are used to racist terms and casual discrimination is their rhetoric—the way they express things. Some of the people you will meet today have been or still are Klansmen. Be cool. You’ve never met anyone like the folks you will meet today.”
What I did not say was that I was equally sure the folks in Laurel had never met anyone like their guests today. I had told the union committee leadership that I would be bringing visitors from California. The union committee that was running the strike at Masonite—since the International had removed their officers, confiscated their treasury, and dismissed their officers—was made up of black and white rank-and-file members. Each time visitors were expected, the committee selected one of their number to be a special host, accompanying the guests throughout the day’s activities.
I had briefed the Cummings on the agenda for the day. Sub-committees would have been meeting since 7 a.m., (Southern working people, black and white, start early to beat the heat). At nine o’clock the entire union committee and guests would gather at the committee house (a freedom house we had obtained in Laurel) for reports. One would be on the legal situation; we had provided lawyers to challenge the trusteeship. Another would be from the political committee. White and black unionists were running on a “working man’s ticket,” along with Susan Ruffin, a black leader in Laurel, who was running for mayor. So there was Herbert Ishey, a former Klan enforcer, running for Water Commissioner and Road Supervisor on the ticket with the black civil rights leader. Mississippi had never seen anything like this, I
told our guests.
M. O. McCarty, our designated host, met us in the yard of the committee house. The nine o’clock plenary session was just beginning. I introduced the Cummings to Mr. McCarty and he took them around to meet everybody. The first meeting we had attended of the union had been all white men; now the committee was made up of white and black women and the old male leadership, white and black. I took pride in introducing our guests to the women members, most of whom were militant, natural leaders. While the meeting unfolded a group of union members and community activists put the noon meal together in the large kitchen. I noted with pride that union men were helping the women in the kitchen.
The plenary was followed by a country feast, the likes of which only an aroused working class, black and white, can put on in Mississippi. Sue and Richard had to try three kinds of potato salad and as many different kinds of fried chicken. A good time was had as everybody arranged themselves around the large tables, covered a short time ago by reports, legal briefs, and the committee news sheet, The Rights of Man, which Jack Minnis helped the union people to publish each week.
After dinner, we all took to our cars and pickups to drive out to Jasper County for the weekly mass meeting in a cow pasture. The sheriff of Jones County was not sympathetic to the union strikers (his bread no doubt being buttered by Masonite), so to avoid harassment from the law, the union held its rallies next door in Jasper County. The former Klan guys had adapted some of their favorite activities to the new interracial grassroots work: the car caravan, outdoor rallies in somebody’s cow pasture, and handing out literature. Now instead of hooded night riders caravanning through the black community to intimidate, the black and white unionists and their supporters would make a big show of driving through Laurel before heading out to the country for their meeting. Sunlight now illuminated the speakers on the back of the flatbed truck, whereas before it may have been a burning cross. Instead of stuffing hate literature into mailboxes in the dead of night, the new tactic was for salt-and-pepper teams to fan out into the community and pass out a new kind of literature, touting racial cooperation and understanding.
On our way to the cow pasture, M. O. and I rode in splendor and luxury in the back of the Cummings’ Eldorado. The dust of Mississippi might have be clinging to its exterior, but the big Cadillac had a great air conditioner. My seatmate looked only slightly out of place in the big car with the fancy couple from California. McCarty reminded me a little of my uncle Harvey, a life-long poor sharecropper. M. O. had the huge calloused hands of a working man and a leathery, perpetually crimson neck. Like Uncle Harvey, he had moved from the hard life of a dirt farmer to the relatively easier factory life. Well, Harvey had moved from the farm outside Dothan, Alabama, to Mobile, where he worked on the construction crew of his son-in-law, my cousin, Charles Jordan. Harvey always hungered for novelty and excitement—a good attitude to have if you are a self-educated country man, recently arrived in the city.
Since leaving Laurel’s outskirts, we had ridden in silence. Maybe Richard and Susan were contemplating what awaited them in Jasper county, an even more rural and out of the way place than tiny Laurel. Maybe to break the silence, Susan suddenly spun in her seat and asked, “Tell me Mr. McCarty, what do you think of the Negroes?”
Without skipping a beat M. O. gave the standard Southerner’s answer to a Yankee’s question, “Well, I get along with them just fine, I just don’t want one marrying my daughter and I don’t want to have to eat with them.” Well, that was a conversational nonstarter.
When we got there, other members of the union committee stood next to an open gate leading into the pasture. Hundreds of cars and pickups were arrayed in semi-circles around a long, high flatbed truck, conveniently located under a huge oak tree. Speakers were already gathering on the truck bed which served as a raised stage. Many cars and trucks sported Wallace stickers, whip antennas, gun racks, and Confederate flags. Except that half the crowd was African American, it might have been a Wallace or even a Klan rally.
We parked where the union guard said to park and walked toward the stage. M. O. spied some of his old union buddies, maybe his old Klan buddies, too, and wandered off toward them. As soon as he was out of earshot, Susan wheeled on me and hissed, “Did you hear what he said?”
I replied calmly, “You mean about Negroes?”
“Exactly,” she exploded, “How can you work with people like that?”
“What kind of people would you want us to work with?” I asked.
She found it difficult to answer.
“These are the people we need to be reaching,” I explained, trying not to patronize. “But I don’t think you are getting the full picture.”
I whistled in the direction of McCarty and motioned for him to rejoin us. He ambled over and asked, “Yeah, what?”
“M. O.,” I asked, “Where did you have dinner today?”
“Over there at the committee house, why?”
“Was the food good?” I asked, “and did you stand up to eat or did you sit down?”
“Sure was,” he said, “My wife made a whole bunch of it this morning, started frying that chicken at four this morning. She served and then sat with us there at the table, remember?”
“I do remember,” I assured him. “Do you remember, M. O., who was sitting there at the table with you?”
“Yeah, I was sittin’ with my running buddies,” M.O. happily recounted, “Ivory Garrett was sitting on my left and James Nealy was on my right side.”
Throughout this colloquy, our guests for the day were looking at us like what in the world are these two nuts up to. Given McCarty’s last answer, I began to close my case. “What color is Mr. Garrett?” I asked.
“He’s black,” M. O. answered innocently.
I felt like a prosecutor leading the witness. “And what color is Mr. Nealy?”
“He’s black, too.”
“Well, M. O.,” I sprung the trap, “remember what you said back in the car about the Negroes?”
“Yeah?” he kind of strung it out like he, too, was beginning to wonder where this was going.
“Well, my friend,” I grinned at McCarty, “If you don’t have any better luck with you daughter than you are having with your eating, then you better look out.”
M. O. slapped his knee with a huge laugh and shouted, “Bob, I see what you mean!” Still laughing, he headed back to his buddies.
I did things during that organizing project that were even more hair-raising than some of the things we did in SNCC. A lot of the pulpwood cutters were in peonage to a local wood dealer. In backwoods areas of Mississippi, this guy was the lord of the manor and a law unto himself. Sometimes, I had to go by myself to meetings. We’d be having a meeting of black and white woodcutters, and the man himself would walk in, and I had to absolutely Bogart. Even James Simmons, president of the Gulfcoast Pulpwood Association, who was an old Wallace supporter from Alabama, had said, “These people would just kill you without a flicker of an eye.” I would have to get up at the meeting in front of his men and say, “Mr. So-and-so, I am an organizer for the Gulfcoast Pulpwood Association, and we’re glad to have you here, and we’d love for you to say a word, but this meeting will be private.”
There were some attempts on my life. I had my car windows shot out several times, and attempts were made to run my car off the road. I did start carrying a weapon. Philosophically, I had decided that even the strongest advocates of nonviolence always said that if you have to choose between nonviolence and not functioning at all, do whatever you have to do. One night, a guy in a pickup was trying to force me off the road. I took out my pistol, a big old Webley .45, a British officers’ revolver, formidable with its long barrel. When he pulled up beside me, the guy put his window down and started shouting at me, “You dirty communist, nigger-loving Jew, son of a bitch, blah, blah, blah.” We were on a double-lane highway going from Laurel back to New Orleans, and
he was trying to keep my attention so he could run me into a bridge abutment or the water. The minute I realized what he was doing, I just raised the gun up, and he turned his truck so fast that he spun around and went across the median. The next meeting we had in Laurel, a friend of M. O. McCarty’s, who I knew was still going to Klan meetings, came up to me and said, “That was fantastic last weekend.”
I knew what he was talking about, but I didn’t want to say anything. I said, “The speech I gave?”
“No, not that speech. That was good, too, but on the way home. They talked about it in the meeting. They were all flabbergasted, because they were all saying, ‘Well, that S.O.B. is supposed to be nonviolent.’”
I told him, “Look, if you see those guys again. Tell them I have absolutely nothing against them—me and you and M. O. get along all right. But if people threaten me, I will shoot them. I’m not going out of my way to hurt anybody, but if they shoot at me, goddam right I’m gonna shoot back.”
He told me, “Bob, I don’t care what you say about nonviolence but that has done more good for the union movement than anything I have seen happen for a long time.”
When you take up the weapon, you have taken into your hands your own protection, while in the nonviolent mode your protection is in the hands of a higher power, whatever it may be. It was like when I was captured by the Klan, every time I thought they were going to kill me, I was okay. If I had any chance to escape or maybe survive, then things got shaky.
GROW lasted a decade, and the years with black and white workers from Masonite and pulpwood yards across the South proved GROW could change hardened racists. GROW caught fire in1968, just as Democrats turned their backs on workers in a new class-based elitism that scorned hard hats and poor people and forgot the MFDP ’64 Convention challenge. It was ironic that while Wallace, then Reagan, urged white workers to vote against their own economic interests, white and black common people in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida were demonstrating that progressive populism is, as Norman Corwin said, “not so wild a dream as those who profit by postponing it pretend.” GROW brought organizing expertise (developed in SNCC) to white people suffering from low wages, poor schools, health care, and housing—all in the name of white supremacy.