by Bob Zellner
GROW recruited and trained over a dozen staff. Like SNCC, we saw our role as “working ourselves out of a job” by making grass roots interracial organizing become self-sustaining. As soon as pulpwood cutters, white and black together, could run the saw shop cooperatives GROW helped them establish, the jobs went to woodcutters. The Gulfcoast Pulpwood Association enrolled hundreds of black and white Southerners by conducting strikes involving thousands, electing officers, and running their own affairs. Our political campaigns, run by candidates and supporters, helped local people get trained; they branched out to organize successful unions of poultry workers and catfish skinners.
We put hundreds of workers through residential workshops in our New Orleans center and at the end of GROW the big house was sold for exactly what we paid for it. The staff moved on. Jack Minnis had a successful career as a political commentator; our photographer, Robert Analavage, wrote a novel, then killed himself; Walter Collins, our most effective black organizer, went to prison for draft resistance; Mike Higgson, an Englishman who became an experienced organizer, is a successful builder in New Orleans; Toni Algood and Charlie Gillespie became mainstream union organizers. Marie and Steve Martin continued their political work. After his wife died, Steve organized teachers in Alabama and campaigned for Senator Barack Obama. John and Vicki Koeferl helped organize the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association in New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward, continuing the physical and political work of recovery from Katrina and President George Bush’s neglect.
Dottie and I began drifting apart towards the end of the GROW Project. After GROW, I first worked in the oil field, but left so I could be home every night and went to work as a union carpenter, making the best pay of my life, at the Shell Refinery in LaPlace, Louisiana. Dottie went back to school to become a licensed practical nurse, and later went to work at the New Orleans Home for Incurables, a brick-walled enclave near the monastery on Magazine Street. To me, Dottie had been one of the original new-wave feminists, some of whom came out of SNCC. We separated in 1979, and although I moved to New York, I kept an apartment in New Orleans to be with Maggie and Katie as much as possible. Dottie and the girls then moved to New York in the summer of 1983 after Maggie graduated from high school and before Katie started the ninth grade.
22
Fundi: Passing It On
In 1980, I moved to New York to start a small construction company. Over that decade I also did some work in the film industry and I was traveling, writing, and lecturing. As the nineties began, I was thinking about writing a memoir, a process which unexpectedly led to graduate school and then eventually to this book. These were interesting and productive years.
My New York building company was called Big Apple Design. Looking for clients, I went to the people I had known for twenty years in the movement. I built a new law office of ten thousand square feet at 800 Broadway in exactly ninety days for my friend Victor Rabinowitz and his partners at Rabinowitz, Boudin, Standard, Krenski, and Lieberman. I built a deck for Bill Kunstler’s home on Gay Street in the Village and he liked it so much I did another one and a tree house for his summer place on Peek a Moose Road near the Shandankin reservoir in upstate New York. Other clients included artist Helen Frankenthaler and art historian Barbara Rose. John Koeferl from New Orleans helped me I renovate the Hudson River mansion of the poet John Ashbery.
I managed the construction of Harry Belafonte’s new Italianate office in the theater district and did some work on his country lake house. I enjoyed driving upstate with Harry and hanging out at his house. He said I ate an apple like a rich guy. I asked what he meant, and he showed me his core. It looked like a caricature of an apple core. There was not an atom of white left, just the stem, the seed pod in the center and two little specks of peel at each end. He said if you grew up in the islands poor like him, you’d eat an apple that way, too. I told him I did grow up poor, then I lied and said we were so poor we didn’t even know what an apple was. Harry laughed and said I could signify as much as I wanted but there was no way, no way, I was ever as poor as he had been.
I thought I would have the last word when I told him that I was certainly poorer now than he was. Belafonte said to remind him when we got to the house that he had something for me. At the house he took me to the finished attic which he had converted into a giant air-conditioned walk-in closet. In neat rows there were highly polished pairs of shoes arranged from black on one end of a row through to pure white on the opposite end of another row.
“What size you wear?” he inquired like a shoe salesman. I told him ten and a half or eleven.
“Just my size,” he crowed. “Zellner, poor boy, this is your day! Take your pick, start with five pairs.”
I wore Belafonte shoes for years after that. They were good ones. I guess he had every pair he had purchased since the fifties. When Townsend and the rest of us listened to “Banana Boat” and “Matilda” while we were at Huntingdon College, I could not have imagined that one day I would be wearing Harry Belafonte’s shoes!
Joanne Grant Rabinowitz was very close to our SNCC founding mother, Ella Baker, and when I moved to New York Joanne was working on a film to be called Fundi (a Swahili word meaning one who passes on a craft or specialized knowledge; a teacher). Hearing that I was in NYC, Joanne asked me to work with her and cinematographer Judy Irola. They needed me to suggest filming sites and individuals in Mississippi for an important segment of the movie. I did location work for Joanne’s movie and later worked with her and Judy on a half-dozen features and documentaries. We traveled all over the world doing films about women in Frelimo, the revolutionary freedom army in Mozambique; the Mariel boatlift in Cuba; the Mexican view of the Battle of the Alamo; a feature film with Eddie Almos; and many more.
I was also traveling, writing, and lecturing. In the late eighties while on a trip to New Orleans I talked to Lance Hill about the challenges of doing carpentry work in New York to earn enough money to support brief writing periods in a little cabin upstate. Lance and I had worked with Tulane University professor Larry Powell on campaigns opposing David Duke’s forays into Louisiana politics. Lance was in a similar will-work-for-writing-time situation with a small lawn service he ran in New Orleans. He asked, “Why don’t you come to Tulane for a PhD?” When I said I couldn’t afford it, he said, “Hell, Bob, they will pay you to come to Tulane—they pay me.” Lance was then doing a dissertation on the self-defense side of the Southern struggle, using as his topic the legendary Deacons for Defense and Justice.
In 1991, with Hill’s encouragement and Powell’s support, I enrolled in a PhD program in the Tulane history department to write a dissertation on my experiences as a civil rights worker. My doctoral committee, chaired by Powell, approved the somewhat unusual proposition that I would write three chapters of a memoir of the civil right movement as the equivalent of a master’s thesis. Should I finish a complete memoir of my experiences, it could serve as my doctoral dissertation. On the first day of orientation, Powell told the class that only a small percentage of us would ever actually receive the PhD. So far I have proven his words to be prophetic. Maybe finishing this book will inspire me to persevere.
Dr. Powell and Professor Patrick Maney gave me similar writing advice: Tell it like it was—don’t be theoretical or too analytical. Historians will be asking their own questions of the material. You just tell the story. You are a primary source, let others do the historiography. Maney mumbled under his breath that Newt Gingrich had gotten a doctorate from their department—maybe mine would somewhat compensate.
I continued graduate work at Tulane for the requisite two years of course work through 1992. As an older student—also older than many of the professors—I didn’t need to socialize and party all hours of the night, so I was able to keep up with the exceptional young minds around me. The reading and research load was so staggering that I took a course in speed reading.
When I handed in the opening chapters of the dissertation,
Larry Powell gave me more advice: “Leave out the ‘wow factor’ in telling about your first mass meeting. Readers will provide the ‘wow!’ from your description of the scene.”
Two years of course work and another two as a resident teacher and scholar gave me a start on my story. From 1993 to 1995 I began the preliminary research and writing for the dissertation while teaching undergraduate history. I also served as a graduate assistant to my professors and others in the department, proctored, graded tests, and recorded attendance. I sometimes lectured in the Sociology Department.
I was a teaching assistant for a professor who had lost his sight. The history field I plowed, Civil War and Reconstruction through the Modern Civil Rights Movement, looked like current events compared to his work on medieval history. The reading machine he used got its “voice” from a Moog synthesizer and it sounded like the robot it was. The professor, though grateful for his little robot, preferred the human voice, which I provided. Feeling sorry for my puny period of history, he spent hours recreating the Romaioi defense of Constantinople to play on my mind’s big screen. He traced sparkling arcs of Greek Fire coursing high above enemy ships held at bay by the giant iron chain stretched across the straits. I could almost hear the hiss of the napalm-like goo exploding at the water line next to the hull.
I was only supposed to write three chapters while at Tulane. The rest of the book was to be done as the full dissertation. I did my practice teaching at Tulane and later at Long Island University/Southampton College, where I moved after Tulane.
The job at Southampton College was providential, because in the early 1990s the Higher Power demonstrated that there is life after SNCC by enabling me to fall in love with a dear friend whom I had met some years before. Linda Miller and I were married on June 18, 1994, at the Rams Head Inn on Shelter Island, near Southampton, New York.
The Southampton wedding gathering united our families and friends and reunited a number of movement veterans. Naturally, there was lots of talking, not all of it about the past. Some interesting and challenging ideas germinated, including the notion of building a North–South alliance, based on issues still facing us. These ideas later developed into a national conference on social justice and the development of a Freedom Curriculum.
Linda and I worked with Julian Bond, Pat Sullivan, Joanne Grant, Kathleen Cleaver, Howard Zinn, Maggie Donovan, Reggie Robinson, Matthew Jones, and others to organize the conference around the theme, “The SNCC Experience—Passing It On.” The conference took place in 1997 at Wheelock and Simmons colleges and was also supported by MIT and Harvard. The meeting laid the basis for a Freedom Curriculum for public schools and other projects which have since been launched under the slogan, “Teaching Social Justice, Living Social Justice.”
The 1997 conference in Boston also served as a joyful reunion for movement people, and, more importantly, their children. I especially remember the workshop organized and led by our daughter Margaret especially for movement offspring and their parents. Matthew Jones, a SNCC Freedom Singer, sat in the room with his kids and was moved to tears hearing Margaret and other black and white movement babies talk about missing their moms and dads while the parents were on the picket line, in jail, or otherwise away from home. The freedom struggle so engulfed us that we sometimes neglected our kids even though we were aware of it at the time and felt a great sense of guilt.
Maggie Donovan and her colleagues have done the writing, perfecting, and vetting of the Freedom Curriculum, which became a project of the National Civil Rights Coordinating Committee (NCRCC), co-chaired by Julian Bond and me. The Freedom Curriculum is an umbrella term covering a set of ideas on how to explore the lessons of the civil rights movement with young children. These ideas include considering racism as an institution; understanding the history of African American resistance; and connecting the civil rights movement to other struggles of oppressed peoples. The curriculum emphasizes collaboration and perseverance. The intent is always for children to see themselves as activists in a democracy.
Spinoffs from North-South work and that 1997 conference, along with the Freedom Curriculum, have meant new directions in training teachers to teach the movement, racial and ethnic sensitivity, and diversity. Providing a focus for the new NCRCC, the Boston experience strengthened our determination to put civil rights into American education. A fluid group of activists, educators and business people formed around New England, while the most collective work centered in Boston; it evolved into a rotating unpaid staff of students, teachers, and community activists.
Maggie Donovan, a first-grade teacher and graduate school professor, has become an international expert in experiential learning. In 2000 Maggie and Cheryl Sutter were invited as teacher researchers to the “Making Learning Visible Project at Project Zero,” a research institute within the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Maggie and Cheryl used the Freedom Curriculum as their research subject and have documented students’ responses to it. With their colleagues they have integrated the Freedom Curriculum into literacy and social studies curricula and aligned it with state standards. Project Zero published this work in the monograph, “Making Teaching Visible.” Maggie and Cheryl were also invited to present the Freedom Curriculum in Havana, Cuba, in 2004.
In 2004 the Washington-based Teaching for Change published a book, Putting the Movement Back Into Civil Rights Teaching, which includes many selections from the Freedom Curriculum. These stories, written by Maggie, are based on work done in her first-grade classroom in Harwich, Massachusetts. One of my favorites is “Pssssst! Hey Mister!” by a seven-year-old boy. I had told the boy’s class about “the troubles” in Danville during the exceptionally bloody summer of 1963. I made an adventure story of how a small boy had rescued me from some marauding policemen. Afterwards, one little boy wrote me a letter. He said, “Bob, I really liked that story you told about ‘psst, hey mister’ and getting shot at and falling in the stickers. I told my teacher it shows that little people can help big people sometimes.”
Maggie and I are especially excited about the educational work being done in Mississippi, the state where the movement struggle was most intense and deadly and where SNCC played such a central role in developing local organizers. The curriculum uses real stories from real people in real situations during the freedom movement, and some schools there have courageously decided to face their own past and help children learn their own history. Working with the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi and its director, Susan Glisson, several of the communities where the struggle was most explosive, including Philadelphia, McComb, and Oxford, have hosted conferences for elementary teachers where Maggie presented the Freedom Curriculum. During these conferences many teachers have approached Maggie to tell her their own stories, which are now included in the curriculum.
Some portions of the New York City school system under Chancellor Joel Klein are involved and have done field testing along with Sean Devlin through the American Civil Rights Education Services. “ACRES” organizes three-week tours of historical sites across the Deep South. Students raise money for the trip while attending an eight-week intensive course at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn or the City Academy at City Hall in Manhattan. Devlin recruits movement veterans as master teachers and traveling instructors during the tours. Diane Nash, James Bevel, Bernard Lafayette, Barbara Bland, Amelia Boynton, Elizabeth Eckert, James Meredith, John Seigenthaler Sr., Matthew Jones, Hollis Watkins, Dave Dennis, and Bob Moses are among those who have served.
My weeks with Sean Devlin as a master teacher have been rewarding. I use the Freedom Curriculum a lot as I have watched him build an experiential learning instrument employing videos, movies, live heroines and heroes, drama, poetry, rap, bands, and freedom music. Devlin got hooked on freedom while working with Jane Pauley producing documentaries on the sixties.
Some exciting events on the road to the Freedom Curriculum have been small ones. Mag
gie’s first graders in Harwich performed a play they wrote about the Montgomery boycott. One little girl played the bus driver, another was Martin Luther King, and a small boy played Rosa Parks, the favorite role. Others set out chairs in the shape of a bus. The rest became policemen and women or parts of the crowd shouting encouragement or abuse at “Mrs. Parks.” They thoroughly enjoyed doing their play for me, “the visitor.” After the delightful play, I told them about meeting Dr. King and Mrs. Parks while I was a student in Montgomery. Classwork included writing to the visiting “speaker.” One first-grader wrote to thank me, “Bob, I was so excited when you said you met Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, do you mind if I ask if you met Harriet Tubman?” I read it perfectly in spite of small misspellings or uncertain grammar. I wrote and asked Maggie to show him my letter saying I missed meeting Tubman, but that she was in the same movement as me—just earlier.
As our teaching plan has been studied in real class rooms, we have documented children’s engagement with the movement through storytelling, drama, artwork, poetry and music. We have collected evidence of children’s growth as readers, writers, and historians as well as their passion for justice. Children have an innate sense of justice—“It isn’t fair!” They prove to be at home using metaphor and love the adventure of the movement, easily identifying with the heroines and heroes. Freedom songs, which they sing with gusto, become as important in the plan as freedom stories. Students pile up a large number of books they have read, and they and their teachers add a small pebble to the story tin can as each is added to their repertoire. Songs and poetry they write in class are amazing and the plays they produce and the hand-bound books they make are inspiring. Student responses to the curriculum are being used by a number of school systems as a proven experiential learning tool. In 2005, Teaching For Change made a professional development film in Maggie’s classroom of the class’s original play about the Montgomery Bus Boycott and how to teach the movement in the ways we have developed. They also have some of our lessons on their website.