SNCC- The New Abolitionists

by Howard Zinn

  CLARK: They will not be molested in any way.

  MRS. BOYNTON: Does giving them food mean molesting them?

  CLARK: They will not be molested in any way. If you do, you’ll be arrested.

  FORMAN: We’d like to talk to them; they’re standing on line to register to vote, and we’d like to explain registration procedure to them.

  CLARK: They will not be molested in any way, and that includes talking to them.

  2:00 P.M. A fragile thread was stretched taut, and everyone watched. Forman and Mrs. Boynton went back across the street. As they did, I heard aloud, creaking noise and looked up; it was the scaffold that had been suspended above the scene with the two window puttiers; it was coming down now. I looked closer at the windows of the courthouse and saw the faces of county employees jammed up against them.

  I spoke briefly with Danny Lyon, the photographer who had been following “the movement” all over the South and taking pictures of it, a curly-haired fellow with a thick mustache, high-spirited, unafraid. We mused over the emblem on the door of the county courthouse. It said, “DALLAS COUNTY, ALABAMA,” and showed what looked like a figure bearing a set of scales. The scales were tipped sharply. “Justice?” Danny asked, smiling. A posse man near us was showing his electric cattle prod to a companion.

  2:05 P.M. I spoke to the senior Justice Department attorney: “Is there any reason why a representative of the Justice Department can’t go over and talk to the state troopers and say these people are entitled to food and water?” He was perturbed by the question. There was a long pause. Then he said, “I won’t do it.” He paused again. “I believe they do have the right to receive food and water. But I won’t do it.”

  2:10 P.M. Forman was calling newsmen and photographers together to witness the next scene. All were gathered in the alley alongside the Federal Building, around a shopping cart which contained the uneaten sandwiches and the keg of water. Mrs. Boynton said: “We’re determined to reach these people on line with food.” Two SNCC field secretaries stood before the shopping cart and filled their arms with food. One of them was Avery Williams, Alabama-born. Another was Chico Neblett from Carbondale, Illinois. Both had left college to work for SNCC.

  Chico gave his wallet to Forman, a final small gesture of acceptance of going to jail. He said to Avery, “Let’s go, man.” They walked down to the corner (a SNCC man never jaywalks in the South!) with all eyes on the street focused on them. They crossed at the corner. A group of us—photographers, newsmen, others—crossed the street at the same time. It was 2:20 P.M. As Chico and Avery came close to the line, the fat trooper with the cigar and the blue helmet, Major Smelley, barked at them, “Move on!” They kept going towards the line of registrants. He called out, “Get ’em!” The next thing I saw was Chico Neblett on the ground, troopers all around him. They poked at him with clubs and sticks. I heard him cry out and saw his body jump convulsively again and again; they were jabbing him with the cattle prods. Photographers were taking pictures, and the Major yelled, “Get in front of those cameramen!” Four troopers lifted Chico by his arms and legs, carried him to the corner, threw him into the green arrest truck that stood at the curb.

  Now the troopers and posse men turned on the group of us who had followed all this; they pushed and shoved, ripped a photographer’s shirt. A young reporter for the Montgomery Advertiser, himself a native of Selma, had his camera smacked by a state trooper using his billyclub. Then the trooper pinned the reporter against a parked truck and ripped his shirt. When he walked to the sidewalk, a posse man back-handed him across the mouth.

  We moved back across the street to the federal building. The Justice Department attorney was at the public telephone on the corner, making a call. He looked troubled. The green arrest truck pulled away. Chico and Avery waved. The Justice Department attorney took the name of the photographer who had been hit; several of us went into the F.B.I. office and swore out statements on what had happened.

  3:30 P.M. Four of us sat on the steps of the federal building and talked: the young Negro attorney from Detroit, James Baldwin, the white attorney from the Justice Department, and myself. The Detroit attorney said, “Those cops could have massacred all those three hundred Negroes on line, and still nothing would have been done.” Baldwin was angry, upset. The Justice Department man was defensive. He asked Baldwin what he was working on now. Answer: a play. What was the title? Blues for Mister Charlie, Baldwin replied.

  3:40 P.M. Still no food and no water for the people waiting. I walked down the street, checking the number of people, to see if the arrests and the excitement had diminished the line. It was longer than before.

  3:55 P.M. Baldwin was talking to a newspaperman, “It cannot be true, it is impossible that the federal government cannot do anything.”

  A police loudspeaker boomed out into the street: “All you people who don’t have business here get on. White and colored folks, move on.” We gathered on the steps of the federal building, not sure it would prove a refuge. Jim Forman joined us.

  4:30 P.M. The courthouse closed its doors. The line was breaking up. The Detroit lawyer watched men and women walk slowly away. His voice trembled, “Those people should be given medals.” We made our way back to SNCC headquarters.

  That night, there was a mass meeting at the church called for 8:00 P.M. At 7:00 P.M. fifteen people were there. I spoke to an old man. He was a veteran of World War I, seventy-three years old, had lived in Selma all his life. I asked him if, in his recollection, there had ever been any activity by Selma Negroes like this? He shook his head. “Nothing like this ever happened to Selma. Nothing, until SNCC came here.”

  At five minutes of eight, the church was packed, every seat taken, people standing along the walls. Father Ouillet and another Catholic priest sat in the audience. The Negro attorney from the Justice Department sat there also. The kids in the chorus were up front, singing: “Oh, that light of free-ee-dom, I’m gonna let it shine!” A chandelier hung way up in the domed ceiling, a circle of twenty-five bare light bulbs glowing. A Negro minister started the meeting with prayer, the local newspaper editor, a white man, bowing his head as the minister intoned: “Bless this wicked city in which we live, oh Lord, have mercy on us!”

  Forman spoke. The emotion of the day was still inside him: part of it triumph because 350 Negroes had stood on line from morning to evening in full view of the armed men who ruled Dallas County; part of it bitterness that those people, defending the United States Constitution against Sheriff Jim Clark and his posse, had to do it alone. “We ought to be happy today,” Forman told the crowd, “because we did something great….” Everyone applauded. Forman went on: “Jim Clark never saw that many niggers down there!” The audience laughed with him. “Yeah, there was Jim Clark, rubbin’ his head and his big fat belly; he was shuffling today like we used to!” The crowd roared, needing release. When Forman finished, the Freedom Chorus sang: “If you miss me, can’t find me nowhere, just come on over to the county jail, I’ll be sittin’ over there.”

  David Baldwin spoke, his voice choked: “Until you come down here, you don’t believe it…. I’m not going to lie and say I wish I was going to stay longer…. It’s an evil town.” Just before he spoke, the Freedom Chorus sang the African folk song “Kumbaya,” with their own words. One of the stanzas was: “Selma needs you, Lord, Kumbaya! Selma needs you, Lord, Kumbaya! Selma needs you, Lord, Kumbaya! Oh Lord, Kumbaya!”

  Then James Baldwin stood at the rostrum, his huge eyes burning into the crowd: “The sheriff and his deputies … these ignorant people … were created by the good white people on the hill—and in Washington—and they’ve created a monster they can’t control…. It’s not an act of God. It is deliberately done, deliberately created by the American Republic.”

  The meeting closed as always, with everyone linking arms and singing “We Shall Overcome,” youngsters and old people and young women with babies in their arms, the SNCC people, the Catholic priests, the speakers on the platform. Over on th
e other side of the church I could see the young Negro attorney for the Justice Department, his arms crossed like everyone else, singing.

  9. The White Man in the Movement

  Beyond the picketing and the demonstrations, the furor over the right to vote and to be seated in a restaurant, there rises that ultimate question, answered negatively by the Muslims, worried over by liberals, exploded in the center of the intellectuals’ parlor talk by James Baldwin: Can white people and black people truly live together as friends in the United States?

  It is characteristic of the young people in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that they should not speak their answer, but show it—and that they should do this not in the cushioned atmosphere of Northern tolerance, but in the violence-ridden towns of the rural South. White and black youngsters in SNCC—in Dawson, Georgia; Selma, Alabama; Greenwood, Mississippi; Pine Bluff, Arkansas; Danville, Virginia—walk the streets together, share the same sleeping quarters, the same food, the same dangers, join in the same songs through prison corridors where iron bars separate them. Never in the history of the United States has there been a movement where the lives, day by day, of Negro and white people are so entwined physically, intellectually, emotionally.

  The reality behind this statement is somewhat more complex. There have been tensions and troubles, anti-white and black nationalist feelings among Negroes in SNCC, resentment expressed against white kids rushing into the movement, personal piques and gripes and explosions, and, in one setting of high nervous tension, a fistfight. But these are the aches of progress, the inevitable and welcome signs that people are meeting for the first time, and that through a transition which brings occasional bursts of hostility, people are learning to live with one another. The tensions are a counterpoint to the old “peace” of separation and subordination; therefore jarring, full of surprises and passions. Among these passions, there rises again and again that feeling between one person and another that can only be described as love. And in the deep and complex relationships among people in SNCC, we have perhaps the blurred vision of what awaits the nation and the world when the artifice of race no longer stands in the way of human contact.

  The first white field secretary in SNCC was a Southerner—Bob Zellner, born and raised in Southern Alabama where his father, a Methodist preacher with scant means, moved from one small town to another (the list looks like a KKK itinerary: Slocum, Roxley, Daphne, East Bruton, Mobile). In fact, his father once was a member of the KKK and a fundamentalist preacher. But while Bob was a child, the Reverend Zellner went through the emotional and intellectual transformation that made him an iconoclast in the church and a rebel in Alabama. Without the support of his father and mother, Bob doubts that he could have survived the series of rebellions against Southern white orthodoxy that finally brought him into SNCC, one of its most-jailed, most-beaten, and most-respected members.

  I first saw Bob Zellner one day in December, 1961, when I waited outside the Dougherty County jail for the emergence of the Freedom Riders whose imprisonment had led to the mass demonstrations in Albany. He came out through the gate with the rest; he was bearded and somewhat unkempt after ten days in that miserable jail. As he walked over to join the others a policeman grabbed him. It seemed that he alone had an additional charge against him, which would delay his release. As the policeman pushed and dragged him off, Bob waved and smiled to his friends, and there was something in that gesture which stirred me to a good deal of thought that night.

  Bob Zellner has light brown hair, an athletic build, an easy grin. Vaguely aware, in high school, of his father’s growing heretical views on race, he argued with friends for Autherine Lucy’s right to attend the University of Alabama without being really sure why he felt that way. But it was during his last two years at Huntingdon College in Montgomery, where he was an outstanding student, that he made the decisive turn. He came into conflict with the college administration over the firing of a teacher whom he admired. Around this time also he was reading in the newspapers about the sit-ins, and found himself identifying with the Negro students waiting for long hours at the lunch counters.

  When he took a course on Race Relations in the winter of 1960, instead of doing his research in the library he decided to investigate the problem first-hand. He visited the Rev. Ralph Abernathy in Montgomery, brought college friends to court hearings and to mass meetings at Negro churches, and began to attract the attention of both the state of Alabama and the college administration. He and several friends attended a nonviolent workshop conducted by SNCC people in Montgomery. Police surrounded the place, and they had to escape through a back exit. With the college administration aroused, Bob and the others were threatened with expulsion. Nevertheless he graduated that June, perhaps because he had won several of the school’s highest academic awards, perhaps because he and his parents had put up a vigorous battle to defend his right to act as he did.

  Bob now discovered that there were other Southern white people who thought as he did, and this strengthened him. Anne Braden had come to interview him for The Southern Patriot, an integrationist newspaper put out by the Southern Conference Education Fund. Then they corresponded with one another. Through Clifford and Virginia Durr and other Montgomery liberals Bob began to learn about various contemporary political issues. After his graduation he spent part of the summer at the interracial Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, then applied for a Southern Conference Education Fund grant to work with white students in the South for SNCC. On September 11, 1961, he arrived in Atlanta to start work.

  His job in SNCC did not turn out exactly as expected. As he later reported:

  At first I thought my work would mainly be a quiet sort—simply meeting and talking with students about what was going on. But I soon realized the impossibility of explaining what was going on unless I myself became an integral part of it, and of course my personality make-up and psychology also tended to draw me into the area of action. So I did get into action, first in McComb, rather suddenly….

  In McComb on October 4, 1961 to attend a SNCC planning session, Zellner learned of the murder of Herbert Lee and the arrest of teenager Brenda Travis. At noon, he heard singing outside the SNCC office; students were assembling to march downtown in the first street demonstration to take place in Mississippi. Everyone around him was moving to take part in the march, Bob Moses, Chuck McDew, and a hundred high school kids, and Bob was suddenly faced with a hard choice: to take part might seriously hurt his “quiet sort of work” among white Southern students, yet he wanted to declare, both to these Negro youngsters and to himself, his place in this movement. As the line began to move down the street from the office, he ran outside and joined it.

  He was the only white person in the long line of youngsters, who walked silently through town to the main highway. Then, with the sun beginning to set, they came back through McComb to the City Hall, where they found the streets crowded with white people, jeering and shouting, and large numbers of automobiles, and policemen all around. Someone in the crowd shouted out Bob’s name and threatened to kill him.

  The demonstrators walked up the steps of the City Hall, but the crowd was pressing all around so that they could not move forward or back. Men came out of the crowd, surrounded Zellner, and began clutching at him. Bob Moses and Chuck McDew tried to shield him with their bodies, but they and the other SNCC people at the head of the line were dragged off by the police, one by one, into the City Hall. Then the McComb Chief of Police held Zellner fast while the men began to beat him and to pull him into the crowd. He clutched at the railing, and tried to crawl up the steps. While the policemen watched, he was punched and kicked, his face scratched, his eyes gouged, and while on the ground he was kicked repeatedly in the head until he passed out. He regained consciousness in the police station, was pushed outside into an automobile, driven by the Police Chief fifteen miles to Magnolia, and let out.

  For Bob Zellner, that experience had the effect of welding him to the movement by a feelin
g so deep that it was akin to a religious experience. For the Negro youngsters in McComb, the sight of Bob Zellner walking with them into the mob and being beaten was a jolt to their general distrust of white people, an opening wedge for a new understanding about the tyranny of race.

  Four months later, Bob Zellner and Chuck McDew (the football player turned SNCC organizer, the Christian turned Jew, the black man turned Everyman) found themselves in East Baton Rouge jail, Louisiana, through an altogether bizarre set of events, facing possible ten-year sentences on criminal anarchy charges.

  They had been visiting SNCC projects in the Delta and stopped in Baton Rouge to visit Dion Diamond, the Freedom Rider who had left Howard University to work for SNCC, had been arrested twenty-one times in civil rights demonstrations in Virginia and Maryland, and was now in the Baton Rouge jail. Diamond was arrested this time while trying to organize Negro students at Southern University in Baton Rouge; among the charges against him was one of criminal anarchy. McDew and Zellner went to the jailhouse to bring him some cigarettes, chewing gum, books, and a copy of The Nation (The Ugly American and Scottsboro Boy were confiscated, but The Nation was let in) and were promptly arrested. They weren’t told immediately what the charges were, but an officer told McDew that one of them was “possible vagrancy.” McDew was put into an isolation cell, and Zellner into a cell block with about sixty-five men.

  The following morning, policemen brought newspapers into Zellner’s cell block. In the headlines was a story about two Communists who had been caught trying to smuggle obscene literature on race-mixing into the jail. Their names were given and it was said that they were being charged with criminal anarchy, that they were trying to overthrow the government of the State of Louisiana. Bob was wearing a wristband which all prisoners wore, with his name and date of arrest; one of the men grabbed his wrist, saw his name, and then there was a commotion in the cell. Zellner was surrounded, forced into a corner, punched in the mouth, spat on, threatened with death. Day after day the ordeal continued, with the policemen egging on the prisoners. When he dozed off, ice water was thrown on him to force him to wake up. The men approached him with sharpened spoons and razor blades, and told they were going to pin him to his mattress and castrate him. Meanwhile, the policemen stood outside the cell, watching, cursing him.