Any Good Books,
February 2020
The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White
Southerner in the Freedom Movement
Bob Zellner with Constance Curry (2008,
New South Books)
No one would have predicted that a
nice Methodist boy from East Brewton, Alabama, would grow up to be
the first white field secretary of the Student Non-Violent
Coordinating Committee. SNCC represented the youthful face of the
civil rights movement; Bob Zellner was hired to visit white campuses
and look for students who could be converted to the cause. This
memoir tells a more exciting, and terrifying, story of the years he
spent on the front lines of marches, freedom rides, and voter
registration drives. He was arrested dozens of times, and worked with
everybody from Julian Bond to Stokely Carmichael.
Bob Zellner couldn't have grown up in
a more Southern way. Born in 1939, the second son of a Methodist
minister and a school teacher, he lived in various small towns in
south Alabama and the Florida panhandle. Keeping the family fed
required all hands on deck: milking cows and fattening hogs, weeding
gardens, hunting and fishing. Zellner's father and grandfather were
Klansmen, as was common at the time, but his father took a more
progressive turn, and Mrs. Zellner converted his white robes into
Sunday shirts for her five growing boys.
1960 was Bob Zellner's senior year at
Huntingdon College in Montgomery, the capital of Alabama. Zellner's
sociology class was assigned to study the racial problem and write a
paper about what might be done about it. "When the professor
told us to research solutions to racial problems, we were supposed to
understand that research was done in the library." Zellner and
four of his friends proposed to do some actual field work, to the
professor's great consternation. After all, Huntingdon's leafy green
campus was barely a mile from Alabama State College for Negroes, and
there must be some people there with thoughts on the subject.
The professor explained that if the
men sat down with Negro students, "the Ku Klux Klan and others
may take exception to your sitting down and they will come and beat
you up and that will be a breach of the peace, which you have caused,
and therefore you will be guilty of inciting to riot." This
spectacularly perverse (if pervasive) logic tweaked something in
Zellner and his friends, who wound up going to the anniversary
commemoration of the Montgomery bus boycott. Sure enough, to avoid
arrest, they had to leave by the basement door while Dr. King made a
diversion at the front, but for Zellner, it was just a matter of
time.
In McComb, Mississippi, he was beaten
and arrested; in Albany, Georgia, he served on a chain gang with
black prisoners; in Baton Rouge, he spent weeks in a prison hotbox
cell; and whenever he entered Alabama, the state had him under
surveillance. George Wallace even had him arrested four days before
taking office as governor, which teed up a dandy lawsuit. Zellner was
tough, brave, and in very good shape, but he was still just one man
in his early twenties–yet the authorities were very worried
wherever he showed up.
SNCC was a black-led organization, for
good reason; but Bob Zellner said to his brother before he went off
to start his job, "...that I was not in this for the black
people–if this was just acting on a missionary impulse, I wouldn't
survive–that I had to look at it from a different angle. I was
involved because I was fighting for my own rights as well." The
right to sit and eat and talk in a racially mixed group had to be
fought for over and over, against opposition on all levels. The
violent opposition is shocking, but so is the passivity and
complacency of the mass of people, to say nothing of the complicity
of the Federal government, which was all too willing to compromise
away the actual practice of people's rights. That struggle is not
over.
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