The Wrong Side of Murder Creek

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.