DAN'S PAPERS, February 13, 2009 Page 21 www.danshamptons.com
Who’s Here By Debbie Tuma As a white man growing up in Alabama during the 1940s and ‘50s, Bob Zellner knew all too well the helpless feeling of witnessing prejudice. Born in 1939 in a small town of Jay on the panhandle of Florida, five miles from the Alabama border, Zellner was raised in East Brewton, Alabama, which is separated from its wealthy neighbor, Brewton, by Murder Creek — named for the lynchings that occurred there. “When I was growing up, Brewton was the richest town in America,” said Zellner, who now lives in Southampton. “All my life, I heard ‘Boy, you were raised on the wrong side of Murder Creek.’” Many decades later, after being recruited personally by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to serve in the civil rights movement and after being arrested 18 times in six states while an activist in the Freedom Movement, Zellner uses that statement for the title of his new book. The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement, published last November by New South Books, is memoir of Zellner’s life-long activism that he has been documenting for over 20 years. “I started writing it in the ‘80s and I’d keep putting it down to get involved in organizing,” he said. “When I went back to graduate school in the ‘90s, I wrote it to serve as my PhD dissertation in history.” More recently, Constance Curry, who worked with Zellner in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), helped him edit the book, and Julian Bond, head of the National NAACP, wrote the introduction. Zellner has also worked closely with Lucius Ware, head of the local NAACP, on various projects. Zellner wrote the book “because I wanted young people to know that the civil rights movement was both blacks and whites ... it was a people’s movement,” he said during a phone interview from his hotel in Savannah last week, where he and his wife, Linda, were participating in a book fair. The Wrong Side is also being optioned for a movie, with his friend Spike Lee as executive producer and Barry Alexander Brown as directorscreenwriter. “This book was always very visual and movie-like to me, because I remembered it as events, with sounds and sights,” said Zellner, who will travel to Alabama to to get permission to shoot there. After graduating from Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama in 1961, with an honors degree in sociology and psychology, Zellner joined the SNCC. He was the first white southerner to serve as Field Secretary for this group, which tried to do away with segregation and prejudice through non-violent means. “I say to people, I didn’t get involved with this group just to help black people, I did it to free myself as well,” Zellner said.
Bob Zellner, Activist
lence against the white population.” Zellner was to try to register black people to vote. “This was in 1963. Blacks would be killed if they registered to vote or actually voted,” he recalled. In Louisiana, Zellner was charged with criminal anarchy for trying to visit a staff member who was arrested for doing sit-ins. He had the same charge in Baton Rouge, and got arrested for his organizing efforts in Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Connecticut and Massachusetts. From ‘63-‘65, Zellner studied race relations in the Graduate School of Sociology at Brandeis University. During Mississippi Freedom in 1964, he traveled with Rita Schwerner while taking part in SNCC’s and CORE’s investigation of the disappearance of her husband, Mickey, as well as James Chaney and Andrew Goodman. When SNCC became an all-black organization in 1967, Zellner joined the Southern Conference Educational Fund to organize an anti-racism project for black and white workers in the Deep South. During the ‘60s, Zellner worked on documentary and feature films, traveling to Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and Mexico. The film, Mississippi Burning so bothered him (he felt the role of the FBI was distorted) that he lectured at college campuses on the “real history” of the struggle. In 2000, closer to his Southampton home, Zellner suffered a broken elbow at the hands of the town police, when, as chairman of the Southampton Town Anti-Bias Task Force, he mediated a dispute between the police and the Shinnecock Nation. Police attacked Zellner and members of the tribe who were protecting their ancestral burial grounds from proposed development. They were charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. But in 2007, a Federal jury ruled that Zellner and the Shinnecocks were victims of false arrest, malicious prosecution, and denial of civil rights, and they were awarded compensatory and punitive damages. In addition to finishing the 20-year book project, Zellner’s biggest moment was when he recently attended the inauguration of President Barack Obama, along with his friends Julian Bond, Frank Smith, of SNCC, and Congressman John Lewis, of Georgia. “I never would have dreamed we’d have a black president in my lifetime, and I was with Obama when he kicked off his campaign in Selma, Alabama,” said Zellner. “He understood the heart of the civil rights movement, which is non-violent, and he introduced non-violent politics to the world for the first time. His campaign organized a huge, diverse army of nonviolent people and it will make a big difference in the world.” Zellner is working on a second book, Night Snow, based on his diaries of the Obama campaign. He has several upcoming events in the Hamptons. (See Day by Day, page 46.)
” I wanted young people to know the civil rights movement was blacks and whites ... a people’s movement.” Many times, Zellner was restricted from activities due to the segregation laws. While at Huntingdon, he and four others were asked to resign from school for going to hear Dr. Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks speak. “We were doing a paper for sociology, and Dr. King had told us that we could come hear him speak, but we might get arrested,” Zellner recalled. “We were accused of being troublemakers and subversives, because we were breaking the segregation laws.” Zellner worked for Dr. King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and they ended up in jail together in Albany, Georgia, in December of 1961. He was convicted of his civil rights pursuits, and he was sentenced to serve in the Georgia chain gang, which he did. In his book, the chapter “Working on the Chain Gang” tells of that experience. Zellner also writes about being arrested in Danville, Virginia, on the same charge that John Brown was hanged on, namely, “inciting the black population to acts of war and vio-