The Wrong Side of Murder Creek

Tales of a Civil Rights Activist. East Hampton Star, East Hampton, NY, Long Island Books, January 1, 2009

By James S. Henry

"The Wrong Side of Murder Creek" is an extraordinary personal memoir by one of the Hamptons' most colorful Southern imports and gifted political activists. It is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the inside story of the civil rights movement in this country.

More than that, it offers an inspiring account of a purposeful life that has been devoted to the cause of human rights and social justice.

Fifty years after most of the events described in this book, many Americans seem to have forgotten where their most precious rights come from. Bob Zellner reminds us that the vitality in practice of rights like freedom of speech and freedom from discrimination often depends not just on carefully drafted constitutions, Fourth of July rhetoric, lawyers, judges, or politicians, but on the willingness of a handful of "ordinary" citizens to speak up, sit in, picket, and get fired, beaten, gassed, shot at, and jailed. It also reminds us that the need for this kind of outside-the-system commitment is far from over.

The book's title derives from the name of a storied creek that divides the richer and poorer sides of Brewton, Ala., one of a half-dozen small Southern towns where Mr. Zellner and his four brothers grew up in the 1940s and 1950s. As the title implies, Mr. Zellner was not your stereotypical middle-class white student radical. His grandfather, a railroad dispatcher, was a long-time member of the Ku Klux Klan, and his father, an itinerant Methodist preacher and protege of Dr. Bob Jones, also briefly joined the Klan.

Mr. Zellner himself attended a succession of segregated public schools and churches, eventually enrolling in Huntingdon College, a Methodist college in Montgomery. On sociological grounds, therefore, he might well have turned out to be quite a Klansman or, at the very least, not actively opposed to segregation, just like, he says, "99 percent of white Southerners" in the early 1960s.

It is easy to forget just how entrenched formal segregation was in the South back then. As of 1961, when Mr. Zellner, a 22-year-old college senior, became one of the first white organizers for SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or "Snick"), most Southern whites and blacks still believed that the desegregation of public schools, transportation, libraries, and housing, much less voting rights, would be a long time coming.

While federal courts had outlawed discrimination in California public schools by 1947 and had declared in 1955 that public schools had to be integrated "with all deliberate speed," most Southern states were very slow to change. The 1955-56 Montgomery bus strike, led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, had succeeded, but die-hard segregationists reacted by organizing their own massive resistance movement. In Arkansas, a federal effort to desegregate Little Rock's schools in 1957 had simply led to the closure of its entire public school system, plus "white flight" to private schools.

Furthermore, in hard-core states like Mississippi and Alabama, state governments established programs for illegal surveillance, infiltration, detentions, and police intimidation that can only be described as state terrorism. Nor was the F.B.I. much help in protecting civil rights workers. From 1956 on, at J. Edgar Hoover's direction, the F.B.I. sponsored the COINTELPRO program, which spied on and attempted to subvert the movement.

In several cases, the F.B.I. also passed on information to state police that led directly to police violence. And especially after 1963, as Mr. Zellner notes, agents provocateurs insinuated themselves into SNCC itself, fanning the flames of the black nationalism that ultimately led to the organization's demise. According to Mr. Zellner, not one single official has ever been called to account for these government-sponsored crimes.

By the late 1950s, the combination of increased white resistance, increased federal court support for civil rights, and the prospect that a Northern Democrat might soon be elected president led veteran civil rights leaders like Thurgood Marshall and the N.A.A.C.P.'s Roy Wilkins to turn conservative, recommending patience and good manners rather than civil disobedience. As a result, from late 1957 to 1960, there was a real slowdown in organized protests.

The movement's resurgence started in 1960 with sit-ins and freedom rides that soon spread all across the South. These were spearheaded not by the veteran leaders, or at first even by Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, but by hundreds of impatient college students in their early 20s who rose up out of nowhere to form SNCC. From 1960 to 1966, they successfully built a racially integrated national organization that was committed to direct action and nonviolent civil disobedience.

At first most SNCC staff members were young blacks. But they were soon joined by scores of young whites like Bob Zellner, Sam Shirah, Bill Hansen, and Casey Hayden. Long before the Berkeley Free Speech Movement or the Vietnam War, or the rebirth of the women's movement in the 1960s, white activists played a critical role in SNCC just as white activists also played a key role in South Africa's multiracial African National Congress. And SNCC, in turn, provided a training ground for activists in these other progressive movements.

Re-energized by the students, and suddenly willing to challenge authority, the United States civil rights movement went on to experience a turnaround that culminated in the sweeping Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Today, many of us usually attribute these victories to a combination of Dr. King's marches, speeches by Dr. King, and legislative maneuvering by President Johnson. We recall Hillary Clinton's controversial claim about the Civil Rights Act during this year's Democratic primary fight: "It took a president to get it done." As Bob Zellner reminds us, what it really took was a vanguard of young people that was willing to stand up to parents, friends, cops, store owners, Klansmen, governors, and several presidents.

Mr. Zellner's involvement in this movement started out as a defense of his own freedoms of speech and association. As he explains, "I didn't come south to help black people; I was already here, and I got involved to free myself."

Over time, this commitment expanded to protecting the freedoms of others. What began as a college senior's research project led to training sessions in nonviolence at the influential Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, and finally to a position as a full-time SNCC organizer. Mr. Zellner traveled all over the South, routinely experiencing beatings, arrests, and jail time. His growing relationships with other SNCC members reinforced his commitment whatever else they believed, SNCC members were powerfully motivated by their belief in one another.

This kind of involvement did not come cheap. SNCC's commitment to nonviolence certainly paid huge political dividends by provoking one-sided white violence that generated enormous support in the nation as a whole. But SNCC activists took huge risks with their careers and lives. While the black community generally supported black SNCC members, in many cases even their own parents opposed them. For example, John Lewis's parents berated him when he was arrested for the first time in 1960, because they feared it would end his college chances.

As Mr. Zellner notes, in some ways life was even more unpleasant for white SNCC members. They became a special target for the police and the Klan, and their own parents and community were often even more hostile. After 1965, they also faced mounting hostility from black nationalists.

Despite the hazards, 1960 to 1966 were heady, heroic days for SNCC volunteers. Mr. Zellner's unique position as SNCC's "first hired, last fired" organizer allowed him to cross paths with almost every significant civil rights leader. His book is a veritable who's who of the movement, filled with recollections of everyone from Ralph Abernathy, Ella Baker, Harry Belafonte, and Bob Dylan to James Forman, Dr. King, Bob Moses, and Diane Nash, from Rosa Parks and Pete Seeger to George Wallace and the head of the Alabama K.K.K.

It is also a very good read, with hair-raising accounts of cattle prods, water cannons, truncheons, cross burnings, and jail cells in at least six states, plus dozens of colorful stories. There are also several heart-wrenching scenes, like Mr. Zellner's unsuccessful effort to procure medical care at a white emergency room for a black organizer who had just been shot in the head, and the tearful, climactic SNCC meeting in December 1966, when white organizers like Mr. Zellner were downgraded.

Given all this vivid history, I won't be surprised if some Hollywood director takes a shot at making a feature film out of "Murder Creek." But he had better have the talents of a Victor Fleming or a Cecil B. DeMille, because this is truly an epic story.

Even with the able assistance of Constance Curry, an old friend of the author's and a movement veteran, this book has been 20 years in the making. I suspect this is partly because Mr. Zellner is by nature a doer, not a writer, and because the story is so rich. But it is also because so much of the story was painful to relive and relate.

One of the most fateful moments was the May 1966 takeover by Stokely "Starmichael," Bill Ware, and other black power advocates, followed by the December 1966 expulsion of all white SNCC members. These moves soon proved to be disastrous. In June 1967 Stokely Carmichael quit to join the Black Panthers. H. Rap Brown took over, renamed it the Student National Coordinating Committee, and started preaching that "violence is as American as apple pie."

By the late 1960s SNCC had been reduced to a handful of local chapters, Carmichael had moved to Guinea, an African dictatorship, and H. Rap Brown was launching a criminal career that culminated in his 2002 life sentence without parole for murder.

Some might argue that this trajectory was inevitable. After all, SNCC had already achieved most of its goals with respect to Jim Crow laws. Furthermore, the civil rights movement had been radicalized by riots in Watts and Detroit, the rise of competing organizations like the Panthers, the Vietnam War, and Dr. King's murder.

On the other hand, we do have the striking example in South Africa of the A.N.C.'s prolonged multiracialism against the opposition, it should be noted, of the United States government, whose preferred alternatives to apartheid in the 1970s and 1980s were Chief Buthelezi, the Zulu dictator, and the Pan-Africanist Congress, a black power fringe group.

We also have Mr. Zellner's tantalizing suggestions that many black SNCC members sided with him, at least in private; that Carmichael's original election and the vote to expel whites were very narrow decisions, and that the black power takeover was probably abetted by agents provocateurs. As the long-term impact of this turning point on our entire political system was so important, this deserves much more attention.

In any case, anyone who is cynical about political activism in general, or 1960s activists in particular, really needs to read this book. Indeed, like Mr. Zellner himself, most leading 1960s activists remained activists their entire lives if there was a "Big Chill," it didn't apply to them.

Does this kind of political activism still have any relevance? Superficially, with our first black president about to take office and so many high-profile blacks and Latinos on the top rung of the economic ladder, some may be tempted to say no, that we already live in a postracial society, and that our focus has appropriately shifted from "protest" to "politics," as Bayard Rustin proposed in 1965.

After nearly four decades of focusing mainly on party politics, however, the fact is that the actual level of economic apartheid in our schools, neighborhoods, health insurance system, pension system, and capital and labor markets is greater than it was in the 1960s.

Lately there has also been an epidemic of racial, ethnic, and class confrontations in which the two leading political parties have utterly failed to represent the interests of ordinary whites, blacks, and Latinos from the fight to rebuild New Orleans and the trial of the Jena Six to the brutal "knife lynching" of Marcelo Lucero right here in Suffolk County in November to the federal government's failure to provide any meaningful financial aid to homeowners even as it showers billions on Wall Street.

In short, there's plenty of evidence that, even after Barack Obama's election, we still need our capacity for protest as well as politics. Mr. Zellner's book is a timely reminder of the power that ordinary citizens have to wage the ongoing battle for social justice directly, by putting our faith, brains, and bodies on the line.

James S. Henry is an economist, lawyer, and investigative journalist. He is a vice president of the Suffolk County chapter of the New York Civil Liberties Union and a volunteer cooperating attorney for the A.C.L.U. A resident of Sag Harbor, he is also the managing director of the Sag Harbor Group.

"The Wrong Side of Murder Creek", Bob Zellner with Constance Curry, NewSouth Books, $27.95