After Freedom Summer, Dottie and I went back to Boston and Brandeis in the fall of 1964. It was incredible, but we soon ran into none other than Willie B. Painter. We were walking home from a SNCC party and passed a dark doorway, and I saw Willie B. standing there. I said to Dottie, “Don’t look now, but Willie B. Painter is standing in the door back there.” She said, “Bob, you have lost your mind, this is Boston, he is in Alabama.” Then we heard footsteps coming up from behind, and Willie B. caught up with us.
He said, “Bob, what are you doing in Boston?”
I said, “Willie B., I have a strange sense that you know what I am doing in Boston.”
Unbeknownst to me, George Wallace was speaking at Harvard Law School the next night. He had campaigned in 1964 for the Democratic presidential nomination. He had already lost, but he loved the spotlight and was still traveling around speaking whenever he had the chance.
Willie B. said, “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow night.” I wasn’t aware that Wallace was going to speak at Harvard, so I just said, “Well, you may see me, you may not.” I wouldn’t give him any information—period. Then when I found out about the speech and realized that Willie B. was concerned about me showing up at Harvard, I didn’t want to disappoint him.
I decided to do a little organizing. Some SNCC-connected Harvard students told me that the law professor who was moderating Wallace’s appearance would bend over sideways to protect a guest from hostile questions or verbal attacks. Demonstrations were outlawed. But the SNCC students arranged a place for me to sit near the area where the microphone would be set up to take questions from the floor. A large student would get to the mike first and I could hide behind him to avoid the possibility of Wallace recognizing me and refusing my question.
Wallace gave his usual spiel—pugnaciously “sending a message to the pin-head bureaucrats” in Washington. He said the American people were fed up with being bused and punished with affirmative action. He bellowed that if he were president, he would bring the nation back to a true respect for the God-given right of the various states to shake off the tyranny of the federal government. The governor claimed race relations were fine in Alabama because everybody liked it as it was—where everyone knows his place. As for all this talk about violence and voting—why everybody who wants to, in peace-loving Alabama, can vote.
At the end of his tirade the first student asked a softball question. Wallace answered and the boy stepped aside. I looked up and said, “Governor Wallace . . .”
Before I could continue, he spun around and sprinted toward the back of the stage. Moving slightly to my right, I looked past the lectern to see what George was doing back there. I saw him dart down some steps to huddle with a uniformed Alabama trooper on one arm and Special Investigator Willie B. Painter on the other. The instant Wallace bolted, the moderator began pounding the gavel, shouting, “I rule that question out of order.”
I shouted back along with half the audience that no question had been asked. “I don’t care,” the professor screamed, looking for the disappearing governor, “I rule that question out of order, now sit down!” I stood my ground and the audience began chanting, “He didn’t ask a question.” Others shouted, “How you can rule a question out of order that was not asked?” After all, they were law students.
The professor finally allowed me to go ahead with my question. I said, “Where’s Governor Wallace? I saw him disappear down the stairs. Maybe he doesn’t want to be asked a question by me. I’m Bob Zellner with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. I’m from Alabama.”
Then the students started chanting, “Make him answer. Make him answer.”
As this was going on, Wallace was being led slowly back to the podium. It probably didn’t look good for the Fightin’ Judge to run from someone totally unknown to the audience. George peered at me over the lectern and the professor told me to go ahead. So I asked a rather convoluted question, but it made the point. I said, “Governor Wallace, in your talk, you said there’s good race relations in Alabama and there’s no persecution of black people and black people can register to vote in Alabama. In light of that, how can you explain . . .” and I mentioned a number of cases like the Birmingham church bombing for which he bore almost direct responsibility. I mentioned all the martyrs in Alabama, the times people were arrested around the rights of black people or attempts to register to vote. “How can you explain all that if there are good race relations in Alabama?”
He said, “Bob Zellner, I don’t have to answer any of your questions.” Then to the students he said, “This man has been in practically every jail in Alabama.” Suddenly there was thunderous applause, not for Wallace, but for me. It wasn’t so much for me, as it was against Wallace. Immediately, I thought, “Oh, Jesus God, now the papers are going to say that Wallace got a standing ovation from the students at Harvard.” There were Alabama reporters and the state troopers traveling with him.
Afterward, I called Virginia Durr in Montgomery and told her to get the papers the next day because they were going to say that George Wallace got a standing ovation from the students. She said, “They’re that crazy?”
I told her the story, and repeated, “I guarantee you the reporting will be a standing ovation for George Wallace at Harvard University.”
To this day people ask me if in my confrontation with Wallace, the students gave Wallace a standing ovation. In fact, one of the headlines of the Montgomery paper was, “Zellner loses in bout with Wallace.” That’s how familiar they had gotten with the small rivalry between George Wallace and me.
Wallace had reason not to want me at his speeches. Every time he ran for president, I organized a truth squad, and wherever he went, we would go there. I had organized events at his rallies before, and I was always popping up at unexpected places right in his face.
While we were in Boston, the police sent regular reports on me and Dottie to police in Alabama. This is recorded in the files of the Alabama Sovereignty Commission. Willie B. Painter bragged that he knew everything there was to know about me. When he emerged out of the doorway that day on the Boston street, he introduced himself to Dottie and said he hadn’t had the pleasure of meeting her before, but he did know where her parents lived in New York.
I stayed in Boston for the fall semester and the spring semester. I was arrested and beaten during the Selma March activities in 1965, but I was in Boston at the time. Although SNCC had been organizing for a few years in Selma, the big campaign came in 1965. The main organizing that spring was by SCLC, but John Lewis and others from SNCC were among those beaten so badly on Bloody Sunday on March 7, 1965. The violence was so stark that people mobilized around the country. We headed up the organizing in Boston for the response to Bloody Sunday. We had been sending truckloads of food, books, and clothes from Boston to Alabama and Mississippi, but after Selma, we began to organize politically by having demonstrations at the Federal Building. We were seeking federal intervention in Selma and the creation of a national climate for protection of the marchers and passage of a voting rights bill.
Boston was a good place to organize, because there was a tremendous infrastructure of supportive students and professors as well as long-time liberals and progressives. We had strong groups at Harvard, Radcliffe, Boston University—all the major colleges and universities. The outrage over Selma was palpable. We organized an informational picket and then upped the ante by springing civil disobedience on the Boston federal offices. We did workshops and training as if we were conducting sit-ins, including ACLU-trained observers and legal aid in reserve. We began by blocking the doors of the federal building. If they weren’t going to allow black people to vote or protect marchers down South, we would shut the building down. Our group sat in the revolving doors and on the sidewalk in front of the doors. Of course, the police tried to clear us out, but at my door, we linked arms and legs. Our mass entanglement was tremendously strong, and the cops got frustrated. It took a lot of them to break it, and they picked me out as one of the instigators.
When the cops tried to break me loose, one did his best to break my finger and my wrist. We had a lot of observers, and so I said to one of them, “This policeman is breaking my finger and wrist.” He immediately stopped, but when they were carrying us to the police vehicle, we all went limp. That really made them mad. Even though there were TV lights and cameras going and radio people everywhere, this cop raised his fist back and hit me in the face as hard as he could. Bam! I was so nonviolently mad, but all I did was keep him in focus so I could read his badge number when my eyes cleared up. I then called out to the observer, “1859 is the badge number of the person who just hit me.” The cop then shoved me into the vehicle, and four or five more cops climbed in and started beating me like a punching bag. I was seeing stars and passing in and out of consciousness. Noel Day, one of our black civil rights workers who pastored a church in Roxbury, came piling in like a football player, knocking cops in all directions. He put his body over my body. Then they started beating him. When they got me to the jail, they did their best to clean me up a little. They called the jail doctor, and I was so beaten up, I couldn’t speak and I couldn’t see, but I could hear. The doctor said, “This man is seriously injured. You have to take him to the hospital. I will not have the responsibility.”
“Well, we can’t take him to the hospital like that. How are we going to explain it?”
I guess they didn’t think I could hear, but I did and the doctor said, “I don’t care how you explain it, but you have to take him to the hospital.” They took me to the hospital and wheeled me in on a gurney, and I heard the people in the ER say, “My God, what happened to him?” and the police said, “We don’t know, put it down as a routine automobile accident.”
This was Boston, Massachusetts, in 1965. This was another case where we sued. We had all the witnesses, and the badge number and the names of the cops. It never went anywhere. I don’t even know whether complaints were filed against the cops. We were so concerned about keeping the movement going that I don’t even think we pursued it, and our lawyers didn’t go forward with it.
After Danville and Boston, I believe I began to question nonviolence. By the summer of 1964, a degree of disillusionment was setting in among some long-time workers. The murders of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman in Neshoba County fanned the flames. We had faced such unrelenting brutality for a number of years, as well as the basic indifference of the federal government. The Feds would do something only when absolutely forced to do so. It was hard to take the hypocrisy of the government, still putting themselves up as the leader of the free world, the bastion of democracy. We got along better with the Klan and the killers and the terrorists, because they made no bones about what they were doing.
Very few politicians, Southern or national, had the courage and willingness to stand up and take the cost. They apparently didn’t believe or see that they could have gotten a tremendous boost from such activities. Even the little tiny bit that they did has already put JFK and RFK into the pantheon of greats, but what could they have done if early on they had said, “Look, there’s laws against killing people for wanting to register to vote. I’m gonna put you in jail, George Wallace, we’re not gonna pussyfoot around with you, we’re gonna put you in jail if you stand in the school house door against a court order, and then we’ll have court, we’ll let a judge decide whether or not you’re to be punished.”
But instead the killers and the bad guys got off more or less. Can you name a single Southern official, except the small fry, who was ever charged with a civil rights-related crime, much less tried and convicted?
In ’64, I remember that there were debates in the Freedom Schools about violence versus nonviolence. I was one of the few people in SNCC that continued to defend the nonviolent position, but mostly as a tactic or strategy. I wasn’t so sure of it as a philosophy of living, any longer. I still believed in dedication and selflessness and giving your life up for the cause, but I was becoming in a sense a little more revolutionary, because almost every nonviolent guru or philosopher has said that the only thing worse than not being nonviolent in the struggle is not struggling.
I remember specifically testing the waters on nonviolent strategy in ’64. Because I had been so closely involved investigating the murders of the civil rights workers, at the funeral for Chaney and in the days following, I went around and polled people—if you want to consider going to kill Rainey and Price, talk to me. Nobody seriously considered it. I probably was motivated by grief and anger and a certain degree of cynicism, and it probably wouldn’t have been a good thing, although I often wonder what those murderers and killers and terrorists would have done if some of them had suddenly started showing up dead.
In the summer of 1965, after the birth of our daughter Margaret Rachel on July 20, Dottie and I came back to Atlanta to full-time SNCC duty. Dottie worked in the communications department with Julian Bond while I joined Jack Minnis in the research department. Jack was a brilliant and creative strategist. We were researching voter registration laws and the laws on independent political parties growing out of the problems we were having in Mississippi, and attempts to form a political party in Lowndes County, Alabama, where Stokely and others were working. The Alabama Democratic Party was symbolized by a white rooster and the slogan, “White Supremacy, For the Right.” A black panther was chosen as the symbol for our Lowndes County Freedom Organization (because it can eat a white chicken). It later became the symbol for the more militant national Black Panther Party. At some point, Stokely brought a drawing of a black panther to Dottie. He asked her to “fix it up” a little because it was a big scraggly line drawing. So Dottie evened out the lines, made the whiskers a bit more upstanding and inked in the body, so that it was entirely black. We were quite surprised to see that panther drawing appear on television some weeks later, and of course, one still sees it in many contexts.
The summer and fall of ’65 were some of the toughest times to be in Atlanta, because we were old hands and the tension between whites and blacks was getting worse. There was a big influx of former volunteers coming on staff and working on projects. I felt bad about it because everybody would go out of their way to say to Dottie and me, “You know, when we’re talking about white people, we’re not talking about you.” I would have to say, “Well, I’m white people, so you are talking about me.”
It was confusing. I thought back to when I first joined the staff in 1961, and Forman and some others found my race useful because many of the young people working with them in the rural areas had never met a sympathetic white person. Most of the SNCC staff had been in colleges and universities, so they had met a few whites and saw we weren’t all peckerwoods, a term sometimes used by blacks to describe whites. A peckerwood in the pantheon of shibboleths or epithets in black terminology is about the lowest form of white humanity. It beats white trash and cracker. All those folktales and the great superstructure of the racist ideas were peeling away during the movement until you finally came to say, “We’re people.” A truly great feeling is a flash of genuine color-blindness. I don’t know if you forget or if color becomes so totally irrelevant because you’re simply relating to each other as human beings. When I talked about SNCC brothers and sisters, people would sometimes ask what color a particular person was. I found myself sometimes pausing to remember, color not being uppermost in my mind. Maybe my presence was useful. In addition to working to recruit white Southerners, it might be useful for SNCC to point out in the black community that Zellner was on the staff. “He’s white and Southern, too.”
The rising anti-white sentiments in 1965 didn’t anger me so much as challenge me. I had never had the relationship with black staff that some of the northern volunteers had. I carried very little guilt on my sleeve; sometimes a guilty conscience could be a troublesome by-product of liberalism, a crude description of which might be, “beat me for I have sinned.” I had long since done away with my “liberalism,” and I didn’t recognize any particular feelings of guilt. I was doing everything I could do. My closeness to black friends was person-to-person. Black people easily spotted white guilt. Some would take a whack at it. In Danville in ’63, Ivanhoe Donaldson slugged my friend Daniel Foss. Danny was a bumbling Brandeis intellectual, but he had detached retinas. He had already been beaten by the cops and for Ivanhoe to lose control enough to slug this guy was like slapping a baby or something. I told Ivanhoe if he ever laid another hand on Daniel Foss I would put down my nonviolence long enough to break his neck. Ivanhoe was okay about it—that is how we were. If somebody said something insulting to me personally, I would just say, “You don’t treat me like that. Don’t treat me as a category. I am not a category. I am a person.”
But by 1965, there was a kind of exceptionalism growing, the nationalism was growing, the anti-white feeling was growing, but they kept saying it applied to white people, but not to Dottie and me. Also, the struggle was on between people wanting more structure in the organization and the so-called “freedom high” group. There were gender divisions, class divisions, and philosophical divisions—how free to be and how organized to be. Then, of course, there was Vietnam, and SNCC took an early position against the war. When Julian Bond was elected in 1965 to the Georgia House, the other representatives refused to seat him on the basis of his SNCC activities and opposition to the war. Jim Forman and I accompanied Julian to the well of the Georgia House of Representatives when he was denied his seat. Of course, he was ordered seated by the U.S. Supreme Court the following year.
I believe that informers or government agents, black and white, had been in our SNCC meetings and activities since the beginning. Sometimes the white informers would be the more radical voices. Jim Forman had trained us so well at the start that we almost always could tell who the informers were. In 1964, we did a lot of screening for summer project recruits. Dottie did a careful job in vetting people who might be informers in New England. We would discreetly tell each other that we suspected certain people. I remember Jack and Jill Schaefer in New Orleans who were part of a group, the Red Collective, and they turned out to be agents. They had an airplane and a newspaper, and all kinds of funding with no visible means of support. When Wounded Knee happened in 1973, they went up to join the most militant group of American Indian Movement folk. They were police agents.
The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission formed in 1956 to spy on integrationists and civil rights activists. When its files were finally opened to the public in 1998 they revealed that some of the informers among us were employed by the Commission itself. One of my really good friends was identified as a police agent by a fairly reliable person, and I don’t really know whether I’ll ever know the truth and how to treat it.
We became increasingly aware of agent infiltration as our problems and issues increased after the summer of 1964. COINTELPRO certainly coordinated their agent provacateurs in SNCC. COINTELPRO is an acronym for “Counter Intelligence Program,” an illegal FBI operation to investigate and disrupt “dissident political organizations” in the U.S. Covert operation have been used throughout FBI history, but formal COINTELPRO operations of 1956–71 were broadly targeted against organizations that were considered to have politically radical elements. In the FBI’s view, this included Dr. King’s SCLC, certainly SNCC, and supposedly white supremacist groups like the Klan. The founding document of COINTELPRO directed FBI agents to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” the activities of these dissident movements and their leaders. Never mind that this was unconstitutional.
When Dottie and I returned South in 1965, the agents in and around the Atlanta SNCC office seemed to encourage divisiveness and confrontation on the black/white and other issues. Sometimes you would know who the agents were, but it could also tear the organizations apart trying to guess about people. Another COINTELPRO tool was misinformation. They would use informers or anonymous calls or send anonymous letters to make accusations against certain leaders and those accusations would appear to be coming from another leader. They would also interfere with the marriages and domestic situations of individuals. One example was during Stokely’s marriage to Miriam Makeba, the famous singer from South Africa; they would send letters to Stokely saying that Miriam was having an affair with one or another African leader. The letters suggested that he commit suicide. Time and time again they would either expose an affair that someone was having or they would make it up whole cloth. In one situation, a national Black Panther Party member supposedly put a gun in Forman’s mouth—probably instigated by government agents. In some cases, the government agents would go into a volatile situation and urge people to go further in their actions so they would cross the line into illegality. We assumed our office phones were tapped and we know for sure our home phone was tapped after we moved to New Orleans. The telephone person actually came to the house and told us the phone was being tapped from downtown and had requested that it be monitored. We found tacks in the driveway or there could be snakes in your mailbox or car, or sugar in your gas tank. A lot of COINTELPRO moves were so skillful that I’m sure they have never seen the light of day.
Part of the tactics included the use of drugs where they would induce a temporary psychotic state in people. Forman once was stuck in a psychotic state for a long time. I didn’t use any drugs because I was convinced that with so many arrests, if they ever arrested me for use or possession of drugs, I would never see the light of day. But I did drink. I once attended a conference in Connecticut and had some kind of episode that lasted two or three days. I don’t remember drinking anything more powerful than beer, but I was so out of it that I sensed somebody had given me some LSD or something.
In February of 1966 Dottie, Margaret, and I moved to New Haven where I worked as the campaign manager for congressional candidate Robert Cook, a Yale sociology professor. The offer came as a blessed relief. We could remain on the SNCC staff and manage the campaign for Cook. He was an early peace candidate, and we had support from Harry Belafonte, Dr. Benjamin Spock, William Sloane Coffin, and Senator Wayne Morse.
Forman thought the move was a good idea, as a way of keeping the Northern communications going and continuing my work with students. I wound up organizing a good number of students to go South on various projects. Robert Cook didn’t win. His emphasis on peace was too early to get traction, and he was challenging an entrenched incumbent, Robert Gaiamo; we only got about six percent of the vote. But we did form AIM, the American Independent Movement, to run Cook’s campaign and did a lot of good organizing. AIM remained as a force for a long time around New Haven.
While directing Cook’s campaign, Dottie and I began developing a plan for organizing poor and working-class black and white people in the Deep South. The project eventually became GROW, or Grass Roots Organizing Work, and it lasted for a dozen years organizing black and white woodcutters (Gulfcoast Pulpwood Association), factory workers (Masonite in Laurel, Mississippi), and poultry workers. Informally, we also called it Get Rid of Wallace. Originally we wanted GROW to be a SNCC project, feeling that it was time to move into the white community of the Deep South. Great power, expertise, and experience had been generated by the civil rights movement, spearheaded by SNCC, but by the end of 1967 the organization was in the process of pulling out of Mississippi and voting to become an all-black group. As the first white Southern field secretary for SNCC, I was to become the last to leave.
I never felt any personal animosity from Stokely or any of the old hands. I did feel it from some of the newer people that I didn’t know very well, especially the people concentrated in the Atlanta office. In fact, Forman told me later that if we had hung on just a bit longer, things might have been different. It was ironic, because the Atlanta project reflected some of the most virulent anti-white feelings and many of the staff there were fired shortly after I left. Forman felt that if we had stuck it out, we would have been able to weather the storm altogether. I don’t think so. I think it was a historical shift.
The general staff meeting at Kingston Springs, near Nashville, in May 1966 was the first since our meeting at Waveland in November 1964. I believe it was the first time that the subject of the position of whites in SNCC came up as a specific agenda item. I was not at that meeting. Stokely replaced John Lewis as chair, and it marked a huge shift in the organization. It was a strange story. At first, John was reelected unopposed. Then, later on when there was a much smaller group present, Worth Long proposed that they reopen the question of SNCC chairperson. Worth was not on the staff at that time, but he was a close friend of SNCC.
It is a comment on the informal nature of SNCC that some non-staff person could ask for the reconsideration of something as important as who would be chairperson. In any case, it was reconsidered and Stokely was elected. The changeover was quite dramatic, because it meant different philosophies and methodologies for the organization. John Lewis had played a key role in so many battles for so long, had good relations with Dr. King and SCLC, and had many white friends. John Lewis lived by the SNCC dictum that the individual was not to be the leader, the individual was not to be the star, but you represented the group, and you were the spokesperson for the group. Any searching for personal charisma, personal stardom was anathema to the old-line SNCC folk.
Some jokingly called Stokely “Starmichael” during Freedom Summer and again after he became chair. He had a different way of doing things. It may have been what was called for, because at that point there were a lot of changes going on. We had a huge Atlanta office and infrastructure and printing presses and a fair amount of income. It was the changing of the guard from the old religious orientation to the new political. Nobody at that point could envision what the new political direction was going to be, except that we could feel the undercurrents of white-black tension. History, in my opinion, has not dealt adequately with this schism in SNCC, because a lot of people who argued that it was a good thing for SNCC to be all-black based their stand on the possible takeover of SNCC by white people. That is an argument on which someone would have to try hard to convince me. Maybe the new breed of white people in SNCC, who were mainly SNCC volunteers from ’63 and the summer of ’64 coming in and showing a fair amount of arrogance and lack of deference, could have planted the seeds of that fear of takeover. But my view was that even up to 1965 and 1966, SNCC leadership was firmly in black hands and properly so. Any white person in the organization who ever had any influence at all, knew who led SNCC. A few whites had been in positions of leadership in some of the field offices, but very few.
I think John Lewis’s ouster was another evidence of the organization becoming more political and more Northern. Stokely was a respected organizer. He had a lot of the SNCC attributes—impeccable physical courage, great showmanship, great creativity in terms of organizing and tenacity to go in and get the job done. He also was articulate and sometimes glib in a way that John Lewis never was.
Kerhonkson, New York, in December 1966 was the last full staff meeting that any white staff persons attended. The Kerhonkson meeting was held at the Peg Leg Bates Hotel. Forman had arranged with Peg, as his friends called him, for us to meet there cheaply in the off-season. Peg’s country club, which he started in 1951, was the first black-owned resort in that area—at an old turkey farm in the Catskills near New Paltz. I was there. It was the dead of winter. The meeting unfolded like Greek tragedy. Everyone played their parts and the outcome seemed inevitable, which is one reason, maybe, that it turned out the way it did. Dottie did not go to the meeting. I drove up with Ella Baker and Joanne Grant. I must have felt pretty numb on the drive up, because I kept thinking that Joanne and Ella were treating me almost like I was sick and only they could bring me comfort. Probably I didn’t fully understand that the die had already been cast and SNCC would become all-black. This is somewhat understandable because many in the movement had shielded Dottie and me from the harshest of the anti-white attitudes which had been growing in our organization. Perhaps they wanted to make an exception in our cases because we had been with the movement so long.
Driving north to Kerhonkson, I felt the oppressiveness of the cold dreary day. Old snow lay on the ground and along the roadways it had picked up the black tinge of car exhaust and burnt tire rubber. Conversation inevitably turned to what we could expect to happen at the staff meeting. Ella asked, in a roundabout way, if Dottie and I had been treated all right. I told her everything was okay with us but I had heard other stories of poor treatment of whites.
I told them, “I’m probably not going to hear a lot personally, not only because everybody wants to spare us, but I let it be known a long time ago that I don’t play liberal. I didn’t come South to help black people, I was already here, and I got involved to free myself. Old SNCC buddies know I don’t take shit, I can get that from white folks I grew up with; I don’t have to take crap from black folks, too.”
Joanne was slightly exasperated, “We know that Bob, but what have you heard about others?”
“It’s only hearsay,” I said, “But after the experience we had in Mississippi in ’64 and this recent stuff, some of the staff vowed never to speak to a white person again. That is understandable in a way. I never did figure out how black people found the grace to put up with the treatment this country has dealt out without going crazy or killing somebody.”
Just before the vote was taken to end white involvement in the SNCC staff, some veterans expressed sadness over our departure. One leader was heard to say that he felt bad because Bob and Dottie had been in the thick of the fight long before many of the people voting to dismiss them had been in the organization. I thought that was a shuck and jive and tried to keep the focus off us personally and concentrate on the principles involved. It was clear to most that I understood concerns that SNCC was becoming too white following the summer of 1964 when many white Mississippi Freedom Summer Volunteers came on staff. What I did not agree with was the fear that our organization might be “taken over by white people.”
My experience was that white staff exercised influence in the organization only to the extent that they appreciated and abided by the principle of black leadership. Old hands were clear that this was proper leadership for a primarily black organization working on mainly a black agenda. When white volunteers displayed arrogance and a take-over attitude, they didn’t last long in SNCC. What, then, was the driving fear? How, exactly, could white people “take over” a black-led organization?
To me, the fear (felt primarily by newer staff but also by some old hands) had to do with SNCC’s image in the national black political, activist community. The fear was that nationalists would see SNCC as a white-dominated organization. It is ironic, however, that at the same time our group was moving toward a more exclusivist position, Malcolm X, after a trip to Mecca where he saw blue-eyed Muslims, was moving away from a simplistic black-white dichotomy to a more revolutionary and inclusive stance. That meant that Malcolm, having split from Elijah Muhammad, was willing to work with all who were going his way regardless of color. It is instructive also that the Black Panthers, the “ baddest dudes” on the block, made it clear that they intended to work with all revolutionaries, regardless of color.
With the clarity of hindsight, it seems now that we made a mistake. By 1966 and 1967 SNCC was being battered from all directions. The federal government, through COINTELPRO, played a role, but the fears and distrust it created may have been little more than nudging SNCC to go ahead and do what it was already inclined to do.
In the introduction to one edition of his book, SNCC: In Struggle, Clayborne Carson asks a probing question which I think has never been adequately addressed by movement folk. He posits that the civil rights movement, and SNCC in particular, had made brilliant use of three tools that helped to bring about revolutionary change in the Deep South: 1. nonviolent direct action; 2. long term grassroots work in local communities; and 3. an interracial staff. Carson’s question to the movement was, when these potent weapons were largely discarded in the late sixties, by SNCC and other nationalists, what did they offer in terms of strategy and tactics to take their place?
Another part of the puzzle that led up to the decision at Kerhonkson is the background on two key organizational decisions made before the one on white exclusion. I should make it clear that I agreed and still agree with both prior decisions—even as I disagreed with the final one at Kerhonkson.
First, SNCC was the first major national civil rights group to formally oppose the war in Vietnam. Many people, even some who personally opposed the war, thought it was a mistake for SNCC to take on the war issue because it might distract from our concentration on ending segregation. The second wound SNCC inflicted on itself, in the opinion of some, was its policy position affirming the right of Palestinian self-determination. There had always been a strong alliance between Jews and African Americans because of the Jewish tradition of upholding justice and the practical view that if black people are not safe in the country, then Jews can’t be far behind in the persecution sweepstakes. The Palestinian decision may have been a turning point affecting that long alliance.
Some see the series of three ground-breaking decisions as nails in the SNCC coffin. Others think that the first two could have been survived, had not the agreement to become an all-black staff given SNCC’s disaffected supporters an easy way out. Most observers and participants do agree that the three steps taken together spelled the eventual doom of the organization. Maybe many of our supporters were already looking for the exit and the nationalist turn simply greased the skids.
Some people from the Weather Underground were in the general area of the Kerhonkson meeting. There was a lot of drinking going on—for some of us probably to numb our hurt. The main issue was the black-white question, and almost all of the white people who were there felt handcuffed in a way. We wanted to make our position clear, but we didn’t want to “fight” for it. We felt if we lobbied and organized and cajoled and maneuvered against the vote to become all-black, our work in the movement would be rather meaningless. So we said that we would participate in the debate very carefully and mildly. It was still painful. My basic position was that SNCC shouldn’t be an all-black organization—that we should continue to struggle with the issue inside the organization. For me, the work was always against black and white separation. Also, on the argument of fear of white people taking over the organization, my question was, what white people? I was one of the most influential whites within the organization, but I wasn’t going to take over anything, wasn’t interested in taking over anything. Dottie wasn’t either. We were always clear about where the leadership in the organization rightfully belonged.
Some bizarre stories followed the Kerhonkson meeting—that there were certain restrictions on staff relating to white people and that some black staffers vowed to no longer speak to white people. A white woman friend told me that while she was traveling home from the meeting in a car with some old and close SNCC friends, a black woman in the car passed her a written message rather than speak to her.
Some accounts say the white people left SNCC soon after that meeting, but Dottie and I remained on staff for a while. We were still living in New Haven and had already developed the GROW proposal. We proposed to do the project as a SNCC project, and I attended my last SNCC meeting in Atlanta in May 1967 to discuss this. Rap Brown had been elected chair to succeed Stokely, but I never felt any personal animosity from him. I always considered him, like his brother Ed, a wonderful, beautiful, gentle person. I also knew Willie Ricks, one of the most vocal of the black power advocates, who changed his name to Mukasa and also refused to speak to white people. Here again, it was strange, because I had a good personal relationship with Willie, Rap, and Stokely. Later on when we had the GROW project going, Rap was in jail in New Orleans, because they said he had carried a rifle on an airplane. I was based there, so I would go visit him at Parish Prison. At one time, he chuckled and said, “Zellner, it’s kind of ironic that we kicked your ass out of SNCC and now you’re the only one who will come and see me.” Some of those who adapted the strong nationalist position also said that it was not personal and that it didn’t mean that they couldn’t be friends with white people. In fact, the Panthers had a pretty good attitude. White people couldn’t be Panthers, but the Panthers would work with white revolutionaries.
I presented our proposal for the GROW project in Atlanta in May, 1967, saying we would like to do it under SNCC. The negotiating went on with me in one room and the SNCC Central Committee in another room. Some people complained that I had made it into an emotional issue. Both the Kingston Springs and the Kerhonkson meetings suggested that white people in SNCC should organize in the white community. We agreed with that, and I wondered why I and others hadn’t moved to that position earlier, but it was more complicated than it sounds. I had been reluctant in 1964 and 1965 to develop a white organizing project because first of all the thought was terrifying on the face of it. For those of us who had been in SNCC organizing in the black community for so long, were we now to go to the very people we had been ducking and dodging and who had been shooting at us and beating us all the years and say, “We’re gonna organize white folks now”? How could you work with white people without them stringing you up?
SNCC, however, by 1967 was mesmerized by the image of being all-black, and lots of influence came from relative newcomers who didn’t know us very well. Admittedly, I came rather belatedly to SNCC with this plan for the GROW project which we had been working on for quite some time. We had been developing it with people in SCEF and the people we were working with in New Haven and other advisors and people around the country. It was a well thought-out project to target poor and working-class white Southerners and help them think about changes to improve their lives, and the need to link up with the expertise and the experience and drive that existed in the black community; perhaps they might even try to reach their goals together.
I presented these ideas to SNCC. I said it was arguable that black people can be organized as black people without it being a negative formation, but anybody would agree you can’t organize most Southern white people as white people and have anything but a racist group. So white people had to be organized in conjunction with blacks in order to combat their racism and so they could see what they had to do to destroy the superstructure of oppression and privilege and segregation. We told them it needed to be done by SNCC because we now had the expertise and the contacts in communities to demonstrate the power developed in the black community—the same power to offer to poor working class white people, so that both groups could go forward together.
Our proposal was in the face of the pell-mell rush toward black nationalism. Even though we had the example of Malcolm X, the great prince of black separatism and black nationalism, moving toward a more inclusive position, SNCC, having started as integrated, was moving in the opposite direction. That was the train wreck that we had.
Dottie’s and my long history with the group gave us the temerity to make our proposal. The debate then came down to whether we could do the project in some special staff status where they could still say that SNCC was all-black. It was not a very open debate and some people opposed to being all-black were fairly quiet. It boiled down to wanting to make an exception for “Bob and Dottie,” and the GROW project. I wasn’t willing to do it. Dottie wasn’t willing to do it on the basis of principle. What they proposed was that we remain on staff but not come to meetings. We found this unacceptable. First, SNCC had never demanded that anyone accept second-class status. Why should we? The next proposal was to come to the meetings but not vote. Our answer was the same. They were trying to avoid telling us that we were off the staff. I said to Forman, “You’re my leader, what do you think we should do,” and he said he couldn’t recommend anything. I later told him that if he had laid out any strategy or tactics that had an end game we both agreed on, I could have absolutely gone along with him. If he had said, “Let’s just temporize on this for a certain time. There are forces that we are dealing with, and afterwards we can go on,” I would have been willing to wait, but he always said that I forced the issue and lost. Bill Ware was one of the main people who was agitating for programs and staff to be all-black. He is one of the people who has been identified in various ways as an agent provocateur.
From the beginning of the discussion Dottie and I had made it clear that we were going ahead with the project. The only question SNCC had to answer was whether we would do it with or without them. When my comrades said no, I realized it was my last day in SNCC. It was huge for me, because I had been on the staff since 1961. SNCC was our life. It was our existence. It was our total identity. We didn’t realize the extent that our souls had belonged to SNCC—that we were road warriors. I was only twenty-seven, but with a tremendous amount of experience crammed into five or six years. With the GROW project, we were looking at more years of intense organizing and at the end of that . . . who knew; we had no sense of what it would be like to live in a normal workaday world, no concept of working at something that didn’t require total dedication. It was like being cast into outer darkness, because SNCC was our family in a very strong sense.
We were lucky in moving from the SNCC staff to a welcoming SCEF staff, where we had an autonomous project and could raise our own money and establish our own policies. But it was never the same again. It was like the end of the most important years of our lives, but we realized that there’s no way to be twenty-seven and have the best years of our lives behind us.
Forman and some others kept in close contact with us after we left and did some work with our project. We always had an integrated staff at GROW, and all of our community projects were integrated. As time passed, I grew more supportive and had a greater understanding of Black Power. Even as the black nationalism tide rose, I realized that it was a political position. There were positive and negative things about it, but I probably accentuated the positives. For one thing, I wasn’t going to second-guess any of the black people in SNCC. They were intelligent, autonomous people. It was hard to realize that the whole thing was in the process of falling apart not only over nationalism, but on a lot of other fronts. One of the things that is unique about my story is my longevity on the SNCC staff. From early fall 1961 until I left in 1967, the last white staffer to go, there had been only the four semesters of respite at Brandeis, and even then I was speaking on SNCC’s behalf at least three times a week. Because of this variation of places and assignments, I participated in possibly more and more varied campaigns than anybody else except Forman, who was involved in almost everything. Six years is a long time to be so consumed with such a variety of campaigns in such a variety of locations, while always focused on survival, especially after I was told that specific people were supposed to kill me. Richmond Flowers, a relatively decent attorney general of Alabama, told me once that he didn’t know how I survived so long.
Over the years, I have felt some estrangement from a few individuals from early SNCC days. But now, when we all get together, no matter what the feeling was back then or during the changes, we are still intensely together. The years and months fall aside, and we are SNCC again, and some people kind of stand back and marvel at the phenomenon of our still being so close. Some now are very outspoken that it was wrong of SNCC to eject us, but generally it’s the people who felt it was wrong even at the time. Nobody who felt it was right at the time has now come and said, “I was wrong about that.” I still have to intellectualize it at times, because it was so personal and so painful.
I also mulled over, when I had some distance, the arguments over whether SNCC should be more structured or less structured. In the early days of SNCC, I would think back to Myles Horton’s admonition that no organization should last longer than twenty-five years; SNCC lasted about ten (ironically, Highlander recently observed its seventy-fifth anniversary). Those last years were painful times for many of us, and people dealt with it in different ways. Some people went to Vermont and got naked, others drank a lot—some did both. We went South and organized.