More than once, Zellner was beaten into unconsciousness. He was expelled as a white from SNCC in 1967 following leader Stokely Carmichaels movement of the organization in the direction of Black Nationalism. As a new generation asks, What is my place in this struggle? Zellners work points to new answers. Civil Rights activist Bob Zellner to share his fight with Pensacola. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Still, its as good a telling as you ever get from a major motion picture, capturing the bona fides Brown aspired to achieve. Their south-wide strike achieved a rise in the price they were paid for their wood. Those were people that you had to take a tremendous risk to follow them. After his eighteenth arrest, Bob and his partner, Elizabeth Pamela Smith have moved back to his home state of Alabama, where they worked to elect Senator Doug Jones and support the work of EJI, Bryan Stevensons Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery. The bitterness for the stock markets intensified in his family after the 'Wall Street crash of 1929. Wow. But I think what it's done, is it's exposed to the racism that was always there. How scary was that? We had the moral high ground, but it was also very practical. He ran as a Democrat in District #1 (heavily GOP) for New York State Senate. He got the character right away and he's really good looking, much better than me, but everybody says there's a faint resemblance between the young me and Lucas Till. Fill out this simple form to send an email to a friend who might enjoy this page. The fight has not ended for Zellner and his wife, Pamela, who still invest in their community. In one, a white jailer puts them on display to curious tourists, one of whom asks them to say something in communist. Kish mir in tuchus, McDew responded famously. All of us SNCC was in that one briefcase. Sometimes when we retell the stories, we actually soft pedal the amount of violence that there was. One would think a film about the civil rights movement wouldnt invite in the white savior trope, but the scene where our blonde-haired leading man carries Joanne (Lex Scott Davis), the beautiful mocha skinned Black woman in his arms (slow motion) through an angry mob of white people to safety is laughable. Always active with his wife Pamela, always on the go, he sees . Famous for battles with segregationist lynch mobs, violent police, and the KKK, Zellner is also an organizer who brought Black and white Southern working people together in the GROW Project, including Klan members, on terms of equality and respect. I was working with a cinematographer, Judy Irola and we were doing movies around the world and we'd started out doing civil rights movies about the South. At that time, the 'Duke' doctoral fellow was writing a thesis on the federal funds market. The series chronicled the life of Kathleen's client, murder convict Steven Avery. He was interested in my story and I started telling him stories about SNCC and working in Alabama and Mississippi. Yeah. His organizing work paid off, with working class rallies with as many as two thousand black and white people out in a cow pastureold Mississippi rednecks with the whip antennas and [George] Wallace stickers on their trucks, standing next to black folks, all of them talking about how the power structure was holding them down.61 This enticed OL leaders, among others in the NCM, to recruit Zellner for organizing Deep South trade unionists and reforming Klansmen.[3]. Please email us at [emailprotected], subject line republish, with any questions or to let us know what stories youre picking up. Our site uses cookies. Jeanine is a Writer, Actor, member SAG/AFTRA, AEA, Podcast host, Producer, CEO VisAbleBlackWoman Productions, Certified Health Coach and Conscious Dance facilitator. Since 2014, he also tours twice a year with Project Pilgrimage as a Traveling Historian. The moral aspect was that if you didn't fight back, you had a potential of converting that person. I hope that's the takeaway. Neil High School in Brewton, Alabama and graduated from Murphy . Providing historical perspective, Bob has been a Guest Lecturer for Common Power. She lectures and writes frequently about the civil rights movement and co-edited Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC. He later moved to Wilson, North Carolina. We had to go to Tuskegee." William Barber. Top 3 Results for Linda Miller Zellner. We're here, we're here in Montgomery. Once the opening credits finally end, the film flashes back to the previous year. As a result, those qualities were ascribed to another character and McDews role significantly diminished. GROW built a residential educational facility in New Orleans and began organizing the Gulfcoast Pulpwood Association while working in Laurel, Mississippi where a wildcat strike involving black and white Masonite factory workers and woodcutters spread across the southern states. He's not going to reconcile with you, but you need to go see him." In the way too long Freedom Rider scene, not only does the audience witness Black women getting stomped in the street and punched in the face by white men, they get pulverized by white women using purses with bricks inside them as weapons. Alex is survived by his wife . The film begins with a bloodied and beaten Zellner, riding in the back of a 57 Chevy with a group of fellow sons of the South, on his way to what could be his own lynching. After 50 years of an entertainment industry and news media that constantly shows blatant violence against Black people nonviolently protesting its no longer shocking or surprising. Movies. Bob Zellner, a trailblazing civil rights activist, is the grandson of an Alabama Klansman. Zellners first job out of college was to be Counselor and staff at Highlander Research and Education Center|Highlander Folk School located in Monteagle, Tennessee for the summer of 1961. (1961-1967). While working on the dissertation, he taught the History of Activism at Rosemont College, PA. and Southampton College of Long Island University. Bob's memoir, "The Wrong Side of Murder Creek, A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement", with Constance Curry and foreword by Julian Bond, was published by New South Books in the November, 2008. He is the former director of the 'Chicago Mercantile Exchange.'. I knew that because my father had already done a tremendous journey of leaving the Ku Klux Klan that I was destined to take a part in this somehow or another. After that, there was not a lot of question with the early SNCC people about my commitment, but I also realized that white privilege, would lead me go back to being white at any time that I wanted to, had I chose to do so, but I made a commitment that I wouldn't, so I tried to live up to that. It's about young people and it's especially about the strength and power of women, not only in the Civil Rights Movement, but then our nation in general. It's like, yeah-. I said, "Well, no, that's the same movement, but they were there earlier." . Combined Destinies: Whites Sharing Grief about Racism. SNCC was our life. Zellner, of Alabama, is the grandson of a Klan member. While focusing on breaking the hold of George Wallace and the KKK on poor and working-class white people across the south, Bob Zellner debated George Wallace at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts when Wallace ran for president in 1968. He continues to speak publicly on civil rights and in 2008 published a memoir, The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement. For several months Zellner, McDew, and Moses ran a freedom school, Nonviolent High of Pike County, for the students who dropped out of Burglund High to protest Traviss expulsion, though the school closed when the three activists were convicted of disturbing the peace and contributing to the delinquency of minors. That was incredible. That may lead to a TV series, Zellner said. During Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964 he traveled with Rita Schwerner while taking part in SNCC's and CORE's investigation of the disappearance of her husband Mickey, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman. The son and grandson of Ku Klux Klan members, Zellner may have been the unlikeliest of allies to the civil rights movement in the 1960s. While in Russia, he lived and worked with a group of black gospel singers who were also helping the resistance, and when he returned to the United States, he repudiated his racist beliefs. When SNCC became an all-black organization in 1967, Bob and his wife Dottie joined SCEF, the Southern Conference Educational Fund to organize an anti-racism project for black and white workers in the Deep South called GROW, Grass Roots Organizing Work, also called Get Rid Of Wallace. We are providing this brief biography for, The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, Copyright 19982023, Jewish Women's Archive. we loved all of that. The men attempted to drag Zellner away from the other protesters, but Zellner clung to a railing until police finally pulled him off to arrest him, along with the other SNCC workers and 119 students. Robert always considered Kathleen a strong-willed lady and someone with the ability to push her opinions firmly. However, he still planned to move to Vietnam. Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site. Forman said that he hoped [his] story holds up., Zellner understood that the Civil Rights Movement belonged to young Black southerners, but he was also fighting for [his] own rights as wellI was joining the movement to establish my own right to fight for what I believed in.. It was painful. As co-editor of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's newsletter, the Student Voice, Dorothy Miller Zellner helped craft the organization's message and report on stories suppressed by the mainstream media.Zellner was arrested at a CORE demonstration in Miami in 1960 and participated in sit-ins in New Orleans before joining Julian Bond as co-editor of the Student Voice, which . How could you not become a part of the movement when Saint Rosa Parks told you to do so? They have also lived in Freemansburg, PA. Jim Forman arrived a week later with a tape recorder. Happy Womens History Month! Our work to expand the Encyclopedia is ongoing. When we were kids, Granddaddy, he was just a sweet old man. (2016- present). (2012). It reminds me of the time Chuck McDew and I visited my brother and his wife in a small town near Knoxville, Tenn. McDew, an African American born in Massillon, Ohio, was fascinated by the jobs being held . Bob Zellner was a member of the October League.[1]. He was born in Oshkosh on May 2, 1960 the son of the late Raymond and Virginia Miley Zellner. Especially when you couldn't have thousands of people demonstrating, carrying arms. One is Jewish and from the North, the other Southern and the son of a Methodist minister. Carrying forward the tradition, Robert was never keen on venturing into speculation. There is so much nuanced relevance to Mr. Zellners life story and his role in the civil rights movement, but sadly Son of the South uses broad easy strokes to attempt to tell a complex American story. I said, "I'm, Bob Zellner. Zellner was SNCCs first white field secretary. Up until 1967, Zellner worked with Ms. Ella Baker, Rev. Doug Tanner, the tour takes hundreds of Senators and Congresswomen and men to Alabama every year to commemorate Bloody Sunday and the passage of the 1965 Voters Rights bill. Well, that was in the early 80's. Bob became a staff member of SNCC on September 11, 1961, as a field secretary to do campus traveling. It was our existenceIt was like being cast into outer darkness, because SNCC was our family in a very strong sense., Zellner eventually joined SCEF and help lay the groundwork for GROW there. Julian Bond, now the National NAACP Chairman and Bob organized the National Civil Rights Coordinating Committee. Anything you want to leave the audience with? . During the protests in McComb, a person attempted to pull out his eyeballs. More:A man escaped slavery by mailing himself to freedom. Bob Zellner, The Wrong Side of Murder Creek (Montgomery: New South Books, 2008). In the mid-1970s, the couple moved to Canada briefly but later moved back to the US. Mr. Zellner became SNCCs first white field secretary and was arrested 18 times with John Lewis and the Freedom Riders. It's Zellner who's "The Son of the South" a white preacher's kid from Alabama and the grandson of a Klansman. How could you not make a decision at that point? Hence, Robert began searching for a new research fellowship program. Zellner, Bob Biography: Robert Zellner was born April 5, 1939 in southern Alabama. 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