by Howard Zinn
Finally he got word to his lawyers, who interceded, and he was removed to an isolated cell called “the hole.” They pushed him into a 5 × 7 cubicle, dark, hot, and stench-filled. All this time he had not known what happened to Chuck McDew after they were arrested. Suddenly he heard a voice calling in a loud whisper “Bob, Bob, is that you?” He looked through the tiny opening in the steel door, and could see McDew’s face reflected in a piece of metal on the stone wall facing his cell. Bob now realized that McDew was in the next cubicle, and was so happy that he began to cry.
They talked for a while, exchanging stories of their experiences in jail. Then they sang. The police pounded on the door for them to stop, but they sang: “Woke Up This Morning With My Mind on Freedom.” The heat was turned up in their cells, and for seven days they remained in those tiny hot holes, at times so weak from the heat that they could not raise their heads.
Chuck McDew’s days in “the hole” were something of a nightmare. When he was first put in, he found two psychotics in the cells near him; it seemed that Louisiana kept mental cases in jail until their transfer to state institutions for the insane. One of these was a fifty-year-old white woman who screamed and moaned continually, who banged her head against the bars, tore off her clothes, and repeatedly tried to hang herself. With the heat turned high in McDew’s cell, he would lie on his cot at night and sweat; he lost thirteen pounds. The cot was as narrow as a bench, and too short for him, and he would wake up to night to find his feet dangling in the open toilet bowl that was near his cot. The guards would leave the lights on for days, then turn them off for long periods, so the only way he knew the time of day was by the meal schedule.
Right-wing groups conducted tours of the prison to see McDew. High school students and others would be escorted past the cells, and McDew would be pointed out as “that nigger Communist” and “nigger anarchist” and they would peer at him through the little hole. One time two high school girls on a tour strayed near the end of the procession, came over to the window, and whispered, “Say something Communist.” Chuck then said, “Kish mir in tuchas,” which in Yiddish means, “Kiss my ass.” Delighted, they walked away.
After four weeks in jail, McDew and Zellner were formally arraigned, the charge being that they
… with force of arms, in the Parish of East Baton Rouge, feloniously did … advocate in public and in private opposition to the Government of the State of Louisiana by unlawful means and are members of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, an organization which is known to the offenders to advocate, teach and practice opposition to the Government of the State of Louisiana by unlawful means.
Their bail had been set at $7000 each, and Diamond’s bail was $13,000, but legal efforts finally succeeded in reducing the bail and they were released. Diamond stayed in jail fifty-eight days, and went through a very difficult emotional ordeal. He was determined, nevertheless, to stay in jail as a protest against the first use of excessive bail to stifle SNCC’s activity. Ultimately the charges against Zellner and McDew were dropped, but two years later Dion Diamond had to return to spend sixty days in jail in Baton Rouge on the original charge of disorderly conduct.
No one can measure the consequences of that experience for Zellner, a white Southerner, and McDew, a black man, locked together, physically and emotionally, in the East Baton Rouge jail. And no one can gauge the consequences for all of American society, which in some future hour will show the effects of the increasing association of people who never before knew one another intimately. What we are seeing in the McDews and the Zellners is the faint but growing evidence of a new relationship between Negro and white in the United States. And what we also see is the kind of anguish the nation must endure before this comes to pass.
In the spring of 1963, a white Baltimore postman, William L. Moore, headed for Mississippi with signs protesting racial discrimination, was murdered on an Alabama highway. That incident led to Bob Zellner’s next major job as a field secretary for SNCC.
The day after Moore’s body was found on the road near Attalla, Alabama, a poll was made by telephone of the SNCC Executive Committee, and they agreed to continue his walk to Jackson, Mississippi. The following day, April 25, 1963, SNCC sent a wire to Alabama Governor George C. Wallace, informing him of the walk, and asking him: “Will the State of Alabama provide protection for our walkers?” Wallace had denounced the murder and even offered a reward for apprehension of the killer, but he replied: “Your proposed actions, calculated to cause unrest, disorder, and a breach of the peace in the state of Alabama, will not be condoned or tolerated. Laws of the State of Alabama will be strictly enforced.”
Then SNCC sent a wire to President Kennedy, who had expressed his shock and condemnation of the murder, asking: “Will the Federal Government provide protection for our walkers?” There was no response.
The murdered man had been a member of the Baltimore chapter of CORE, and they too were planning to continue his walk. It was decided that SNCC and CORE should undertake it jointly, with an interracial group of ten, five from each organization. The CORE men were Winston Lockett (who had been working in Lebanon, Tennessee), Richard Haley (program director), Bob Gore (publicity director), Zev Aelony (later to be one of the four jailed in Americus, Ga.), and Eric Weinberger (who had been working with sharecroppers in Tennessee).
The five from SNCC were Sam Shirah (a twenty-year-old white Alabaman who was working with white Southern college students), Bill Hansen (also white, a veteran SNCC staffer), Jesse Harris (from Mississippi), Chico Neblett, and Bob Zellner. It was agreed that the ten would start out on May 1 from Chattanooga, equipped with boots and camping equipment, and would walk on Moore’s route, continuing all the way to Jackson, Mississippi. As they prepared to set out, Jesse Harris received a letter from his friend and fellow Mississippian Willie Peacock:
Hello Crazy,
I’m sitting in the SNCC and I look down the list of names of people going on the walk and I see your name down there along with a few other crazies. I don’t know exactly what it took for you guys to go on such a walk; some call it guts and some call it courageousness, but they are all worn out terms.… At any rate, I feel that I can share your fears when you are walking along the highway. As for the other fellows from SNCC I somehow knew they would be along on the walk if anybody did.
The best parts of me are with you guys, which is my heart and mind. May all of your children be conceived in freedom for which you seek.…
Willie Peacock
As the walkers left the Greyhound Bus Terminal (from which Moore had begun his trek) in Chattanooga about 8:00 A.M. the morning of May 1, followed by a caravan of reporters in cars, there were a few well-wishers, a few catcalls. Sam Shirah, in the lead, wore the sign William Moore had carried, with its messages, “EAT AT JOE’S, BOTH BLACK AND WHITE” and “EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL (MISSISSIPPI OR BUST)”. Out of Chattanooga, going up a mountainside high above the Tennessee River, the day sunny and cool, Sam Shirah began to sing softly: “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me ’round!” Chattanooga police and Tennessee patrolmen guarded the line, and there was no trouble, although once a handful of gravel was thrown from a passing car.
By nightfall they had walked ten miles, crossing the border into Georgia, where they stopped to spend the night at the Calvary Baptist Church in the isolated mountain town of Hooker. White people in cars and trucks raced up and down the gravel road alongside the church, gunning their engines, raising clouds of dust. In Tennessee, the police had formed a protective cordon around them. Here in Georgia, there were no police to be seen. Two white SNCC girls, Texan Casey Hayden and New Yorker Dotty Miller, stayed with the group, running errands of various kinds.
Following are excerpts from a diary kept by Bill Hansen that first night, May 1, and the next day:
8:30 P.M. Cars have been gathering in front of the church for almost an hour now. There seem to be in the neighborhood of thirty-five whites, most of them young. They are about fifty yards from the c
hurch. Eric Weinberger is out there talking to them now.… The walkers are a little wary of the situation but we are all rather calm at this point. Zellner and Chico are asleep. Eric just came in. He said they don’t seem to be visibly hostile, but that could change.
8:45 P.M. All the newsmen are still with us (Time-Life, AP, and West Germany). Bob Gore is playing the piano… the rest of us are just sitting around talking. It’s getting rather chilly and we only have one bucket of coal but we’ve started a fire anyway.
10:00 P.M. We turned out all the lights and prepared to go to sleep. About a half hour later cars with headlights on pulled into the yard. They stayed for quite a while, but I went to sleep and don’t know what time they left.
7:10 A.M. We woke up and was it cold, especially after sleeping on the church floor all night. The Freedom Canteen (a truck supplied by the NAACP) brought us coffee and donuts for breakfast.
8:15 A.M. We got underway for the second day. It’s rather chilly this morning. We had to wash in an ice cold spring outside the church.
8:15–9:35 A.M. The terrain is one hill after another. Winston Lockett of CORE is carrying the sign and leading the line this morning. Alabama cars are becoming very numerous…. There definitely is trouble ahead—it seems there is a mob waiting at the Alabama line. A car with Alabama plates threw a firecracker at us. No one was hurt. A Cadillac with Georgia plates came across to our side of the road at about sixty-five m.p.h. and tried to run us down. It missed Eric, Jesse, Sam, Chico and myself by about three or four inches. Sometimes the cars of whites from Alabama stop and gather by the side of the road in groups and yell obscenities at us as we walk by.
10:45 A.M. My feet are hurting terrifically and my legs are aching from my hips to the end of my big toes. I’ve taken off my boots and changed to sneakers because of a big blister on my heel….
11:05 A.M. We started into Trenton, Georgia. Very large crowds are gathered all along U.S. 11…. The Georgia Highway Patrol and the Dade County Sheriff have been with us intermittently since a few minutes after we started.
12 noon. Eric has been limping for the past hour now.
2:30 P.M. No one is really paying attention to anything anymore except the feet of the person in front. My legs ache everywhere and from indications so does everyone else’s. Up and down—up and down these mountains.
4 P.M. We have finally stopped for the day. Everyone is completely shot. We are 6.8 miles from the Alabama line. Newsmen who have driven to the border tell us a couple of hundred people await our arrival along with Al Lingo and the Alabama State Police.
That second day, rocks and bottles and eggs were hurled at them all day long. They stopped at Rising Fawn, Georgia, but there was no housing there, so they spent that night in the homes of various Negro families in Rome, Georgia. The next day, May 3, they found the highway clogged with hundreds of people; the mob walked beside and behind them, lobbing missiles of various kinds. They were walking on the left side of the road, while about forty newspapermen went along parallel with them on the right side. Two Georgia highway patrolmen were in back of the walkers to “protect” them, but they were not very effective. At noon, a white man came up to Winston Lockett and struck him in the neck, bruising it badly. One newspaperman was kicked, another shoved, a newspaperwoman threatened. (Later, Bob Zellner had high praise for the courage of reporters Claude Sitton of the New York Times, and Carl Fleming of Newsweek, who stuck with them from beginning to end.)
At a stop shortly before they reached the border Sam Shirah wired Governor Wallace asking that he let the group pass. Wallace had been a member of the church in Clayton, Alabama of which Shirah’s father was pastor, and had taught a Sunday school class there of which Sam was a member. Meanwhile, as the walkers approached Alabama, Attorney Fred Gray in Montgomery was desperately trying to get a federal court to issue an injunction against Alabama Public Safety Director Al Lingo to prevent the arrest of the walkers.
At 3:30 P.M. on May 3 they reached the Georgia-Alabama line. Planes were circling overhead. Down at the bottom of the hill and around a curve was the state line and a fence. Behind the fence over a thousand white people were massed, with Alabama policemen standing in front of them, shoulder to shoulder. Traffic was stopped, and six or seven patrol cars stood alongside the road. Al Lingo, short, stocky, surrounded by Alabama State Troopers, ordered them to disperse. Sam Shirah walked straight ahead, the rest following, and Lingo called for their arrest. The troopers rushed at them. Bob Zellner lay down and was dragged along the ground and into a police car. Eric Weinberger fell to the ground, and the troopers used three-foot cattle prods on him, giving him repeated electric shocks, then four of them picked him up and threw him into a car. As the troopers jabbed away with their prods (Claude Sitton reported in The Times), an elderly toothless white man shouted from the roadside: “Stick him again! Stick him again!”
The prisoners were jailed on a charge of breaching the peace, then sent to Fort Kilbie, where they were kept in Death Row. For Bill Hansen, it was his twentieth arrest. After thirty-one days in jail, they were convicted of breach of peace and fined $200. Eric Weinberger, emaciated, was barely able to walk into the courtroom; he had fasted all thirty-one days. This was the end of the Freedom Walk. Some day, its participants promised, it would be resumed.
In June of 1963, with trouble brewing in Danville, Virginia, local Negro leaders there called SNCC for help and Bob Zellner came, along with Avon Rollins, a young Negro field secretary who was to make Danville his home base for the next year. It turned out to be an ugly summer in Danville, reaching its climax on June 10, when police repeatedly attacked Negroes marching to city hall, using billyclubs and water hoses, clubbing men and women who, bloody and drenched with water, staggered back to the church headquarters and then to the hospital.
Bob Zellner was arrested that day. Two weeks later, as he and two other SNCC workers were talking at the High Street Baptist Church, police kicked down the door of the church, rushed in, and arrested them, charging them with “inciting the colored population to acts of violence and war against the white population.” Attorney Len Holt, a Negro lawyer from Norfolk who had handled most of the civil rights cases in Danville that summer, was also indicted.
The summer ended in Danville with police rule still a fact, with the wall of racism still standing. But the first assault had taken place. And, beyond this, another important thing had happened: the presence of Bob Zellner and other white workers affected Danville that summer as Zellner and others like him have affected so many towns in the Deep South since the sit-ins began in 1960. The point was made vividly to Negroes that compassion as much as cruelty crossed race lines. And the point was made to Southern whites that, try as they might to obliterate the image, someone like them, someone with white skin and from the South, had a different view of the way people should live together on earth. Those points, reiterated again and again these past few years every time whites and Negroes have gone together on sit-ins, on Freedom Rides, on picket lines, on Freedom Walks, constitute one of the truly splendid achievements of the current civil rights revolt.
In Southwest Georgia, Sherrod stuck to this viewpoint from the beginning. He brought white students, male and female, into Albany, and even into Lee and Terrell Counties, to work alongside young Negroes in voter registration and other activities. He knew there would be serious difficulties; he also knew that such difficulties would have to be endured, sweated out, worn down with patient effort through a thousand failures.
For a white person to find his way past the tangled veils of fear and suspicion that shroud the memories of Black Belt Negroes requires a rare combination of wisdom and luck. It can be done and it has been done, in Southwest Georgia and elsewhere. But it is not easy. With young people, black and white, it is easiest; with old people, it is much harder. Perhaps the best approach is boldness in moving into situations where interracial contact will take place, and then patience in letting them develop.
Peter deLissovoy, a white Harvar
d student who went to Albany to work for SNCC and stayed far beyond his term, gave (in The Harvard Crimson, November 12, 1963) a devastating portrait of the white college girl down in Terrell County for SNCC, with long hair, silver earrings, and sandals, bouncing confidently along a Georgia road to a sharecropper’s shack, exhorting the awed and worried Negro who opened the door to register, and insisting that he call her by her first name. There were such people in SNCC, very close to that caricature. They came and went. As deLissovoy wrote:
Whiteness is the problem of a tenacious if sometimes comical little minority within the American Negro Movement. It is not an insurmountable problem, as the cynics would insist, but it is difficult, tree-like in its old deep roots and twisting ramifications, and, if not faced honestly and quickly by the afflicted, it can be crippling.
As he said, it is not an insurmountable problem. Bob Zellner surmounted it. So did deLissovoy himself. So did Dotty Zellner, and Casey Hayden, and Bill Hansen, and Sam Shirah, and many others in the movement. And in this group must be counted the white person whom I first saw, neat and Ivy League-ish, at a civil rights conference at Sarah Lawrence College, and whom I saw the second time, dirty and unshaven, just out of Terrell County, Georgia. This was Ralph Allen.
On September 13, 1963, a letter was smuggled out of the Sumter County jail in Americus, Georgia. It was written by Ralph Allen, who had been there for thirty-seven days on a charge which could bring a sentence of death. In it, he described the evening of his arrest, August 8, when he attended a mass meeting of the Sumter County Movement… and then walked downtown to find Negroes lining the streets and singing.
