Bob Zellner - Poitier and Brando, Mississippi, 1964

 

I'm glad to be here in New York tonight. My daughter was here earlier. She's a New York psychoanalyst. [audience laughter] You just about have to be one to be analyst in New York. I'm Bob Zellner. I'm actually from LA, Lower Alabama. [audience laughter] I grew up in South Alabama. My father was a Methodist minister. He was also a member of the Ku Klux Klan. My grandfather was a member of the Klan, and most of my aunts and uncles. The aunts were, of course, in the Auxiliary Klan. 

 

I was named after Bob Jones, who has a Bob Jones University. He also conducted the wedding ceremony for my mother and father. So, I come from a very fundamentalist, even terroristic background. [audience laughter] And so, to be known as a New Yorker is unusual. It's also unusual that someone with my background would have wound up in the Civil Rights Movement. But I went to Huntington College in Montgomery, Alabama in 1957. And if you'll remember what's happening in the south at that time, I wound up as my senior year, meeting Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. They got me started on a life of crime. [audience laughter] [audience cheers and applause] 

 

As a result of their influence, when I graduated college in 1961, I joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC. Some of you older people might remember that. [audience applause]

 

SNCC was one of the civil rights organizations. We were young and brash, and we didn't believe that we couldn't go anywhere in the United States. And so, we usually went to the roughest places there were. I was with SNCC from 1961 to 1967, and I was the first white southerner field secretary for SNCC and also one of the last whites in the organization when it became all black in about 1967. As a result of being in SNCC, I was arrested 25 times in five different states, shot at, beaten and generally mistreated. 

 

I don't know why they did that to us in the south. But we did have a lot of supporters. We had a lot of supporters here in New York. So, I thank you belatedly for that. One of the events that I remember particularly about that time-- Muriel Tillinghast and her daughter are with us tonight also. They're SNCC veterans. But one of the things that I remember particularly was the summer of 1964. It was a particularly mythic period in the United States. Because in that summer, we organized students from all around the country to come to Mississippi, because people were getting killed, because they were black and wanted to register to vote. Many of our organizers were shot. Some of them were killed. 

 

We thought that if we brought students from around the country to Mississippi, then we would be able to break that wall of segregation and be able to get support from the United States. We thought that the federal government would come to our aid. One of the myths was that the federal government was actually in favor of civil rights at that time. One of the movies that was made of the 1964 period, which I had something to do with, was Mississippi Burning. They participated in the mythic misrepresentation of American history when they made the FBI the heroes of the civil rights movement. 

 

In Greenwood, Mississippi, that summer, after the murder of three civil rights workers, Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, two of whom were white New Yorkers, this country rose up to a person practically and said, “We have to end segregation once and for all.” The federal government was not yet willing to go along with that. When we organized those students in 1964 to come to Mississippi, do you know what the reaction of our government was? J. Edgar Hoover went on television and radio the day before, 1,000 students were to come to Mississippi for the summer and said, “There will be no federal protection for civil rights workers in Mississippi this summer.” 

 

The reaction of the Klan was to capture the first three civil rights workers who came down, crossed the state line. They were murdered and buried 18 feet deep in an earthen dam. The reaction of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other civil rights organizations was to mobilize massively to go into Mississippi. If they thought that that would keep people out, it helped bring people to Mississippi. Brave people. One of the groups that came were American stars, American actors. I have a particular memory of Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier and Marlon Brando coming to Greenwood, Mississippi that summer. 

 

Greenwood, Mississippi, was a cauldron of violence. Beckwith was from Mississippi. Beckwith had killed Medgar Evers and was a hero in Mississippi, because he murdered a black civil rights worker. Greenwood, Mississippi, was as lawless as the west ever was. It was open season on civil rights workers. And yet, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, and the mythic Marlon Brando came to us in Mississippi in the summer 1964. Now, my particular relationship with this was that I was a white southerner and a member of the SNCC. So, I was to take care of Mr. Brando. [audience laughter] Can you imagine? I'm 21 years old, I hardly ever been out of Alabama and now I've got to go around with this guy who is a legend, of course, in his own mind and ours as well. [audience laughter] 

 

I picked him up at the airport, and we talked about how to get from the airport to this tremendous rally that had been organized for these three people and also to show that the outside world was coming to Mississippi. I picked Belafonte up, because we had to segregate. We couldn't have black people and white people in the same car, because we'd get shot at more often that way. I remember Jim Forman, the executive director of SNCC, said, “Okay, Bob, you drive Marlon to the rally and pretend you're an ordinary white people.” [audience laughter] So, I said, “Well, I can pretend, but I don't know about Marlon. [audience laughter] He's supposed to be a good actor, so hopefully we'll make out all right.” 

 

So, we're on the way to this rally. 14,000 people waiting at the gymnasium to meet these mythic people. And Brando says, before we get there, “Zellner, I've got to go to the bathroom.” [audience laughter] And I said, “At a time like this, you've got to go to the bathroom?” He said, “Well, yeah, there's one here.” I said, “Well, there's a truck stop up here. We'll stop at that bathroom. He said, “What kind of bathroom do they have?” [audience laughter] I said, “Why does it matter?” He said, “Well, it has to be a particular kind of bathroom.” He said, “Do they have stalls? He's like, “All urinals and everything.” I said, “Well, they have some urinals. Maybe they have some stalls and everything.” [audience laughter] He says, “I hope they have stalls.” [audience laughter] 

 

So I said to myself, “I don't care if it is Marlon Brando, I'm going to find out him about this.” So, I said, “Why is that? Marlon, I'm driving on.” He said, “Well--” He said, “It's terrible.” He says, “I'm standing there like a normal person, doing my business and everything. Somebody's right next to me. And all of a sudden, they say, you're Marlon Brando.” [audience laughter] He was certainly a great actor to be able to do that in the front seat of a car on a dark night in Mississippi. [audience laughter] I think he was putting me at ease. Anyway, I remember thinking, “Boy, I'm here with Marlon Brando now. We're going to go to this huge rally.” 

 

We swept into the rally and all the people there, 14,000 people inside and out, they just went crazy. Here's Harry Belafonte, good friend of our Secretary of State, Powell [audience laughter] and Marlon Brando. And so, the chairman of our group stands up and he says, “We have a man tonight who's one of the greatest singers in America. We want to have a song from him right to start with,” He said, “I give you Bob Zellner.” [audience laughter] And I said, “Do you mean Belafonte?” And he said, “No.” He said, “They better hear some freedom songs. You know, we got to get this thing warmed up.” [audience laughter] 

 

So, I happened to have been raised in the south, and I knew all the freedom songs, all the church songs and everything. So, we sang some songs. And that place rocked. I'm telling you. Here was Belafonte and them back there, and they said, “Well, they've never seen anything like this.” But it meant a tremendous amount in that summer of 1964, because just prior to them coming, Silas McGhee, who was the project director of the Greenwood SNCC office, had been shot in the side of the head with a .38 caliber slug. I caught him as he fell with the slug in the side of his head. Many other people were brutalized, because they wanted to go and register to vote. 

 

I remember one time, a 1,000 people were standing at the courthouse in Greenwood, Mississippi. And here's what the white people did. They pulled up in a big pickup truck and they got out with the monkey. There was a sign on the monkey that says, “I want to vote too.” Now, that was both the murderers and the humorists coming to the fore. But we had humor that would beat their humor, because a huge debate broke out in the line of black people. And some people said, “That's an insult. Why would they insult us like that?” And other people said, “No, that's no insult. That 85-year-old white woman has a right to vote like anybody else.” [audience laughter] 

 

Anyway, that was the summer of 1964. People were killed, we sang, we laughed. But it was Harry Belafonte who actually summed up the immense experience of that summer by bringing people from outside, bringing the world press to Mississippi. It was the beginning of the end of racial segregation at the voting booth in Mississippi and the rest of the south, because by 1965, the next year, the Voting Rights Act passed. And it passed because people like Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier and my friend, Marlon Brando, came south and helped us. Harry summed it up at the end of that great mass meeting when he said, “No matter what they do, it is always true that brotherhood and sisterhood is not so wild a dream as those who profit by postponing it pretend.” Thank you.