My father was disowned by his father and his mother and his brothers never spoke to him again in his whole life. It's hard to separate because they're your family. There were two wings in SNCC. A 1957 graduation speaker at Murphy High School in Mobile, he received a BA from Huntingdon College, Montgomery, Alabama in 1961 with highest honors in Sociology and Psychology. 351 pages. A Federal jury, in 2007, agreeing with civil rights attorney Frederick Brewington, ruled that Zellner and the Shinnecock were victims of false arrest, malicious prosecution, and denial of civil rights. Magnum Photos, Inc. c1963 Danny Lyons. I met Barry through Judy Irola and she said that he was from Montgomery, graduated Sydney Lanier. This is a feel good film for anyone who experiences white guilt about the price of their privilege and needs to feel better about their ancestry. Jim Forman arrived a week later with a tape recorder. Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, University of Indianapolis (2019). Providing historical perspective, Bob has been a Guest Lecturer for Common Power. A SNCC member and field secretary, he attended Huntingdon College in Montgomery. I mean, it is the devil you know? That's a tough thing. Continuing his life-long habit of returning from time to time for graduate studies, he completed most of the classwork for a Ph.D. in history, Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana between 1991-1994. If he is still at it today, he nearly lost it many times in the process. If he is still at it today, he nearly lost it many times in the process. Bob Zellner's career as a civil rights activist, beginning in 1955 as a Murphy High School student, spans nearly seven decades. Well, I was very lucky that I was mentored by Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. During the 2016 election season, Bob and his wife Pamela volunteered for the Doug Jones for Senate Campaign in lower Alabama. In real life, the protagonist, Bob Zellner and his pal, Chuck McDew, fit a seemingly predictable pattern: One is white, the other Black. Like 2019s Green Book, Im sure Son of the South will make well-meaning white folks feel like they arent one of the racist ones. Tell me about what your feelings were during that situation? He suffered brain damage and post traumatic stress from the physical abuse inflicted upon him. It's very sad that Huntingdon College, where a huge part of the script takes place, that they weren't able to bring themselves to welcome us to shoot on the campus. Son of the South was written, directed, and edited by Barry Alexander Brown, executive producer Spike Lee, distributed by Vertical Entertainment. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical. Bob works with the Eastern Long Island Branch of the NAACP headed by Lucius Ware and with the Southampton Town Anti-Bias Task Force under the leadership of Dianne Rulnick. J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, far from being heroes of the movement, hounded Zellner's friend and mentor, Dr. Martin Luther King, and launched the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) a U.S. government attack designed to destroy the Freedom Movement. He invited me back to campus. Zellner was arrested, severely beaten and taken out of jail by a mob, who put a rope around his neck and told him he was going to be hanged. The University of Chicago I liked him because he was the perfect good ole white boy, a teetotal white country boy, with the accent and the background of the real rural South. He later moved to Wilson, North Carolina. Although he occasionally uses a broad brush dipped in primary colors while fashioning his admiring portrait of Bob Zellner, the grandson of a Ku Klux Klansman who improbably evolved into a civil . You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search. Brian Dennehy playing my grandfather. To register go to Eventbrite or the Equity Project Alliances Facebook page. Administration. If we had wanted to create him, we couldnt have done a better job, McDew wrote in his autobiography, Tell The Story, released posthumously last year. Not exactly, if you consider that neither are typical white Alabamans. This month he will share the life lessons he learned during the movement with a Pensacola audience. Bob Zellner From Wikitia John Robert Zellner (born April 5th, 1939) was the first white southerner to serve as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The first white Southerner to serve as a Field Secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he worked with historical figures including John Lewis, Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Ella Baker, and Anne Braden. 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. Bob Zellner, a trailblazing civil rights activist, is the grandson of an Alabama Klansman. Zellner was perfect. 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]. I had met church people strong in faith, but until then I had never seen such a dedicated soldiers, he remembered. And there's the moment, where Rosa Parks says to you, not making a choice is making a choice and there's something going to happen to you where you're going to have to jump in and make a decision on that. He is the former director of the 'Chicago Mercantile Exchange.'. How could you not make a decision at that point? Yet he was not following the trope of the white savior; a charge directly addressed, and discounted, in the film, as well as in Zellners 2008 autobiography, The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement, co-written with movement scribe Constance Curry. They have a daughter named Anne Zellner, who is a lawyer at the firm 'Ryley Carlock & Applewhite' in Denver. Living With Others: Challenges and Promises. Carol Ann thinks that Rosa Parks and the Durrs were overstepping trying to recruit them into the civil rights movement, but Zellner flashes back (within the flashback) to a time where he was pressured to brutalize some Black folks. (Viewed on March 2, 2023)