An LI Civil Rights Hero

By Doug Geed

    He was born in 1939 as deep as you can get in the Deep South. "L-A" as he calls it -- Lower Alabama.

  His grandfather was a lifelong member of the Ku Klux Klan and his dad was also a KKK member.

  Pretty unlikely that Bob Zellner would become an active and dedicated servant in the fight for civil rights, but that's what happened.

    Zellner -- who now lives in North Sea, outside of Sag Harbor on the South Fork -- has written a new book called "The Wrong Side of Murder Creek," which chronicles his struggles as a white civil rights activist.   

   Zellner was considered a traitor among his fellow white Southerners -- and was hated almost as much as the blacks who struggled for such simple freedoms as the right to sit down on a bus, use the same restroom as white people, eat in the same restaurants as anyone else and -- perhaps most importantly -- cast a vote for elected officials who just might try to change the embarrassing and repulsive way our society treated African-Americans.

   Zellner first met Dr. Martin Luther King when he was in college doing a paper on the civil rights struggle. He went to hear Dr. King and Rosa Parks speak at a church. He was warned that he'd be arrested if he went to Dr. King's church (a white man stepping inside a "black" church was considered a crime), but he went anyway. He actually escaped the law that day, but was arrested 8 or 9 other times in 7 different states.

    He can't even remember how many times he was beaten, but vividly remembers how a police chief released him to an angry mob that beat him and then dragged him to a cow pasture with a rope. Bob's a smart guy and, through his fear, he managed to get the crowd bickering among themselves. When he convinced them he was a fellow Alabaman and not a "meddling New Yorker," they finally let him go.

    I interviewed Bob this past Tuesday and haven't gotten a chance to read his book yet, but based on the stories he told me, I'm sure it's entertaining, enlightening, appalling and uplifting all at the same time.

   Spike Lee thought enough of it to turn the wheels in motion to make a movie about Bob's story.

   You can see my interview with Bob Zellner starting Sunday night, March 15th in our 5 pm newscast and running all through the day Monday the 16th.

   A longer version of our interview will air in my "East End Show" which airs every Saturday at 7, 9, 11, 1 and 3 -- and Sundays at 7, 9, 11:30, 1:30 and 3:30.

    You may want to check out Bob's website -- www.bobzellner.com

 

   

Comments

[John]

I guess that there's nothing to really be said, here ("good job"?), but I'm looking forward to the piece. Is there a date set on the "East End" version?