Bob Zellner, civil rights activist and author, to speak at Transylvania February 1, at 7:30 p.m.; free and open to the public
LEXINGTON, Ky.—Bob Zellner, civil rights activist and author of “The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement,” will speak at Transylvania University on Wednesday, February 1, at 7:30 p.m. The talk, in the Mitchell Fine Arts Center’s Carrick Theater, is free and open to the public. Zellner was born in Alabama in 1939, the son and grandson of Klansmen. After graduating from the Huntingdon College in 1961, Zellner became the first white southerner to serve as field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Zellner’s father rejected his past Klan associations and supported his son in his civil rights efforts. Arrested 18 times in seven states, Zellner organized in McComb, Miss.; Albany, Ga.; Danville, Va.; Talladega, Montgomery and Birmingham, Ala.; New Haven, Conn.; and Boston. From 1963-65, Zellner studied race relations in the Graduate School of Sociology at Brandeis University. During Mississippi’s 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. When SNCC became an all-black organization in 1967, Bob and his wife, Dottie, joined the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF) to organize an anti-racism project for black and white workers in the Deep South called GROW, Grass Roots Organizing Work. In the early 1990s, studying at Tulane University for a Ph.D. in history, Zellner wrote a dissertation on the southern civil rights movement.