(joyful music) (people talking indistinctly) - Growing up young Bob Zellner's grandfather and father were in the Ku Klux Klan.

So it might be hard to imagine that Bob would grow up to become a major force in the Civil Rights Movement but he did just that.

From his college days until now, Zellner has never stopped fighting for equality.

Along the way some of those fights put his life in peril.

But he endured, working with transformational figures like Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and John Lewis.

His memoir, "The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement" is a powerful story that spawned the Spike Lee produced Barry Alexander Brown directed film, "Son of the South."

Time Magazine celebrated Bob Zellner as one of the 17 living legends of the Civil Rights Movement.

We welcome Bob Zellner to "Conversations."

Thank you for being here, my friend.

- Thank you, Jeff for having me.

I'm very happy to be here.

- Let me just set the stage about your life.

Let's begin.

Tell me about your childhood.

- Well, my childhood was very similar to most childhoods of children that grew up in LA in lower Alabama as I did.

And, it was fairly normal even to the extent of my father and my grandfather and my aunts and uncles being on one side of the family in the Ku Klux Klan and on the other side of the family on my mother's side that they come from the Creek Indian heritage in northwest Florida, south Alabama.

And they were always anti Ku Klux Klan.

So I've been in this struggle since I was a wee tot, pro clan on one side of the family, anti clan on the other side of the family.

And I was very fortunate that my father becoming a Methodist minister was able to see that the vision of the Klan did not match the vision of the gospel of the New Testament.

And being a thoughtful person, he wrestled with that for a number of years and was eventually able to break from the Ku Klux Klan and decide to be a human being and a Christian minister.

And his father and mother disowned him and his brothers never spoke to him again in his whole life.

- Over that?

Over leaving the Klan?

- Yes, that was how up close and personal it was about many Southern families in terms of our racial history.

And now we are in a situation that's similar to the situation we were in in the fifties and the sixties because once again it's becoming very dangerous to want to look at this history with clear eyes.

We're being protected from this history, now.

Apparently white southern males are so delicate that they can't take any criticism.

And so most of the history courses now that teach American history because black history is American history and American history is black history, and it's being outlawed again to even study this.

And it was the same situation when I was in college at Huntington College between 1957 and 1961.

We were not allowed to study the racial problem.

If we did, we were subject to be arrested for breaking the segregation laws.

So I had to start making a stand when I was still in high school and college to assert my right to study American history in all of its beauty and all of its ugliness.

I had to fight for that right when I was in college and I'm still fighting for that right today and participating in the Civil Rights movement.

- How old were you when you realized that this is a real problem, that part of my family my grandfather and my uncles, et cetera, are racists you know, that they hate this group of people.

What point did that trigger you that formed the passion to take you on your life's journey?

- I think it started as early as grade school.

When I was in the third, fourth and fifth grades.

I, like every other southern child I would hear things casually mentioned like, "Daddy and them killed them in the inn last night" just casual conversation among children about killing people because of their color.

And I guess it was because of my father had already begun his long breakup with the Ku Klux Klan.

I was able to see that in a little bit of a different way than some of my peers saw it.

They just saw it as totally normal that black people don't have the same feelings that white people have, and it's okay to beat them and shoot them and oppress black people.

And I didn't believe that that was so even as a child, I didn't like that.

And I said, "I'm not gonna go along with that.

I'm not gonna be part of that system."

- You and your father have conversations about his relationship in the Klan and then his relationship with his father?

- I believe I did have some once I was old enough to understand the import of what he had done and how hurtful it could be for a person to be disowned by your own mother and father.

That's about as hard a situation I think as you can go through and especially if you were doing something that you knew to be the right thing and you were being programmed to do bad things.

It was a very, it was a tremendous burden for a young person to live with.

And it was much easier to rebel and say, "No I'm not gonna be part of that old south."

Going back to the days of slavery and doing away with democracy that we've won for.

So hard, hard fought democracy.

I thought it was important to try to keep those values.

And the main, one of the main reasons I started working full-time in the Civil Rights Movement was to maybe see if there was a time when our creed would match our behavior would match our creed.

We had a very good creed.

Send me your tired your huddle masses yearning to breathe free.

And we had an intention to have a free country but we were also trying to have segregation and racial discrimination in a free country.

And they don't go together.

- Right.

Take me to when you get to college, you get to Huntington College in Montgomery, Alabama.

And so take me kind of through the process that started you on your journey.

- Well, I think part of the process was that for some reason going to Huntington College in 1957 as I did from Mobile.

Mobile was in terms of the rest of Alabama, was a progressive town.

Mobile and Pensacola and New Orleans I think are leavened to a certain extent by being ports of call.

So the people were used to seeing people from other parts of the world speaking strange languages.

And so Mobile and the Gulf Coast was a little more cosmopolitan than Birmingham.

And Birmingham was very raw.

It was a new city in the South and it did not have the leavening influence of the noblesse oblige of the aristocrats.

So they were just raw, out to make money.

And when the convict leasing system was perfected in Alabama, it went from 10% of the state income to 70% of the state income was made from convict labor slavery, getting people who were serving time for felonies doing hard labor.

They could be enslaved and they were.

So it was a situation where a lot of people of goodwill came together and began to organize and they organized groups like the Southern Conference for Human Welfare.

And that's when Ms. Eleanor Roosevelt came down to Alabama to the founding Convention of the Southern Conference Human Welfare was in Birmingham.

And do you know who they were harassed by?

And they were set upon by Bull Connor in 1938.

1938.

- Wow.

- That's 20 something years before Birmingham.

And he was still the police commissioner Bull Connor in Birmingham and in kit turned the dogs and the hoses against the children in Birmingham.

So we have people in the south who have made their life work is racism and trying to keep people separate and divided and fighting amongst themselves.

And that's easy to do.

The hard thing to do is bring people together with common purpose and common power.

That's why I work with a group today called Common Power because the most common power that American citizens have is the right to vote.

And we still have people who want to restrict the right to vote to mainly white people of property.

The way they started out in the United States, you had to be a white male and you had to have property.

- Going back to when you really got involved.

I mean, what was it in you that made you want to stand up to the level you did?

I mean, it's one thing to state something to say, "I don't agree with it."

But it's another thing to pour your life into it.

It's another thing to risk your life like you did.

What about you is different?

Because there are a lot of other people could have done it, too.

- Yes.

I think there were other people my age, I'm 83 now and I think there are other people my age in Alabama, Mississippi, all over the deep south.

They wish they knew then what they know now, so they could have maybe taken a stand and made a difference in that time.

And the great thing about it now is God has allowed me to live this long and a lot of other people.

So we're having a second chance and a lot of people saying, "Oh, we have another chance to heal the racial divisions and the inequalities in our country and have a more perfect union."

And so we're almost a division of the house again.

There's a kind of a cold civil war going on right now where if one particular party gains a lot of power in a state they want to take state power and force their ideas on the rest of the citizens of that state.

And that's not the American way either.

American way is to debate issues and develop policies that are good for the majority of people, not a small minority of people.

- What do you think has caused the divisiveness in our country in recent years?

- Well, there are a lot of the divisiveness is caused by grievances.

And a lot of people do have grievances in this country.

We are probably the most anti-labor country in the world, developed industrial country that is basically opposed to working people being able to form a union and to get better pay and better working conditions.

So in many, many ways American exceptionalism means that we are willing to be on the bottom rungs of civilization.

And maybe many people don't think that we belong on the bottom rung.

We belong in the leadership of people around the world who are protecting democratic procedures and forming democratic governments rather than authoritarian governments.

- Let's go back to your younger days and you worked with, I mentioned in the opening was some transformational figures, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks.

Tell me about the first time you met Martin Luther King Jr. (sighs, chuckles) - Well, the first time that I met Martin Luther King Jr. is the time that I sought him out.

And I was in a sociology course at Huntington College and we had been given a senior's thesis to write our paper on solutions to the racial problem.

And that was a common assignment in sociology 404, race relations.

And you knew that you were supposed to read the books in the library and maybe read some articles here and there and do your research that way and then write your paper and hand it in and hope for the best.

But some of us were serious sociologists and we said to our professor, "We are here in Montgomery, Alabama and we've been assigned a paper to write about solutions to the racial problem."

And we know that scholars from all over the world have come here to Montgomery right here to this town to study the Montgomery Bus boycott which was essentially one approach to solving the racial problem that is to do away with segregation.

We'd have a lot fewer problems if we did away with the legal segregation.

So we thought that we had a responsibility to go and talk to the people who were being discriminated against.

If we're talking about race relations, how could we leave out one of the races that the relations were about?

So we said we are going to go and do our scholarly responsibility and we also have responsibility as a Methodist because the Methodist church had said that all good Methodists around the United States should be working for racial reconciliation.

And all of our national church activities were integrated, specifically and forcefully integrated.

And so it was an opportunity for some of us who were young church people to experience integrated situations.

'Cause we never had that opportunity in Alabama.

There was nowhere in Alabama that you could meet safely in a large gathering talking about race.

We had to go to Highlander Folk School in Tennessee.

That's where there was an institution there where people could meet from all over the south in an integrated manner.

And that was so anathema to the southern states that the year after I graduated college I worked at Highlander Folk School for the summer.

And at the end of that summer, the school was confiscated by the state and they bulldozed all the buildings and destroyed the whole campus, destroyed.

They tried to wipe the institution off the face of the earth.

- It's just hard to imagine when you think about it.

Yes, it really is.

Would Dr. King, I mean, what was he like in person?

- I was very, very fortunate for Dr. King to agree to be a mentor for me and the other students as well.

And he always, one of the things that he stood for that everybody always talks about even in the Selma campaign, every campaign he was ever in he took a lot of time to talk to the children.

And he'd always, he was always surrounded by children and sometimes as young as 12 or 13, 14 years old.

And they remember to this day when Dr. King was in town, they would sit with him and and talk to Martin Luther King just like they were normal adult people.

- What kind of influence Rosa Parks have on you?

- Oh, Ms. Rosa Parks.

Well, a part of the influence that she had on us was that we could see what her relationship was with Ms. Virginia Durr and Virginia Durr and Ms. Rosa Parks had a very, they were really good close friends but Mrs.

Parks was constantly having to teach Mrs. Durr about racial etiquette because Mrs.

Parks would point out that when they were with other people Virginia should not call her Rosa.

If Virginia addressed Mrs.

Parks, she said say, "Mrs.

Parks," because Rosa said "When I address you Mrs. Durr I always say Mrs. Durr, so you should say Mrs.

Parks."

- Makes sense, makes good sense.

Tell me about the movie "Son of the South" that's based on your life, huh?

Your life story.

- It is, it uses my life story as the kind of the framework for the movie.

But what we're trying to do, and we're doing more in the next few years, we're trying to use my story and my memoir.

I'm working on the second volume of the memoir now.

The working title of it is "Freedom Road."

And we are using the book and any other TV or movies that might be made as a way of telling the story and teaching that history back there because young people, we have learned that if somebody bans your book or bans or prohibits you from telling your story, they say, "Oh that's interesting.

Let me look into it and see what they're trying to hide."

So there's a lot of interest now on the part of young people to study this history and the fact that Barry Brown and Spike Lee made a movie that is very watchable.

I like to see the movie, I like to watch it in a theater that has good sound because the music is really good.

And you can also hear the lines a lot better in a movie theater than you can on the streaming platforms but on all the platforms, it's a movie that introduces young people to the Civil Rights Movement.

And if they like the movie, they maybe will read some other things about the Civil Rights Movement.

- And you said the movie was really geared towards the young people and primarily young women, huh?

The director wanted to really appeal to young women.

- Yes.

And that's natural too because once you begin to study the Civil Rights Movement very carefully you'll see how important the women's leadership is in the Civil Rights Movement.

Most of the cases that we know about, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott is a really good example.

The women were the ones that really organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

And if it hadn't been the women, it wouldn't have gone past one day and it went 285 days because the women organized and the men were able to stand in front of the TV cameras and do the talking.

But the women were doing the work and providing the leadership for the Montgomery Bus Boy Boycott to be successful.

And that was a good lesson for people to learn about the Civil Rights Movement, the importance of women leadership.

And when I see composite photographs of all the important women in the Civil rights movement and Mrs. Ella Baker is not there, somebody is not really reading their real civil rights history.

We're just trying to correct the record.

- And I've got about three minutes left here in the program, but what are you most proud of in your life?

- I think what I'm personally most proud of in my life is my two daughters, Margaret and Katie.

And they've been very successful and I'm very proud of them.

And they are carrying on part of their part of the struggle and they're going to be involved in it 20 or 30 years after I'm gone.

And all the young people that we're working with now in Common Power.

And we also work with a group called Shirts Across America for high school students.

All of those students will, the high school students will go through the Shirts Across America program and then they'll be in the Action Academy of Common Power.

And then they'll be well trained to be activists and organizers for the next 50 or 60 years.

And they may well be able to save our democracy and maybe our climate and keep the climate from being so bad that all the humans are gonna die and the animals will be happy and the planet will be happy.

(both laughing) - So you mentioned before you're in your eighties.

What as you look forward over the next few years what do you hope to accomplish?

''Cause clearly you're still running full speed here.

- Well, I'm not running up full speed.

I'm hoping to get back up to full speed.

I had a cancer operation just a year or so ago and so I'm still recovering from that.

I've been very weakened a lot.

And, but anyway, because of my wonderful wife, Pamela she has me on good diets, good food and vegetables and fruit and so forth.

So I'm hoping to have another 10 years, maybe 15 years.

And as long as this is what I love to do I like to talk to you, I like to tell the story.

And I thank you very much for helping us tell this story.

It's an incredible story and a lot of adventures, a lot of excitement.

And anybody that needs a young person knows about computers and needs work.

We've got plenty of work to give them and work with 'em for the next 25 or 30 years and then they're on their own and off they go.

- Sounds great.

Well, you have lived a very fascinating a very fascinating life, no question about that.

We mentioned the book that you have and that you have written your memoir "The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerners in the Freedom Movement."

And then of course we mentioned the movie as well which clearly a moving story.

So Bob Zellner, thank you so very much.

"Son of the South" is the name of the movie.

I just drew a blank on that.

(both laughing) Anyway it was my pleasure to speak with you, my friend.

- Thank you.

I enjoyed being here and I hope I see you some more.

I'm right at home here.

I was born right here in Jay, Florida in Santa Rosa County.

And it's good to be home.

And we're gonna correct the ship of state so that it will not take us to the reef and destruction.

- Sounds good, my friend.

Thank you so much, Bob Zellner.

By the way you can see this and many more of our "Conversations" on the PBS video app and also at wsre.org/conversations.

I'm Jeff Weeks, thank you so very much for watching.

I hope you enjoyed our program.

Take great care of yourself and we'll see you soon.

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