Julian Bond's Time to Teach by Julian Bond

Author:Julian Bond [Bond, Julian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2021-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Jail officials brought tour groups from Magnolia to look at the twelve “communists.” When a young girl asked McDew to “say something in Communist,” he said, “Kiss mir tuchus.”

When they were released from jail after thirty-seven days on December 6, Moses found a dispirited community. Although McComb’s Black adults had rallied to the defense of their arrested children, the threats, beatings, jailings, and Herbert Lee’s death had taken their toll. Their meeting place at the Masonic Temple was closed to them; someone just missed John Hardy with a shotgun blast into his bedroom. No one would come to registration classes. With Hardy, Curtis Hayes, and Hollis Watkins, Moses left McComb for Amzie Moore’s house in the Delta. SNCC’s first attempt at establishing a voter registration project in Mississippi was over.

The McComb experience helped to further shape SNCC from the coordinating committee it had intended to be into a staff-directed organization. The student-directed sit-in movement SNCC had been formed to coordinate was in decline, but SNCC, despite the McComb defeat, was on the ascendancy. The direct actionists had learned a valuable lesson in McComb: voter registration was direct action in small-town Mississippi. The split between the “direct action” and “voter registration” wings became meaningless. In the future, SNCC’s direction would be determined by actions taken and work done, not by titles and divisions. McComb helped to refine SNCC’s organizing techniques. Dependence on local leadership coupled with militancy might not have succeeded in McComb, but it could be tried again elsewhere with greater success.

The addition of Bob Zellner to SNCC’s staff made it interracial, but Zellner’s presence meant more than that. He was hired with a grant to SNCC from the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), an interracial organization formed in the 1930s. Like many interracial organizations, SCEF was a target of Southern red-baiters, especially after a field secretary, Carl Braden, refused to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee and was sentenced to a year in prison for contempt of Congress. Braden and his wife, Anne, developed close ties with SNCC. SCEF’s newspaper, the Southern Patriot, printed articles about SNCC’s efforts and philosophy when the mainstream press and other liberal organizations ignored them. And the Bradens understood—more than most whites—the proper role of whites in a Black-led movement. Southern Blacks, she said, did not “want the participation of white people if they are to be a drag on [the] movement” or if including whites meant “the old pattern that has often prevailed even in liberal interracial organizations— that of white domination.”22 SNCC’s easy acceptance of Anne and Carl Braden, who were persona non grata to every other civil rights organization, marked the beginning of a political openness in SNCC that distinguished it from the rest of the civil rights pack.

The SCEF grant was to be used to hire a white student to recruit on white campuses; John Robert Zellner was the student hired. Born in southern Alabama, the son of a Methodist preacher, he attended high school in Mobile and Huntingdon College in Montgomery.

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