December 24
GUEST: Dorothy Miller Zellner, former coeditor of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s newsletter, SNCC's former media relations person, and coeditor of Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC talks about the Black liberation movement today and its connection to the campaign to free the Palestinian people.Dorothy Zellner on SNCC Digital Gateway
I was very happy to have Dorothy Miller Zellner on Activist Radio to talk about SNCC and the development of the early Civil Rights Movement. Dorothy wrote one of the personal accounts in the book, Hands on the Freedom Plow, a delightful and moving history of the 1960's struggle for racial justice.
Dorothy was very much influenced by her family's commitment to radical social change, and we talked about the role of Judaism in her early decision to travel into the deep South and join SNCC. Her stories are both inspiring and hair raising. I don't think I have ever felt that degree of commitment to an ideal.
I risked my life in being drafted into the military during the US war on Vietnam. How I wish that I had been politically aware back then. I was lucky enough to be sent to Korea for a year. Why hadn't I looked at the bigger picture? Or to paraphrase Thoreau's answer when Emerson asked him why he was in jail, "Why are you not here?"
The end of SNCC is not an uplifting tale, and Dorothy didn't want to emphasize the eventual break between white and Black civil rights workers. Yet I find the subject intriguing. How can we whites choose the right course of action in exposing and destroying white nationalism? Should we write about it? March in the streets? Try to organize multiracial alliances? Or should we resist the US imperialism that has made America the destroyer of human rights in so much of the world?
