By Lynn Burnett

Featured image: GROW meeting in a cow pasture, where Klan rallies had traditionally been held.

In late 1966, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had not yet become an all-Black organization, but it was headed quickly in that direction. By this time, the organization that had grown out of the sit-ins, conducted freedom rides, and become the most effective civil rights organization in terms of grassroots organizing had asked its White members to focus on organizing White communities for racial justice. Stokely Carmichael in particular emphasized the importance of organizing poor White folks.

Bob Zellner – one of SNCC’s very first White members – took SNCC’s new direction to heart. He and his wife Dottie Zellner founded Grass Roots Organizing Work, with a mission statement that read: “We want to begin the serious long-range effort to organize the white people in the south into an equal force in strength and similar in commitment to the movement now flourishing in the Black community . . . so that interracial coalitions, based on common interest, can be formed.”

Bob and Dottie originally hoped that GROW would work in connection with SNCC. As Dottie writes, “I . . . thought that white people could not be organized in a vacuum; there had to be some black presence if such organizing were not to degenerate into racist activities.” As Bob writes in his autobiography, he also hoped to help poor White southerners “link up with the expertise and the experience and drive that existed in the black community.” After all the other White SNCC members had left the organization, the Zellner’s stayed on to present the project idea to SNCC. They knew that the project moved against the direction SNCC was headed in, but at the same time they were two of the most trusted White members of SNCC, and had the support of many of the older and more experienced members. However, the project was rejected, after which the Zellners became the last White members to leave the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

The couple moved to New Orleans in 1967 and launched GROW with the support of Anne and Carl Braden’s organization, the Southern Conference Educational Fund. They chose New Orleans because it was easy to access both Mississippi and Alabama, and because it was safe: they didn’t want to move to a rural southern area where they’d have to waste time, energy and resources defending themselves. GROW began reaching out to poor White folks through their extensive network of Black southern civil rights workers, who had encountered sympathetic Whites over their years of organizing. For example, Fannie Lou Hamer put GROW in touch with poor White southerners who she had built connections with.

However, GROW found that the White rural poor were so desperate that asking them to spend additional time organizing when they were struggling just to survive was too big of an ask. As Bob Zellner remembers:  “They were all so poor.  We stayed with them during the winter in houses so ramshackle the wind blew straight through.” Many of them didn’t own shoes. In addition to their dire poverty, some of the White sharecroppers and other rural poor were scared to death that their overseers would retaliate if they found out they took a literacy class or organizing workshop with GROW. Unlike the Black rural poor, they didn’t have a broader movement to look to or feel inspired by: their fear was crippling. GROW concluded that they needed social services before they could organize, and GROW wasn’t equipped to offer that. As GROW member Robert Analavage wrote, “These are people who must eventually be a part of any movement we build, but they do not have the strength to be the spearhead of it.”  

And so, GROW turned its attention away from severe rural poverty and towards factory workers and unionization efforts. GROW’s first breakthrough was with a group of woodworkers who were on strike in Laurel, Mississippi. Laurel was a Klan hotspot, and some of the country’s most notorious Klansmen were part of the strike. Bob Zellner’s own father had been a Klansman, and he knew how to talk with them. The workers accepted a meeting with Bob, and he opened by being upfront about his background as a SNCC worker. Then he described the new GROW project: “We work with black and white people who believe they are stronger working together with each other rather than against each other. If we can help you, we want to.” A Klan leader named Herbert Ishey slammed his fist down on the table: “Goddammit, I don’t care who you are. We need help from wherever we can get it. You think you’re the only one’s who have trouble with the FBI. They call us Kluxers. We don’t care, commies or Kluxers, we need to get together.”

With the support of GROW the woodworkers were soon holding drive-in rallies with thousands of Black and White workers, in the same cow pastures where Klan rallies were held, “talking about how the power structure was holding them down.” As Bob Zellner recalls, “We had 1,500, 2,000 workers, half Black, half white, half with Wallace stickers and half with NAACP stickers, in the cow pasture meeting together. This is in 1968, ’69, in Mississippi.” Although GROW was a primarily White-led organization, there were also Black militants – like Republic of New Afrika member Walter Collins – on staff. Like many Black Power militants, Walter believed in the transformational power of organizing poor Whites for racial and economic justice. He built his own relationships with old Klan members, and between his efforts and the Zellners, GROW got Black workers and Klan members to go leafleting together in integrated groups with flyers that said, “Come to the working people’s rally”. Mississippi had never seen anything like it.

GROW would continue such work for ten years, not only with woodworkers but also with workers in the poultry and fishing industries. How did GROW do it? Just as they had done in their civil rights work, the members of GROW embedded themselves in the communities they worked with, got to know the people, practiced humility and respect across their differences, and built trust. They provided considerable benefits to those they worked with by facilitating connections to their network of movement lawyers and researchers. And they emphasized practical, material change over idealism. As Bob Zellner put it to one group of White workers: “If you’re going to have a strong union, you must have black and white in there. You know you don’t want black people crossing the picket lines, and you can’t have segregated drinking fountains and bathrooms and lockers, the way you had before . . . You have to do more than you ever expected to, but when you do that, then you have strength and they can’t beat you.” GROW emphasized that segregation led to poorer jobs, schools, and healthcare for everyone. They urged skeptical White workers to at least give it a shot… try some new behavior and see what happens to your ideas, they would say. And to some extent it worked: the ideas of these White southern workers did indeed begin to change. GROW shifted a lot of folks away from the Klan, without ever telling them they were bad people. As Dottie Zellner put it, GROW’s work “proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that on a grass-roots level, it is possible to create working-class interracial coalitions. Period.”

Additional Resources

GROW proposal.

GROW analysis in retrospect: The Lessons of Laurel: Grass-Roots Organizing in the South.

Kairos Center: 50 Years of Poor People’s Organizing: An Interview with Bob Zellner.

SNCC Digital Gateway: Dottie & Bob Zellner present GROW proposal.

SNCC Digital Gateway: entries on Bob Zellner and Dottie Zellner.

Bob Zellner with Constance Curry, The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement, pages 300-313.