Come by Page & Palette during the Arts & Crafts Festival to meet Bob Zellner and his book The Wrong Side of Murder Creek!

Bob Zellner’s career as a civil rights activist, beginning  in 1955 as a Murphy High School student,  spans nearly seven decades. A native of Mobile, he graduated from Huntingdon College in Montgomery where he began working with members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). After graduating, Zellner was hired by SNCC to recruit white students for the civil rights movement. Until 1962 Zellner was SNCC’s only white southerner to serve as a Field Secretary.  Bob served as a campus traveler recruiting young people to join the movement.

Zellner’s memoir, The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement, was recently produced by Spike Lee into a major motion picture, Son of the South. It was directed by Barry Alexander Brown, an Alabama native, and graduate of Lanier High School in Montgomery. Bob and his wife, Pamela Smith, recently moved back to his home state of Alabama where they worked to elect Senator Doug Jones and support the work of EJI, Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery.  Bob is currently involved in several youth leadership training programs, SAA, Shirts Across America, for high school students, Project Pilgrimage and Action Academy sponsored by Common Power for college students.