- Collection:
- Civil Rights History Project
- Title:
- Dorothy Zellner oral history interview conducted by Emilye Crosby in Baltimore, Maryland, 2015 December 08
- Contributor to Resource:
- Zellner, Dorothy, interviewee
Crosby, Emilye, interviewer
Bishop, John Melville, videographer
Civil Rights History Project (U.S.) - Date of Original:
- 2015
- Subject:
- Congress of Racial Equality
Mississippi Freedom Project
Southern Regional Council
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (U.S.)
Anti-communist movements--United States
Civil rights movements--Mississippi
Civil rights movements--United States
Folk music festivals--Mississippi--Greenwood
Greensboro Sit-ins, Greensboro, N.C., 1960
Nonviolence--United States
Women civil rights workers--United States--Interviews - Location:
- United States, 39.76, -98.5
United States, Maryland, City of Baltimore, 39.29038, -76.61219
United States, Mississippi, 32.75041, -89.75036
United States, Mississippi, Leflore County, Greenwood, 33.51623, -90.17953 - Medium:
- personal narratives
interviews
oral histories (literary genre)
video recordings (physical artifacts) - Type:
- MovingImage
- Description:
- Dorothy Zellner reflects on her experience as one of the early organizers in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Offering a unique perspective as a white woman in a black-led organization, she sheds light on the dynamics of race and gender in the Civil Rights Movement. Detailing the efforts of her and her then husband Bob Zellner, she discusses her involvement in organizing civil liberties workshops, forming a Northeast Regional Office of SNCC, and her role in recruiting Northern volunteers for the 1964 Freedom Summer Project. She discusses SNCC's decision to exclude white workers by the late 1960s and reflects on the complexities of this consensus. Emphasizing how SNCC was dynamic in its ability to function as a non-racial community, she considers its deterioration an endured loss for American society. She continues to pride SNCC as her life's work, to this day.
Recorded in Baltimore, Maryland, on December 8, 2015.
Civil Rights History Project collection (AFC 2010/039: 0125), Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Copies of items are also held at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (U.S.).
Dorothy "Dottie" Zellner was born on January 14th, 1938 in New York City. She joined the NAACP in high school, and later went to Miami, Florida to enroll in a CORE workshop, training in non-violent organizing. Under CORE, she moved to New Orleans and was involved with "casing" sites for sit-ins and outreach to the white community. Dotty left CORE and was hired by the Southern Regional Council and moved to Atlanta in June of 1961. Later that year, she became involved with SNCC, organizing a Civil Liberties Workshop in the spring of 1963, and later marrying her husband Bob Zellner the following August. In 1964 she moved to Boston with her husband forming a Northeast Regional Office of SNCC while recruiting and interviewing prospective volunteers for the Freedom Summer Project. In 1965, Dottie had a daughter, and moved back to Atlanta with her new child and husband. She and her husband wrote a Grassroots Organizing Work (GROW) proposal to SNCC, to stay a part of the organization. She later moved to New Orleans to work with Anne and Carl Braden of the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF) for five years. Zellner worked as a nurse for several years before joining the Center for Constitutional Rights in 1984. In 1998, she became director of publications and development for the Queens College School of Law. She lectures and writes frequently about the civil rights movement and co-edited Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC. As of 2014, she is involved in advocacy work on behalf of Palestinians
The Civil Rights History Project is a joint project of the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture to collect video and audio recordings of personal histories and testimonials of individuals who participated in the Civil Rights movement.
In English.
Finding aid http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.afc/eadafc.af013005 - Metadata URL:
- http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.afc/afc2010039.afc2010039_crhp0125
- Language:
- eng
- Additional Rights Information:
- Collection is open for research. To request materials, please contact the Folklife Reading Room at http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.afc/folklife.contact
- Extent:
- 21 video files (Apple ProRes 422 HQ, QuickTime wrapper) (3:03:01) : digital, sound, color.
transcript 1 item (.pdf) : text files. - Original Collection:
- Civil Rights History Project collection AFC 2010/039: 0125
- Contributing Institution:
- American Folklife Center
- Rights:
-
