SNCC 60th

“Can you type?” SNCC executive secretary Jim Forman asked Dorothy “Dottie” Miller shortly after she walked into the SNCC office on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, Georgia. (She later married SNCC’s Bob Zellner, becoming Dottie Zellner).

Although she had come to Atlanta to join SNCC, she had not heard back and had instead spent the last five months working at the Southern Regional Council (SRC).

As she remembered, “the more stories I read about the heroic actions of SNCC workers, the more awed I became. The more awed I became, the shyer I was.”

Within a matter of months, however, Zellner went from “being afraid to walk twenty minutes to the SNCC office to being a full-fledged staff member in an organization I loved.”

Zellner was 22-years-old at the time, and she would ultimately spend the next 22 years of her life in the South.

Zellner was born and raised in New York City. The child of immigrant Jewish leftists, her parents taught her about Black history and the need for racial justice. She grew up hearing stories of Jewish resistance to Nazi fascism.

Zellner’s parents supported her move to Atlanta, and it came as no surprise when years later, Zellner’s father proudly passed around a press clipping of his daughter in jail.

After graduating from Queens College and inspired by the sit-in movement, Zellner first went South in 1960 to attend a CORE workshop. She later helped plan and orchestrate New Orlean’s first sit-in.

Many of Zellner’s friends at CORE would speak “incessantly” about an organization run completely by young people. This organization was SNCC.