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CARD: Bob Zellner was arrested at a Moral Mondays protest in 2013.

CARD: It was not his first arrest.

POLICE OFFICIAL: Can I have your attention. I’m asking you to disburse.

PROTESTORS: We fight! We fight! We fight!

BOB ZELLNER: Well Moral Monday is really takes me right back to 50 years ago. I was the first white southern field secretary for SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and I was one of the first seventeen that were arrested in Moral Monday.

It was very unlikely that I would get involved in the civil rights movement because my father, when I was a youngster was in the Ku Klux Klan. His, his father was in the Klan. But I was very lucky that my father left the Ku Klux Klan. I didn’t know granddaddy was a Klansman. I didn’t know he hated people because of their color. He was just a nice old grandfather to me – who I loved. And my mother at one point after I became involved in the movement, we were in a march and we were going to march through Birmingham and she sent me a telegram and she said something very hurtful. She said, you have to drop out of the march when you go to Birmingham because your grandfather’s going to shoot you. I marched. And luckily we were arrested at the state line, so I never had to test. But I knew I was going to march in Birmingham and I was pretty sure that my grandfather was going to shoot me also.

PROTESTORS: Hey hey, ho ho, Pat McCrory has got to go. Hey hey, ho ho, Pat McCrory has got to go. Hey hey, ho ho, Pat McCrory has got to go.

Clip: Grandson of a Klansman Becomes a Civil Rights Crusader

January 3, 2014

Moral Mondays protester Bob Zellner may be one of the most unlikely Civil Rights activists in American history. His mother, he says, once sent him a telegram saying, “you have to drop out of the march when you go to Birmingham because your grandfather’s going to shoot you.”

Zellner appears in our special “State of Conflict: North Carolina.”

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