MLK 2012 | Civil Rights Activists

Featured Speakers

Geneseo welcomes Judy Richardson, Dorothy Zellner, and Betty Garman Robinson, Civil Rights activists and editors of  Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, for the college’s annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemoration.

Learn more:  Richardson |  Zellner |  Robinson

DOROTHY M. ZELLNER , a SNCC staff member for five years (1962-1967), worked in Atlanta; Danville, Virginia;  and in Greenwood, Mississippi, during the 1964 Freedom Summer.  As a member of SNCC's Communications Department, she co-edited  SNCC's newsletter, T he Student Voice, with Julian Bond, wrote press releases and was a liaison person with the media. In 1972 she became a licensed practical nurse and worked at and organized a union in the New Orleans Home for Incurables. Once back in New York with her two daughters in 1983, she worked at the Center for Constitutional Rights, managing the group’s publications and its Ella Baker Student Program, and then at the City University of New York School of Law as director of institutional advancement and publications. Her article “Red Roadshow: Eastland in New Orleans” appeared in Louisiana History and won a New York Foundation for the Arts award. Profiled in Debra L. Schultz’s book, Going South: Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement, she lectures frequently about SNCC, the Civil Rights Movement, and blacks and Jews in the Movement. She was featured in TNT's "Century of Women" and in the PBS program, "The Jewish Americans." Currently a board member of the Friends of the Jenin Freedom Theatre in Palestine, she speaks against the Israeli occupation of that country. Her recent articles have appeared in  Jewish Currents.