Dorothy Zellner

Dorothy "Dottie" Miller Zellner is an American human rights activist, feminist, editor, lecturer, and writer. A veteran of the 1960s civil rights movement, she served as a recruiter for the Freedom Summer project and was co-editor of Student Voice, the student newsletter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She is active in the Palestinian solidarity movement.

Dorothy Miller Zellner
Born1938 (age 82–83)
Manhattan, New York City
NationalityAmerican
OccupationCivil rights activist

Early life

Zellner was born in Manhattan and raised by left-wing secular non-Zionist Jewish immigrant parents who could speak Yiddish.[1] Her parents raised her with an awareness of Black history, racial justice, socialism, the Soviet Union, and Jewish resistance to Nazism.[2] She credits the Jewish social justice tradition of her parents for inspiring her to become involved in the civil rights movement.[3][4]

Political activism
Black Panther Party logo designed by Dorothy Zellner and Ruth Howard.

In 1966, Zellner helped design the logo for the Black Panther Party. She was asked by Stokely Carmichael to go to Zoo Atlanta and photograph a panther for inspiration. Her husband Bob Zellner and another SNCC member took photographs and Zellner created a sketch. Carmichael requested that Zellner make another attempt based on a rough drawing by SNCC member Ruth Howard that Howard had based on the mascot of Clark Atlanta University. In 1967, Zellner's second drawing become the official Black Panther Party logo.[5]

In 1969, while serving as a staff member of the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), Zellner wrote a memo critiquing feminist consciousness-raising groups as "therapy" and for being insufficiently "political." In response, fellow SCEF member Carol Hanisch addressed an essay to the women's caucus of the SCEF in February 1969. Originally titled "Some Thoughts in Response to Dottie’s Thoughts on a Women’s Liberation Movement", the article was republished in 1970 in the book Notes from the Second Year: Women's Liberation under the title "The Personal is Political." The essay has since become widely circulated in feminist circles.[6]

Zellner worked as a nurse for several years, before she joined the Center for Constitutional Rights in 1984. She became director of publications and development for Queens College School of Law in 1998.[7]

After hearing a talk by Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery in 2002, Zellner became involved in the Israeli-Palestinian peace movement. Since 2002, she has traveled to Israel and Palestine on dozens of occasions, volunteered with Physicians for Human Rights, and is an active supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS).[8]

See also

References
  1. "What Ella Baker Taught Us About Ferguson And Gaza". Tikkun. Retrieved 2020-07-29.
  2. "Dorothy Zellner". SNCC Digital. Retrieved 2020-07-29.
  3. "From Mississippi to Gaza — Dorothy Zellner reflects on 50 years of struggle". Mondoweiss. Retrieved 2020-07-29.
  4. "What We Did: The American Jewish Communist Left and the Establishment of the State of Israel" (PDF). Jewish Voice for Peace. Retrieved 2020-07-30.
  5. "The Women Behind the Black Panther Party Logo". Design Observer. Retrieved 2020-07-29.
  6. Hanisch, Carol (January 2006). "The Personal Is Political: The Women's Liberation Movement classic with a new explanatory introduction". Retrieved 2020-07-29.
  7. "Dorothy Miller Zellner". Jewish Women's Archive. Retrieved 2020-07-29.
  8. "Jewish civil rights activists use legacy to promote BDS". The Times of Israel. Retrieved 2020-07-29.
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