The Class of '65

by Jim Auchmutey

  Koinonia’s liberated attitude about race was the most infamous aspect of its reputation, but there was an irony behind that stance for equality: few blacks ever became members of the fellowship. Some of them lived on the property as tenants, and many worked there over the years and appreciated Koinonia’s broad-mindedness and its generosity in paying higher wages than other farms. Yet only one black family pursued full membership during the 1950s. It vexed Lora’s parents, who would have loved to darken the community’s complexion. “We had bathrooms and we had adequate food and clothes, and yet the Negroes didn’t particularly want to come into the situation,” Ora Browne lamented.

  One of the main problems, Koinonia came to understand, was that a commune was alien to the religious experience of most black people in Sumter County. They weren’t eager to join an organization that required members to give up their possessions when most of them didn’t have that much to begin with. So they worked there, ate and worshipped there, maybe even lived there, but they didn’t make the full commitment of divestment that the white families had made.

  Few outsiders knew that about Koinonia. All they knew was that black people were treated as equals, and that, to them, was unconscionable.

  Lora’s friend didn’t return to Koinonia, but when Ginger broke her leg in an accident at school, Lora visited her home, a log cabin deep in the piney woods, and stayed the weekend. Ginger and her mother couldn’t have been more hospitable. Her father, a Klansman, was a different matter. When Con and Ora came to get their daughter, he peppered them with questions about the farm and its religious views, an interrogation that climaxed with the Big Horrible:

  “Would you let your daughter marry a colored fellow?”

  Con said he would trust his children to fall in love with whomever they chose.

  “Even if he’s a nigra?”

  “Yes, even if he’s a Negro.”

  “Well, it says in the Bible that niggers are inferior.”

  “I’d like to see that. Could you show me that passage please?”

  Ginger’s father stomped off to get the good book, and returned flipping through the pages. “Here,” he said, pointing to a verse in Acts that uses the word Niger. Con explained that it was referring not to a race of humans but to Simeon Niger, a teacher in the early church who may have come from Africa and had dark skin. “It doesn’t say nigger.”

  The awkward conversation had reached a dead end. The Brownes departed, and Lora never visited Ginger’s house again.

  ____________________

  At one point during Greg’s early years at Koinonia, the adults grew concerned about a seemingly innocent development: the proliferation of toy guns. It disturbed them to see their children shooting at each other even if they were just playing cowboys and Indians.

  Nothing united the fellowship like its belief in pacifism. Almost every man in the commune had resisted military service in one way or another—a further source of local resentment. The subject of nonviolence seemed to come up in every other sermon or Bible study, and worship services often included a singing of “Down by the Riverside,” with its spirited chorus of “ain’t gonna study war no more.” When Koinonians took day trips, two of their favorite destinations provided stark object lessons in the cost of armed conflict. They could drive a few miles north to the Andersonville POW camp, where close ranks of tombstones marked the final resting places of the thousands of Union prisoners who died there during the Civil War. Or they could go to the eastern edge of the county, to the state park at Lake Blackshear, where a B-29 Superfortress was displayed in a field as part of a veterans memorial. The grounded plane was the same model that had dropped atomic bombs on Japan. For the adults, it was a somber reminder of tens of thousands of lives incinerated in two hellish flashes. For the children, it was a ginormous curiosity that doubled as a playground. “We’d climb up there and sit in the cockpit and explore the whole thing,” Greg remembered.

  Con Browne was particularly zealous about eliminating the symbols of violence at Koinonia. “I hated guns,” he said. “I talked with the children about war and the bad things guns could do. I told them that some people’s religion was different from ours, that they thought strongman tactics ruled the world. We didn’t believe that. We believed love was the strongest thing in the world and would win in the end.”

  For all the talks and sermons, the gunplay continued. The parents finally decided to put a stop to it. They wanted to teach a lesson, not merely issue an edict, so they came up with the idea of a disarmament service. The children were instructed to surrender all faux weapons—store bought or handmade—and toss them into a burn barrel as the commune stood in witness. Anyone who didn’t possess an instrument of violence could clip pictures of guns out of catalogs or magazines and throw those into the flames.

  The children complied, but the ritual cleansing hardly settled the issue. Knowing that toy guns were frowned upon made the kids want them more. They began fashioning their own weaponry on the sly, carving wooden rifles and making broadswords and Viking shields, hiding them from the grown-ups. “If anything, our arsenal got bigger,” Greg said. “And we started making things that actually worked.” One of them was a rudimentary pipe gun that used a firecracker on one end to shoot a rock out the other. “It was like a little cannon. You could knock the bark off a tree with that thing.”

  Con never gave up his effort to demilitarize Koinonia. Once, when his youngest son, John, came home from school with a dart gun he had received in a gift exchange, Con sneaked into his room at night and replaced it with a toy truck. After John woke and realized his dart gun was missing, he searched the house until he found it in his father’s closet and reclaimed it. Con discovered the theft and ended the tug-of-war by confiscating the contraband for keeps. “I really liked that little dart gun,” John said years later, a wistful note in his voice.

  There were two working guns at Koinonia during Greg’s childhood: Clarence’s old ROTC rifle from college and an antique 12-gauge double-barreled shotgun used for hunting, killing snakes, or culling livestock. Clarence occasionally took some of the boys out to shoot rabbits, explaining that there was nothing immoral about killing something you meant to eat. As for eliminating unwanted animals, Greg’s father usually played the role of the grim reaper. No stray was safe around Will Wittkamper. “A dog would come by, and Will would say, ‘Stand back,’” recalled Charlie Browne, Con and Ora’s oldest son, “and then he’d pull the trigger: Boom! And you’re thinking: ‘Holy shit! He shot that dog.’ Will had no use for pets. If you couldn’t put it in a harness or cook it or milk it, there was no damn reason to have it around as far as he was concerned.”

  Will was a devoted pacifist who had been arrested for his beliefs while Clarence was still in knee-highs, but that didn’t mean he was opposed to the use of force. Far from it. Like other fathers at Koinonia, he practiced corporal punishment, taking the Bible literally when it said, in Proverbs 13:24: “He that spareth his rod hateth his son.” Will did not spareth his firstborn, keeping him in line with a razor strop or a green switch freshly cut from a peach tree. Billy grew so resentful of his dad’s whippings that he rejected many of his beliefs, including his religion, well before finishing grade school. Will began to soften his discipline under the influence of Con, who rarely punished his children. The principal beneficiary was Greg, who escaped most of his father’s wrath and remained a more obedient son, more willing than his brother to follow the old man’s example in matters of faith—for a time, at least.

  Will’s attitude about pacifism was never as simple as it sounded. He didn’t even like the word; he thought pacifist sounded too passive, too indifferent. He preferred to think of himself as a peacemaker because the term implied effort, and he believed that it took unrelenting effort, not saintly acquiescence, to avert violence.

  His sons would learn what he meant soon enough.

  ____________________

 
In Greg’s first couple of years at Thalean, his polite demeanor and eager blue eyes made him something of a teacher’s pet. Most students didn’t bother him or the other children from Koinonia. The school was so small that the principal and staff were usually able to monitor things, and what little harassment that occurred took the form of quick shoves or whispered name-calling. As Greg advanced in school, however, the civil rights movement began to crystallize in the South. With it came a rising level of white resentment, a general cussedness that passed from parent to child. Boys began to pick fights with kids from the interracial commune down the road.

  Each time a Koinonia student was challenged, he had to decide how to respond. In the heat of such moments, biblical teachings usually did not pop into mind. Instinct took over—fight or flight.

  The Browne brothers responded differently, in keeping with their different natures. The outgoing Charlie, who started first grade four years behind Greg, constantly got into scraps when others called him a Commie or suggested that his mother slept with black men. “I decided real early I wasn’t going to be a pacifist, and I think some of the students liked me for that,” he said. “They’d say, ‘At least you’ll fight with us. Those other wimps out there won’t.’” His more reticent brother, John, shrank from the prospect of conflict. When he began Thalean a year after Charlie, he dreaded school so much that he would hide in a hollow tree instead of boarding the bus. Clarence persuaded him to go to class by promising to take him horseback riding.

  The Wittkamper boys were another study in contrasts. While Billy tried to avoid confrontations at school, he did get into a couple of fights and found them, against all his dad’s preachments, liberating and strangely cathartic. “It felt good,” he said. “They left me alone after that.”

  Greg was torn. He wanted to emulate his big brother, to look strong and stick up for himself, but he also wanted to follow the examples of his father and of Con and Clarence, who talked about the Christian’s duty to meet hatred with love. Everyone at Koinonia knew what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount: “Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” What seemed so clear during a Bible lesson wasn’t as easy in real life, especially for a nine-year-old.

  In the spring of 1956, as he neared the end of third grade, Greg faced his first test in applied nonviolence. A boy who had been badgering him since he started at Thalean followed him into the restroom and started calling him a nigger lover. There was nothing unusual about that, but this time the belligerence escalated. As Greg stood at the trough urinal, he felt a sharp jab of pain in his lower back, and then another. The little prick was kidney-punching him.

  “Stop it, Bobby!” Greg warned several times. The punches kept coming.

  Greg finally turned around and smacked him in the chest. The blow took Bobby by surprise, and he tumbled into the trough where his target had been trying to pee. Other boys might have burst out laughing at such a poetic turn of events. Not Greg. He felt awful. “I certainly didn’t tell my parents about it. I didn’t think it was a very Christian thing to do.”

  Greg and Bobby were called into the principal’s office the next day and instructed to make up with each other. Bobby’s apology seemed halfhearted, perhaps because he knew that the hostilities might not be over; his older brother had already threatened retaliation. Greg was far more upset by the altercation. He had violated a teaching of Jesus, something that came straight from the mouth of the Savior, printed in red letters in the book of Matthew, something that was the source of one of Koinonia’s most precious values. As he sat beside the instigator of the incident, he couldn’t help himself: he began to cry.

  chapter 3

  Terror in the Night

  In the spring of 1953, Ralph McGill wrote a column on the front page of the Atlanta Constitution under the mild-sounding headline: “One Day It Will Be Monday.” His subject was anything but mild. The editor was warning his readers of ground-shaking changes that he knew would incense many of them.

  The headline referred to the US Supreme Court’s custom of announcing its decisions on the first day of the week. The most widely anticipated case on the docket—Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka—combined five challenges to racial segregation in public schools, which was required by law in seventeen southern and border states and optional in four others. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund saw the litigation as the key to ending American apartheid. When the prophesied Monday finally came, on May 17, 1954, the justices unanimously outlawed the peculiar institution that characterized education in a third of the country. Their pronouncement changed history and in one corner of Georgia unleashed passions that threatened to destroy Koinonia.

  The Brown decision was met with predictable yelps of protest from southern politicians like Governor Herman Talmadge, who issued one of the first condemnations, swearing that Georgians “will not tolerate the mixing of the races” in their public institutions, regardless of what the court said. Many news commentators were more measured, at least initially. In Americus, the Times-Recorder held out hope that the ruling would be unenforceable: “No law or regulation can be stronger than the public sentiment behind it. If the ‘public interest’ is seriously taken into consideration as suggested by the high court, then it will be many years before the schools in most communities of the South are desegregated.”

  It was an accurate prediction. Greg was finishing first grade when the Brown ruling came down. He would be a twelfth grader before he saw any black students in the hallways. Because of the court’s vague enforcement directive—a year after the decision, it instructed school systems to desegregate “with all deliberate speed”—leaders in the Deep South were able to take their sweet time when it came to enacting the decreed changes. The twilight of segregation in the public schools would be long and arduous.

  In the months after Brown, the attitude of many white southerners hardened and a backlash took hold. In the nation’s capital, three-quarters of the senators and congressmen representing the states that had belonged to the Confederacy signed the Southern Manifesto declaring the decision unconstitutional. In Mississippi, the first White Citizens Council was formed—a sort of Rotary Club dedicated to resisting integration by any means, especially economic pressure such as firing employees or throwing tenant farmers off their land. The councils spread under various names to dozens of communities across the region; an Americus version was chartered in February 1956.

  As they looked around Sumter County almost two years after Brown, the group’s organizers could see only one entity outside the black community that publicly supported racial equality: that eccentric band of Christians out on Highway 49. People around Americus had long been suspicious of Koinonia, but it was easy to stomach the place as long as those people kept to themselves and didn’t try to export their dissident views to the local populace. In the fourteen years since its founding, the farm had faced gossip and grumbling and a degree of shunning but only occasional outright hostility.

  That was about to change.

  ____________________

  It was a delicate request. In March 1956, a minister friend of Clarence Jordan’s asked him to help two students enroll in the Georgia State College of Business, a school near the capitol dome in Atlanta. The college, which later became Georgia State University, was all white; the students were black. They needed the signatures of two university system alumni and thought the leader of Koinonia, a graduate of the flagship school in Athens, was a logical candidate for one of them.

  Clarence wasn’t looking to pick a fight with the state’s higher education hierarchy, but he figured these students had as much right to attend the college as anyone. He met them during a trip to Atlanta and took them to see the president of the institution. Word must have leaked out because reporters were waiting for them when they left. Someone was trying to desegregate the university system, and that was news.

  As it turned out, Clarence was ineligible t
o sign the applications because he wasn’t a graduate of that particular college. But the fact that he had intended to sign was enough. He woke the next morning to find himself on the front page of the Americus newspaper. Governor Marvin Griffin, a south Georgian who had pledged to keep the state’s public schools segregated “come hell or high water,” took notice and phoned the sheriff in Sumter County to ask who “this Jordan fellow” was. “Clarence came back from Atlanta and said this was what the spirit led him to do,” Con Browne remembered. “We didn’t know he was going to do it, but we wouldn’t have objected. I didn’t think it was going to cause us problems.”

  Was he ever wrong. A line had been crossed. Within days, local misgivings about Koinonia turned into belligerence, and the farm became a magnet for all the anger and resentment that had been building since the Brown decision.

  It started with threatening phone calls in the night, usually to the Jordans. Then the vandals went to work. Fences were cut, sugar was dumped into gas tanks, almost three hundred fruit trees were chopped down. The farm’s roadside market made an irresistible target. It was located five miles from the community on US 19, the old Magnolia Highway to Florida, and was marked by several signs identifying it as the “Koinonia Farm Market.” The signs were shot up repeatedly and hauled off so they couldn’t be repaired.

  In June, the county government piled on. The farm was getting ready for Camp Koinonia, its annual summer camp for thirty children, white and black, when it learned that the commission had won an injunction blocking the eight-week program from opening. The grounds: health code violations. When that didn’t stick, the grounds were changed to decency because the kids might witness pigs giving birth. By the time the matter came up for a court hearing, Koinonia had accepted an invitation to move the camp to another site in the mountains of Tennessee. Greg attended and had a swell time—he didn’t miss the pregnant sows at all.