The Class of '65

by Jim Auchmutey

  Back in Georgia, vandalism toward the farm was taking a dangerous turn. One Monday night, a car pulled into the driveway of the roadside market and deposited several sticks of fizzing dynamite. The explosion severely damaged the front of the structure and wrecked a freezer and a meat display case. More than a hundred country hams were lost, although a few were saved. The Klan-charred hams tasted especially good, everyone joked.

  Koinonia decided it was time to speak out. The fellowship placed a full-page ad in the Times-Recorder in an attempt to introduce itself, starting with the correct way to pronounce that funny-looking Greek name. Koinonia was essentially a church, the ad explained, that worshipped daily and counted among its residents a number of ministers and missionaries. “It is true that a few of our beliefs differ from those held by some people in this section. But the right to differ is a precious American heritage. The Fathers of this nation, coming from countries where religious differences were not tolerated, sought to preserve and perpetuate their newfound liberty by writing into the Constitution: ‘Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.’ . . . We pledge ourselves to respect the rights of those who differ with us. We believe the citizens of this county will give us the same consideration.”

  That was wishful thinking.

  The newspaper itself deplored the bombing, hinting at a more acceptable course of action: “Surely there are more honorable ways of waging a battle than through violence and possible bloodshed.” Koinonia was about to get waylaid by one of those honorable methods.

  ____________________

  As bad as the bombing had been, a more fundamental threat to the community arrived in the mail over the summer. Four insurance companies were canceling six polices covering the farm’s buildings and equipment. In the coming months, Koinonia was cut off by its gasoline distributor, its butane supplier, its building materials company, its fertilizer and seed sellers, its mechanic and auto parts dealer, and, worst of all, the Americus bank that had financed the farm’s operations since 1942. One of the few men who offered any explanation was Willis Shiver, head of the lumber company whose materials had been used in most of the community’s structures. He wasn’t dealing with them anymore, he said, because of “pressure from levelheaded businessmen.”

  Translation: The White Citizens Council was boycotting Koinonia.

  One by one, stores stopped selling to people from the farm. They had to drive to nearby Albany or Columbus for groceries. They had to make mail-order purchases because the Sears Roebuck in Americus refused to deal with them. Margaret Wittkamper tried to buy back-to-school shoes for her sons at Belk, and when she was ready to check out, she noticed a police officer enter the store and motion for the clerk. He returned and said it was against the law for him to sell anything to her.

  “There’s no law like that,” she protested.

  “Yes, but the people in Americus are upset about you all at the farm, and I just can’t let you have those shoes.”

  Koinonia couldn’t sell much of anything locally, either. The demand for its produce, hams, and eggs shriveled, and its only customers were a few black-owned markets in Albany. “Chain stores as well as independent grocers refused to stock our eggs, even though they had white shells and were laid by all-white flocks in white buildings,” Clarence wrote, trying to make light of the situation. “Perhaps it was because the yolks were colored!”

  The most bizarre embodiment of the boycott was a sad little man everyone knew as Slappey. He wasn’t quite right. He pursed his lips and cracked his knuckles and pulled at his scraggly, thin hair in a state of perpetual fidgetiness. His task, as he saw it, was to trail Koinonians to make sure no one did business with them. “Don’t buy any of them nigger eggs,” he’d call out in a shrill voice when Con Browne tried to make deliveries. Con figured someone was paying his cab fare because he didn’t drive and seemed to pop up in every store. Slappey claimed the citizens council was bankrolling him to keep an eye on the Communists.

  He had seemed friendly enough before the violence started, when he used to visit the farm and play with the children on the trampoline or amuse them by throwing his voice and making it sound like Jiminy Cricket was trapped inside an apple crate. But after the white community turned against the farm, so did Slappey. He became a racist caricature. His vigilance could be downright creepy.

  Once, outside the courthouse, he sneaked up behind Clarence and kicked him in the rear end. Another time, in the middle of Americus, he noticed someone from the farm with her niece, who was visiting. He looked her up and down admiringly and said, “You’ll make some nigger a fine wife.” Then there was the time he followed Lora Browne and her mother into Walgreens, where they were drinking Cokes at the soda fountain. He waited until they were finished and smashed their glasses, cutting his hand and bleeding all over himself as he explained that he didn’t want anyone to have to press their lips against the same tumblers.

  There were actually a handful of businessmen in the area who were willing to disregard the boycott, albeit carefully. One of them resided nearby in Plains.

  Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter belonged to one of half a dozen families in Sumter County who were known to be tolerant about race. Though both were natives and had grown up with segregation, they had spent their early married years living on bases around the country as he climbed the ranks in the navy. The military, recently desegregated by order of President Truman, provided a marked contrast to the social order of southwest Georgia.

  When his father died in 1953, the Carters moved back home to run the family peanut warehouse. Not long afterward, they went to hear a visiting preacher at Plains Baptist Church, who noticed his old friend Clarence Jordan entering the sanctuary and introduced him. “About a third of the people got up and walked out,” Carter recalled. “That was the first time I knew anything about Koinonia.” The town folks filled them in. “They said it was Communist,” Rosalynn Carter said.

  When the White Citizens Council later approached Carter about joining, he said no. His refusal to go along with the crowd cost him some business, although it was nothing on the scale of the blacklisting against Koinonia. Carter quietly offered to shell the farm’s peanuts—Con Browne remembered taking some to his warehouse—but there were never many transactions because Koinonia was unable to get fertilizer and fuel and was forced to move away from row crops. Years later, when Carter ran for president, reporters would examine his limited contact with the besieged community only seven miles from Plains and look for clues about his moral character. That campaign led to the White House, of course, where Carter’s chief of staff had a familiar name: Hamilton Jordan, Clarence’s nephew.

  ____________________

  It got worse.

  A few days after Thanksgiving, the reopened market was blasted with buckshot, ruining coolers bought to replace ones that had been ruined in previous attacks. On the night after Christmas, the gasoline pump at the farm was drilled with four rounds of steel-jacketed bullets. On New Year’s Day, the sign at the entrance was riddled with rifle fire. The property damage reached a noisy climax on the night of January 14, 1957, when another charge detonated at the market, blowing it into pieces that were found hundreds of feet away. Koinonia elected not to rebuild this time, leaving the blackened remains as a testament for motorists on US 19.

  One of Greg’s future classmates, David Morgan, saw the smoldering wreckage as his family drove by on the way to visit relatives. The fourth grader had never heard of Koinonia and didn’t understand what it was, except that people didn’t like it. It scared him to think that something like that could happen near his seemingly peaceful hometown. In the coming years, he would remember his glimpse of what fear and hate could lead to.

  With each incident, the law was called to investigate, and in unincorporated Sumter County, that meant Sheriff Fred D. Chappell. He was new to the job and wore civilian clothes, pants hi
ked high, two inches of nylon socks showing, instead of a uniform and the Mountie hat favored by many southern sheriffs. He was heavyset and jowly and had a foul temper that could turn his face purple and lead him to spew a stream of racial slurs. When he came to Koinonia after the latest shooting or bombing, he did not seem very motivated to get to the bottom of things, perhaps because he suspected that the victims were perpetrating the attacks.

  Wreckage of the Koinonia farm market

  after the second bombing, 1957. Courtesy of Conrad Browne

  “I don’t find any clues, and I don’t get any cooperation from those folks,” Chappell told the Associated Press. He went on to say that people around Americus “have had it up to here” with Koinonia and related a report he had received about a white girl and two black boys from the farm walking down the street eating from the same bag of popcorn (a report later debunked—they weren’t from the farm and the white girl was a fair-skinned black girl). “They’re operating more openly now than ever before, and somebody is going to get hurt.”

  On the first Friday in February, someone did almost get hurt—almost killed, in fact.

  Early that evening, Greg and some of the children were playing volley­ball on a lighted court beside a peach orchard when they saw two cars creeping down the bend in the highway leading to the farm. The vehicles were so close that it looked like the first one was towing the second one. The children stopped their game to watch. It seemed odd; maybe one of them was having mechanical trouble. Then they heard several pops in rapid succession and the sound of something pelting the branches like a blowing sleet storm. Greg caught a glimpse of the guns as they discharged from the car windows, bursts of fire flicking from their muzzles like tongues from snakes.

  “Hit the dirt!” someone screamed, and the kids dove and scattered.

  Inside the house near the road where the Brownes lived, Lora had just come in from volleyball and was putting her little brothers to bed. She bent over to remove John’s shoes when a crack sounded and a bullet pierced the wall inches above her head. A college student who was staying at the farm and had been sitting with the young ones yelled, “Get down! The house is going to explode.” Lora corralled her brothers, and the three of them crawled into the bathroom shower, where she thought they might be safer.

  After the volleyball court shooting, Greg said years later, “We thought they were going to take us out and hang us on crosses.”

  Once the mysterious cars had vanished into the night, Sheriff Chappell was summoned. As best he could piece together, at least two gunmen had attacked the farm. The first volley came from a shotgun, the second from a .22-caliber rifle. When he heard that Con and Ora Browne had not been there at the time of the shootings—they were in Americus—the sheriff formulated a theory of the crime to fit his biases: the Brownes had done it. They had shot at their own daughter and damn near hit her in an attempt to elicit outside sympathy and contributions. Clarence was livid; he wasn’t sure why they even bothered to call the sheriff anymore when all he did was test their commitment to nonviolence.

  A few weeks after the assault, Lora’s fifth-grade teacher pulled her aside and asked, “Did you almost get shot?” Her sister in the North had sent her a copy of a church bulletin that included an item about an embattled community near Americus, Georgia. It was the first time anyone at Thalean Elementary School had mentioned the troubles to Lora. Her teacher was shocked. So was Lora, but for a different reason. She couldn’t understand how an intelligent person could live in Sumter County and not have some idea of what was happening. Most people didn’t seem to know, or want to know.

  There were more close calls—shots fired at residents, shots fired into cars, more shots fired into houses, once from a machine gun. The most brazen attack came one night when a sniper targeted a window where Clarence usually sat reading. He had gone to bed, but the slug almost hit their oldest daughter, Eleanor, who was home from college.

  With no expectation of police protection, Koinonia organized a night watch. Residents strung lights along the highway and posted sentries armed only with flashlights in cars parked along the shoulder. To fortify the houses nearest the road, they piled wood against exterior walls and rearranged furniture inside where it could stop the bullets. The children joined in during their playtime and dug pint-sized foxholes where they could look out for the approach of enemy pickups until their parents made them come in before sundown.

  One of the night watchmen was a professional soldier, Con’s brother-in-law—Uncle Carl to the kids—an army paratrooper stationed at Fort Benning in nearby Columbus. During a visit to the farm, he reported for duty in full uniform, his chest beribboned with decorations he had been awarded during the Korean War. He brought his rifle, but Con and Ora asked him to put it away, so he reluctantly sat through the night unarmed at his guard post by the highway. “So your dad’s not going to stand up for you?” he told Lora. “I’ll stand up for you. If they think they’re going to kill my niece, they’ve got another thing coming.”

  ____________________

  It was time to appeal to a higher authority: the highest-ranking soldier himself, the commander-in-chief. “Dear President Eisenhower,” the letter began. “A community of nearly sixty men, women and children is facing annihilation unless quick, decisive action is taken by someone in authority. I am therefore appealing to you as a last resort.” Clarence laid out the crimes against Koinonia and pleaded for federal intervention, but the architect of D-Day did not respond. Eisenhower’s attorney general, Herbert Brownell, answered the letter, saying that while the attacks were regrettable, they were a matter for state and local law enforcement.

  That was not comforting. The state revenue department had been combing through Koinonia’s account books for weeks. The governor had ordered the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to examine the commune for evidence of subversive activities. Sumter County had impaneled a grand jury to look into the farm and the incidents there—a grand jury whose members included some of the same men who were boycotting the farm.

  “A number of us have been summoned and we have spent many hours before them being quizzed in Gestapo fashion,” Clarence wrote. “They seem to be convinced that we are the authors of all the violence for the purpose of working up sympathy, publicity, and money. They confiscated all of our financial records and also our mailing list, and photostated every card. The whole procedure has been one of the most discouraging things I have ever witnessed in my life.”

  The grand jury found what it wanted. Its April presentment took more than five thousand words to fault almost every aspect of Koinonia. Among the conclusions: the farm had indeed orchestrated the violence and reaped $27,500 in donations as a result. Its newsletter was a “propaganda sheet,” and its mailing list of fifteen hundred included known Communists. It had brainwashed local blacks into participating in its communal system, which amounted to peonage. The community was not faith-based by any reasonable definition. “We find its claim to Christianity is sheer window dressing and has no precedent in the religious annals of the United States.”

  At least there were no indictments.

  The grand jury got one thing right: Koinonia’s plight was attracting publicity. The persecution of the farm produced the worst headlines to come out of Sumter County since the revelation of scandalous conditions at the Andersonville POW camp during the Civil War. Publications from Time to Redbook to the New York Times sent correspondents to Americus and documented the local animosity toward the farm. “The misconceptions about the community are as many and as tinted as the rumors that circulate the town,” a stringer for Newsweek reported to the Atlanta bureau. He went on to relate the story of a man who went to the farm to pick up some potatoes, wandered behind a barn, and claimed to have seen three women washing clothes: one white, two black—all naked. “Other rumors have it that Koinonia is a group of free-lovers, communists, home-sexuals [sic], nudists, spies, and mongrelizers of the
races. The subject causes uneasiness or awe.”

  An editorial cartoon in the Atlanta Journal depicted

  Koinonia as a victim of the tempestuous times.

  Religious journals like The Christian Century eagerly followed the Koinonia story and depicted it as an American morality play. The great theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, writing in The Messenger, the publication of the Evangelical and Reformed Church, called the grand jury report a “monstrous injustice in the name of justice” and mused about the way the Supreme Court’s school decision had made good people better and bad people worse. On a more secular note, Eleanor Roosevelt, the patron saint of liberalism at the time, wrote about the farm in her syndicated column: “All of us who believe that there are no second-class citizens in the United States, and that we must learn to live together peacefully regardless of race, color or creed, have an obligation to give what help we can to those in the Koinonia Community.”

  Help did come. Churches sent care packages and supplies. (Greg wore donated trousers for years.) People wrote supportive letters and enclosed contributions. One woman drove all the way from New Hampshire to deliver a single sack of fertilizer. Dorothy Day, the Catholic activist and journalist, arrived on a bus from New York and volunteered to stand watch. One night, when a shot struck the vehicle in which she was sitting, Ora Browne ran to her aid and, noticing that she was shivering, offered her a coat. Day waved it off. “That ain’t cold, baby. That’s scared.”

  Koinonia turned to its contacts in the black community to address two of its most pressing needs: banking and insurance. A black-owned bank in Atlanta was pleased to have its business. In an effort to find insurance, Clarence sought the advice of someone who had faced a similar round of reprisal cancellations in Alabama, the leader of the Montgomery bus boycott, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. (Clarence had spoken from his pulpit at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church when another man was pastor and would speak there again at King’s invitation in 1958.) In his reply, King let him know that the Georgians were not alone. “You and the Koinonia Community have been in my prayers continually for the last several months. The injustices and indignities that you are now confronting certainly leave you in trying moments. I hope, however, that you will gain consolation from the fact that in your struggle for freedom and a true Christian community you have cosmic companionship.”