The Class of '65

by Jim Auchmutey

  Part 2

  Americus

  chapter 4

  The Children’s Hour

  Koinonia’s troubles didn’t end when the bombings and drive-by shootings stopped. The conflict between the farm and the outside community simply moved to another setting, one that put Greg and the other children on the front lines.

  In the fall of 1960, three Koinonia teenagers were ready to start high school, one from each of the fellowship’s core families: Lora Browne, Jan Jordan, and Billy Wittkamper. Sumter County had dual school systems—one in Americus, the other outside the city—in addition to separate facilities for whites and blacks. The Koinonia students normally would have attended the white county high school in Plains, but as the offspring of ministers, they were expected to go on to college, and the city high school in Americus had better preparatory classes. The farm also had to consider its history with the schools. The Jordans’ oldest daughter, Eleanor, had gone to Americus without incident, but their oldest son, Jim, had the misfortune of starting at Plains shortly after the desegregation cyclone touched down. He was hounded so mercilessly that he left the school after one day. Their parents agreed that Lora, Jan, and Billy ought to go to Americus High, where they hoped they would be treated better.

  There was just one problem: the school board refused to enroll them. The city had a transfer arrangement with the county and rarely rejected an applicant; of the thirty who applied in 1960, twenty-seven were accepted. No one thought it was a coincidence that all three rejects came from Koinonia. The boycott was continuing, only this time it wasn’t about insurance or chicken feed; it was about children.

  After appealing the board’s decision unsuccessfully, Koinonia debated what to do next. The parents were reluctant to go to court because that seemed to them an unchristian act of aggression—but wasn’t discrimination unchristian? Seeing no other choice, they called the American Civil Liberties Union and filed a lawsuit. Their lawyer invited journalists to the farm to write about the children, to show the public that they didn’t have horns and cloven hooves, so Lora, Jan, and Billy gave interviews and dutifully posed for photos holding a library book none of them had read, as if they were studying for exams. “Well, you look normal,” the reporter said. Another reporter quoted a school board official as saying that they didn’t want the Koinonia students because they might “infect” the other kids with their ideas. While the suit was pending, Florence Jordan homeschooled the three while their younger siblings continued to attend their classes. “I thought they were lucky dogs not to have to go to school,” said Greg, who was starting his eighth and final year at Thalean Elementary. He knew that the outcome of the case would soon affect him.

  The suit was heard a month into the school term. Judge William Bootle, an Eisenhower appointee who would figure in some of the most important civil rights decisions in Georgia, presided over the hearing in federal court in Macon. Six witnesses appeared for Koinonia—the students and their fathers—and six appeared for the school board. Their testimony provided a rare public airing of Sumter County’s tangled attitudes toward the farm.

  A young lawyer named Warren Fortson offered particularly illuminating testimony. Fortson came from a politically connected family near Augusta—his brother Ben was Georgia’s secretary of state—and had been in Americus only a few months. The question of whether to admit the Koinonia students came up at his second board meeting. All he knew about the farm was that people detested it and that a county grand jury had condemned it. He read about the investigation and wondered how fair it had been, but since he was new in town, he thought it wise to defer to the other members when they argued that the presence of the Koinonia children would disrupt classes.

  “I was as much worried about a lot of the parents of the children creating a disturbance as I was the children,” Fortson testified. “I was acutely aware of the man in the street’s opinion, and I have also heard some of those expressions voiced against the people at Koinonia, and I knew it was just right for a rather explosive situation to occur if we allowed those children in the school system.”

  An explosive situation? Judge Bootle pressed Fortson about who he thought would light the fuse.

  “I felt that people in Americus or the children in the Americus system would cause the trouble.”

  “Well, Mr. Fortson, has law and order broken down in Americus to the point that they cannot control their own citizens and the children in the schools?”

  “Well, let’s put it this way,” Fortson replied. “Before I ever came to Americus, there was a considerable . . . outbreak of civil violence. It happened before and it could happen again.”

  That was the nut of it: there had been bombings and shootings in Sumter County, and not that long ago. The school board was afraid that violence might break out again if the Koinonia children were allowed to enter the city high school, so it took the easiest course and excluded them altogether.

  Judge Bootle wasn’t buying it. Four weeks after the hearing, he ruled that the students had been rejected solely because of their parents’ religious and social beliefs. “This will not do,” he declared, ordering the three admitted to classes immediately. The decision was a foretaste of the civil rights struggles to come in southwest Georgia, and it met with widespread anger. The next time Bootle visited Americus to preside over US district court, in January 1961, protestors gathered outside and hanged him in effigy. By then, they had something else to be furious with him about; he had ordered the desegregation of the University of Georgia.

  In the wake of the Koinonia lawsuit, at least one school board member reexamined his stand and made an effort to research the matter. Fortson had been impressed with Clarence Jordan’s eloquence in court. A few weeks after the ruling, he visited the farm and learned more about the community over a fried catfish lunch with the Jordans. He came away liking them and feeling more sympathetic for their perilous position in the county. As for that grand jury finding that Koinonia was teeming with Communists, Fortson privately dismissed it as “crap—standard McCarthy stuff.”

  ____________________

  Americus High School occupied a 1938 redbrick structure with a cupola on top that made it look like it belonged on a colonial plantation in Virginia—Mount Vernon’s middle-class cousin. It was located a couple of blocks off the city’s main drag in a shady neighborhood of older homes that abruptly gave way at the end of the school property to an unpaved street where black people lived in smaller frame houses. Around five hundred students—all white—attended grades nine through twelve. After missing nine weeks of school, Lora, Jan, and Billy joined their number in early November. The court offered an escort of federal marshals, but the families declined because they disliked the idea of armed guards coercing acceptance at the point of a gun barrel. As Clarence told his daughter, “Now, Jan honey, we won the case in court, but there isn’t a court in the land that can make these folks like you.”

  On the night before she was to start classes, Lora received a phone call from an elementary school friend warning that she could no longer be seen speaking with her in public. They might be able to speak on the bus or over the phone at night. “But if I talk to you in class,” she said, “no one will talk to me.” Her friend had been at Americus High since September and knew what sort of reception awaited the Koinonia students. Jan got a similar call from the brother of her best friend at Thalean and thought to herself, “Uh-oh, this is not going to be fun and games.”

  It wasn’t. The three of them were met with hostility from the beginning. Classmates refused to sit with them at lunch, and a few tossed food at them. Someone poured acid in Lora’s locker and ruined her gym clothes. Jan’s textbooks were stolen or vandalized repeatedly, and she ran through a dozen sets of replacements. They were called Commies and race mixers so often that they tuned it out like so much white noise—although Lora was amused by the inventive vitriol of one boy who labeled her “a goddamn nigger-loving Com
munist Watusi Jew.” That kind of covered it. In a backhanded way, the school board had been right: their presence was disruptive. The hostile atmosphere certainly disrupted Lora’s studies, as she went from being one of the top students in grade school to making Fs before she recovered her academic footing. It seemed like the only people at Americus High who treated the Koinonia children kindly were the black ladies working in the cafeteria; when they saw her in line, Jan noticed, they’d nudge each other and give her heaping portions.

  Greg (left, with his brother Billy) tries out a banjo for friends, including

  Jan Jordan (center) and Lora Browne (right), 1962. Courtesy of Lora Browne

  Billy may have had the toughest time of it. The southern code of chivalry dictated that no one lay a hand on the girls, but there were no such compunctions when it came to boys like the eldest Wittkamper son. Along with the taunting and vandalism the others experienced, he got pushed on the stairs and popped in the back and received threatening letters. Reflecting on it later, he would laugh and say that it could have been worse. Billy had stuttered since childhood and played it up whenever he was menaced by others. “I think they thought I was a moron and left me alone sometimes.” He warned Greg that high school was going to be nothing like what they had known at Thalean.

  Jan would tell her father what she and the others were going through, but the only advice he usually imparted was to turn the other cheek. It occurred to her that the children were being persecuted for their parents’ beliefs. She grew resentful and began to question her own faith. One day, relating an especially bad incident, Jan watched as her father’s eyes filled with tears, and she understood that he was as frustrated and powerless as she was. After that, she stopped telling Clarence about everything that was happening.

  As rough as it was, Jan and Lora remained at Americus High after their first year. Billy did not. Near the end of the school term, his parents asked him whether he would rather continue his education somewhere else. Billy despised the high school and hated the heat, humidity, and insects of southwest Georgia, so he leapt at the chance to escape. The Wittkampers sent him to the Chicago area, to Reba Place, a Mennonite community with long-standing ties to Koinonia. It turned out to be one of the best things that could have happened to Billy, but it wasn’t so good for Greg, who wouldn’t have his older brother to lean on when he entered the crucible.

  ____________________

  Greg was initiated into Americus High School with a favorite weapon of teenage pranksters everywhere: a rubber band–propelled paper clip.

  As he started ninth grade in the fall of 1961, he had to deal with the provocations of a junior named Tommy Bass, who liked to sneak up behind him in the hallways and fire paper clips into the small of his back with a rubber band. They stung like shotgun pellets. Tommy was good; his attacks were so quick and stealthy that Greg could never catch him in the act. He had little doubt who was shooting him, though, so he went to the principal’s office to try to stop the nonsense. K. W. McKinnon—Mr. Mac to students—may have looked like a bespectacled milquetoast, but he was known as an old-school disciplinarian. Jan and Billy had warned that the principal’s penchant for order did not extend to looking out for Koinonia children. Greg understood what they meant when he reported that he was being nettled with office supplies.

  “Did you see who did it?” McKinnon asked.

  Greg had to admit that he had not actually seen the culprit.

  “Then there’s nothing I can do. I need proof.”

  Angered by the principal’s seeming lack of concern, Greg reached for the first rebuttal that popped into his mind. “Well, if you won’t do anything, maybe we should bring in some federal marshals.”

  “Go ahead,” McKinnon replied coolly.

  It had not been an auspicious introduction to authority at Americus High. When Greg went home and told some of the adults about the exchange, Clarence suggested that he shouldn’t make threats he couldn’t back up. It had been almost a year since Koinonia had declined the court’s offer of marshals to escort the students. The cavalry would not be galloping to the rescue.

  There was another Koinonia teenager entering the high school that fall, and she carried herself quite differently than Greg. Carol Browne, Lora’s younger sister, was starting eighth grade as part of a new class that had been added to the school. A high-strung thirteen-year-old who was so skinny that students inevitably nicknamed her Olive Oyl, she didn’t take guff from anyone. When kids started pestering her and calling her a nigger lover, she responded combatively, “Why not? I trust them more than you.” She begged her parents to let her fight the bullies at school, but they told her no, under no circumstances.

  Greg took a different tack. After his encounter with the principal, he concluded that his best survival strategy would be to lie low and keep quiet. When slurs and insults came his way, as they did almost every day, he tried to ignore them and didn’t talk back. He was determined to be invisible.

  Nothing about Greg’s appearance or demeanor should have drawn undue attention. At fourteen, he looked like many teenagers in the years before Dylan and the Beatles, when boys modeled themselves after Elvis or Ricky Nelson if they didn’t have a crew cut or a flattop. Greg wore his hair long and greasy, swept back into a ducktail: he could’ve been the lost Everly Brother. He didn’t raise his hand in class. He seldom spoke unless he was spoken to. He didn’t volunteer for any clubs or go out for any teams.

  Greg quickly realized that his brother had been right: high school was going to be more trying than grade school. The harassment clearly intensified, but most students never jeered at him or shoved him on the stairs or stung him with paper clips; the juvenile vigilantes were always a minority. Most of his classmates simply shunned him. Age had something to do with it. As children move into their teens, they become more susceptible to peer pressure. Like Lora and Jan the year before, Greg noticed that students who had once been approachable at Thalean would no longer talk with him openly. They might say something on the bus ride home, but at school they seemed afraid to be seen near him. When he sat down for lunch, people moved away from his table as if he had come in reeking from cleaning the hog pens. From 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., five days a week, he was at once utterly conspicuous and completely isolated.

  Greg’s new classmates didn’t know much about Koinonia. Many of them couldn’t even pronounce the name properly; they called it Corn-nee-ah, like it was a weed that popped up in the cornfields, or Co’nia, skipping over a syllable like they were ordering Co’Cola in a south Georgia drawl. They didn’t know about Koinonia’s religious beliefs, why it supported racial equality, or how its communal system worked and why it didn’t necessarily make the members Communists. All the students knew was that their parents said Koinonia was bad, that Greg was the only member of their class who came from the place, and that it had literally taken a federal case to get him and his like into the school. The boy was radioactive. It was best to stay away from him.

  ____________________

  Among the freshmen who observed Greg that fall were several who would write him letters of apology many years later. He knew none of them because he came from a county elementary school and they had attended one that was part of the city system in Americus. They made little impression on him at the time, but they all knew who he was; he might as well have worn a scarlet K on his chest.

  Celia Harvey, a demure banker’s daughter and devout member of First Methodist Church, was curious about Koinonia in the way a good girl might be curious about a leather-clad motorcycle gang. She had heard awful things about the farm. “People called it a cult. There was a lot of discussion about why their kids were coming to our school. I felt sorry for them. I kept thinking: ‘How can their parents allow them to be here? My parents wouldn’t put me in a position like that.’ I didn’t think it was right, as young and vulnerable as they were.”

  Celia made a point of staying away from Greg. So d
id her best friend, Deanie Dudley, a pretty car salesman’s daughter who had a friendly word for almost everyone she met. She didn’t want to be rude to Greg—not directly—so when she saw him coming down the hall, she turned away or pretended to be hunting for something in her locker. “I would look at him and wonder who he was and why he believed things everyone else disagreed with. I couldn’t understand why those people were here in the first place. Why would they come to the Deep South and start a commune? It didn’t seem like a wise thing to do.”

  David Morgan, a vocational instructor’s son who was something of a smart aleck, had no personal animosity for Greg. But he did want to be liked, so he snickered when the other boys called him names and said nothing when he witnessed the tripping and shoving. As a red-blooded male, he was mystified by Greg’s nonviolent response. “I always wondered why he didn’t fight back. You could see from his physique that he could have taken care of himself.”

  Of all the classmates who later apologized to Greg, perhaps none was as dubious of what he represented as Joseph Logan, the wavy-haired son of an insurance salesman. Joseph had heard the rumors about Koinonia—about the Communism and race mixing—and wanted to keep his distance from anyone who came from the farm. “We were told that when they came in from the fields, they threw their clothes into one pile, and the next day, they may get their clothes back and they may not. You may get a black person’s clothes from the day before.” His young mind shuddered.

  Joseph Logan.

  Joseph was a good kid: diligent, well-behaved, churchgoing, an A student, and certainly not a troublemaker. But he was also a football player, and the company he kept explained a lot about his frame of mind. Americus High was the focus of white pride and identity in Sumter County, and its football team was at the tip of that tribal allegiance. The Panthers were a winning program, making the playoffs in 1961, taking the state championship the following year, and churning out star players like Dan Reeves, who went on to play professionally with the Dallas Cowboys and to coach two teams to the Super Bowl. Joseph dreamed of joining the AHS tradition and, despite his average size, made the varsity as a hard-blocking offensive lineman during his sophomore year. The other players looked at his curly hair and nicknamed him Buckwheat, after the kinky-headed boy in the Our Gang comedies. Joseph didn’t care; he laughed along with the guys. He took the credo of teamwork and athletic groupthink to heart. His coach became the ranking authority figure in his adolescent world, his teammates the most influential peers. They weren’t the kind of people who questioned the way things were. “We despised Koinonia and all it stood for,” he said. “You have to put up with a wart until it goes away; that’s how we felt about Greg.”