The Class of '65

by Jim Auchmutey

  Up the road at Koinonia, people did what they could to support the cause. The farm welcomed civil rights workers for rest and relaxation, hosting picnics and hayrides and sometimes looking after the children of jailed activists. Charles Sherrod, SNCC’s leader in Albany, was a frequent visitor, as was C. B. King, the lawyer who represented most of the arrested protestors. Although Koinonians themselves did not join the demonstrations as a rule, they often went to the meetings to show that at least some white people in the area were sympathetic. “Many of these people had stood by us and helped us through the years of severe persecution,” wrote Dorothy Swisshelm, a social worker from Cincinnati who had come to Koinonia to live and regularly attended the rallies with others from the farm. “It was now our turn to stand by them.”

  When Swisshelm and a group of other white women from Koinonia went to their first mass meeting, people eyed them nervously, as if they might be police spies. Greg had a similar feeling when he encountered C. B. King in an alley beside an Albany church and noticed the lawyer’s eyes flash with alarm. “I think he thought I was a redneck there to assassinate him.” But once the crowd knew they were from Koinonia, the visitors were warmly accepted and sometimes treated as honored guests. “They sat us up front and introduced us,” Lora Browne recalled.

  The meetings, usually held at two Baptist churches across the street from each other, were a revelation for most of the Koinonians. Greg had never heard such loud and joyful music. “Everyone sang at the top of their lungs. Our singing was very calm at the farm—I mean, we used Methodist hymnals.” Lora had never been in a black southern church before and was almost embarrassed by the outpouring of emotion. “People were shouting amen and fainting and hanging out the windows. I thought they were going to jump out of the balcony. It couldn’t have been more of a culture shock if we had been in Tanzania.”

  At one assembly Greg attended, Clarence Jordan was invited to speak. He told a typically folksy story about two hunters out to bag a bear. One of them chases the beast into a cabin and tells the other one, “Here he is. You skin him and I’ll go out and get you another one.” Clarence assured the faithful that Koinonia wasn’t going to be like the first hunter; it was going to stick around and help them skin the bear of racism.

  In truth, Clarence and others at the farm had reservations about the movement. They believed the best way to encourage equality was to set a Christian example in the manner they lived, not to attack segregation in the courts or on the picket lines—a live-in, Clarence called it, not a sit-in. While he supported the movement’s goals wholeheartedly, he disapproved of confrontational tactics such as boycotts. Koinonia knew what it was like to be boycotted. He did not regard it as an act of nonviolence, regardless of which side was behind it.

  As the protests in Albany dragged on, Clarence requested a meeting with Martin Luther King so they could discuss their different understandings of nonviolence. Vincent Harding, a Mennonite minister from Chicago who had come to Georgia to work for civil rights, knew both of them well and set up the conference, which he witnessed. “Martin had great respect for Clarence and Koinonia and all they had been through. As I remember, Clarence came to the house where Martin was staying in Albany and went into the bedroom, where Martin was resting, and they talked for an hour or an hour and a half. It was a serious conversation. Clarence laid out his deep concerns about the problems that he saw with a boycott. Martin didn’t want to disagree too vigorously, but it’s fair to say he did not share those hesitations.”

  The two concentrated on their areas of agreement. Koinonia would continue to help the movement in accordance with its convictions and make the property available to civil rights workers. That commitment was about to intensify.

  ____________________

  In the spring of 1963, a Harvard student named John Perdew was reading about the protests in Birmingham, Alabama, where police had attacked demonstrators with water cannons and snarling German shepherds. News coverage of the savage repression accomplished what months of marches and arrests in Albany had failed to do: it swayed public opinion in favor of stronger civil rights laws. The events inspired Perdew to write SNCC and volunteer to spend his summer working with the group in the South. He was instructed to report to a place in deep rural Georgia that he had never heard of—Koinonia Farm—where an orientation session would begin on Sunday, June 16. He and two Harvard classmates hit the road in his ’56 Ford.

  The movement was boiling over that week. On Tuesday, Governor George Wallace made his infamous “stand in the schoolhouse door” in a vain attempt to keep black students out of the University of Alabama. That evening, President Kennedy, who had been disturbed by the brutality in Birmingham, announced on national television that he was sending a civil rights bill to Congress that would outlaw discrimination in public venues. Shortly after midnight, Medgar Evers, the field secretary for the NAACP in Mississippi, was shot and killed in the driveway of his home in Jackson. It all happened within twenty-four hours, as if the boundless pain and promise of American race relations had been compressed into one three-act drama.

  Enter Americus. In early 1963, SNCC sent a team of organizers from Albany to mount a voter registration drive in Sumter County. It was fertile ground; although more than half the county’s population was black, none of its elected officials were. The organizers lived at Koinonia for several weeks and then found a place to stay in town. “We knew Clarence had issues with some of the things we were doing, and we didn’t want to get into a conflict with him,” explained one of the SNCC field secretaries, Don Harris, a Rutgers University graduate from New York City.

  After they left the farm, the organizers often returned to socialize and share information. They became friendly with the young people, who were quite taken with Harris and the others because they seemed so cool and confident. That spring, when Lora Browne decided to attend the junior-senior prom to show that Koinonians could be regular teenagers, too, she asked a white SNCC worker to take her. Soon afterward, he got arrested and jailed, as activists are wont to do. He was sprung just in time to escort her to the dance, where he loudly asked administrators why Lora’s family had to go to federal court to get her into high school. They were not elected king and queen of the prom.

  The Wittkampers were settling back into life at the farm when Perdew and twenty other summer volunteers arrived for the SNCC orientation. Greg and Collins drifted in and out of the sessions as their work allowed and got to know the newcomers, most of whom were college students from the North. The SNCC veterans gave them a primer on nonviolent protest: how to behave, how to get arrested, how to go limp and become dead weight when the police haul you to jail, how to protect yourself by curling into a fetal position and covering your head, what it feels like to be struck by a billy club.

  Little of this was surprising or new to Greg. He had been weaned on Christian nonviolence and been targeted for his beliefs for as long as he could remember—hell, he’d been shot at. At the same time, he had never been arrested, so he paid attention.

  For Perdew, a white college professor’s son from Denver, the orientation was considerably more worrisome. “If you are arrested,” he remembered one speaker saying, “don’t expect to be bailed out; there’s no telling how long you might be in jail. We do not have the resources to post bail, and you will be a more effective witness for the battle against racial injustice by staying in jail.”

  That sounded ominous.

  After the talks and training, the session ended, as civil rights gatherings usually did, with music. Everyone sang freedom songs, many of them customized for the local fights to come. One of them invoked Martin Luther King’s favorite lawman: “Ain’t gonna let Sheriff Chappell turn me ’round, turn me ’round, turn me ’round.”

  Three weeks later, those lyrics sprang to life.

  ____________________

  The Sumter County Movement was driven by teenagers, most of them students or recent gradu
ates of the black high school in Americus. Galvanized by the collegians in Albany and the children who filled the jails in Birmingham, they were impatient to attack white supremacy in their hometown. “SNCC tried to discourage us,” remembered Sammy Mahone, one of the group’s leaders. “They didn’t think we were ready to protest public accommodations. But the students insisted we do it.”

  Ad for a segregated drive-in from

  the Americus High School yearbook.

  Their first target was the Martin Theater, the biggest symbol of segregation in Americus, where black moviegoers had to walk down a long, dark alley to buy tickets at a separate window and then climb the back stairs to the balcony. The theater had figured in racial incidents before; in a rare instance of a white person running afoul of Jim Crow laws, a Koinonia resident was once charged for sitting upstairs with some black friends. Greg had done the same thing several times, settling into the colored section with Collins. On the night of July 11, eleven teenagers approached the main box office to buy tickets for The Young Racers, a forgettable flick about sexy young people on the grand prix circuit in Europe. Not that the teenagers cared about what was on the marquee overlooking Forsyth Street. When they were turned away and refused to leave, they were arrested for blocking the sidewalk and given sixty days’ probation. A week later, a larger group—including some of the ones on probation—returned to the theater and were again intercepted by the police.

  This time, the punishment was harsher. The protesters were locked up, and some of the organizers were put on work details. Sammy Mahone had to clean out the city’s sewage treatment tanks under shotgun guard. “It was 90 degrees, and I was down there shoveling shit with a pitchfork. Some of it would fall back on you and run down your back.”

  As the arrests stacked up, the authorities did what Albany had done and farmed out prisoners to surrounding counties. Three dozen girls from the ages of ten to sixteen were taken to Lee County, south of Americus, and held for days in a derelict facility known as the Leesburg Stockade. They were confined to a single room of twelve by forty feet and slept on a bare concrete floor. They were fed cold, half-cooked hamburgers and drank water from a dripping shower head. The one toilet was clogged, and they had to squat over the drain to relieve themselves. One of their overseers, a white man, tossed a snake in with the youngsters just for laughs.

  Parents couldn’t find out where their daughters were being kept at first, and when they did, were allowed only minimal contact with them. The plight of the girls wasn’t revealed to the wider world until a photographer working for SNCC, Danny Lyon, sneaked onto the stockade property and took pictures while his driver was distracting the guard. The images were published in black newspapers nationwide. The Chicago Defender ran some of them under the headline: “Americus Hellhole for Many.”

  The young people at Koinonia were sorely tempted to join the demonstrations. While Greg and Collins and Jan Jordan were regulars at the mass meetings, only Collins took to the streets, once getting a bloody nose when a cop billy-clubbed him. Greg was new to the movement and uncertain of where a blue-eyed white kid fit in with the black freedom struggle. Besides, he had a job at the farm, a job he was actually getting paid for now—he didn’t particularly want to take an involuntary leave inside a jail.

  When Jan asked her father for permission to join the protests, Clarence said he’d rather she didn’t. He thought it was dangerous and counterproductive to provoke the segregationists. If she went to a soda fountain with a black girlfriend because they wanted a Coke, that was fine; but if she went there for the sole purpose of testing the law, he would not approve. “If you get arrested under those circumstances,” he told her, “I won’t bail you out.”

  For the time being, Jan and the others at Koinonia did not participate directly in protests. They found other ways to help.

  That summer, several of them worked with SNCC volunteers to put out a newsletter about the movement, Voice of Americus. They printed it at the farm on the same mimeograph equipment used to produce Koinonia’s newsletter. The publication continued for two years and carried articles from black and white students, including Greg, who contributed an illustration showing an intricate spider web that symbolized the deceitfulness of white supremacy. Or something like that.

  Whether it participated in protests or not, Koinonia had already contributed immeasurably to the movement in southwest Georgia, if only by example. “When people saw that little group wasn’t going to let the Klan run them off,” said Mabel Barnum, whose family ran the largest black funeral home in the county, “they knew from that time on that you don’t have to be scared of the Klan.”

  ____________________

  On a hot Thursday night in early August, more than two hundred people surged out of a rally at Friendship Baptist Church and onto the streets of Americus singing “We Shall Overcome.” The police ordered them to disperse, and when they didn’t, fired shots overhead, scattering some of the crowd. They waded into the remaining demonstrators with clubs and blackjacks, targeting the three SNCC organizers they believed were fomenting the unrest: Don Harris, John Perdew, and Ralph Allen. The civil rights workers used their training in nonviolent resistance and lay inert like sacks of cornmeal. Sheriff Chappell stood over Harris and tried to make him get up by poking him with an electric cattle prod—a “hot shot,” they called it. The three were roughed up—Allen required stitches—and arrested. Angry onlookers threw bricks, breaking windows and injuring several officers.

  On the following night, there was another rally, another march, more clubs and bricks, more injuries and arrests. It was the second small riot in as many days. In the aftermath, Greg went to Americus with Zev Aelony, a sometime Koinonia resident who was working for another civil rights organization, CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality), and helped him interview witnesses and take affidavits documenting allegations of police brutality. Aelony was a true-blue do-gooder from Minnesota who had read about Koinonia while he was staying in a kibbutz in Israel. He was inspired to discover that a band of Christians could be so serious about sharing their resources and standing up for their convictions, so he moved to Georgia and lived with them off and on for several years, despite the fact that he wasn’t, strictly speaking, one of them. He was Jewish. Clarence welcomed him anyway, saying that his belief in nonviolence made him part of the fold.

  Aelony’s investigation of the earlier arrests was abruptly halted on August 17 when he was nabbed during another march and thrown into jail with the SNCC leaders. To keep them behind bars indefinitely, the county’s solicitor general devised a novel legal gambit: he charged them with inciting insurrection under a Reconstruction-era statute that had last been used to prosecute a black Communist labor organizer, Angelo Herndon, during a notorious show trial in the 1930s. If convicted, they faced a possible death sentence.

  The four languished in jail for more than two months. Allen and Perdew shared a cell and were able to keep up each other’s spirits, although they came to hate the sound of the sheriff’s pet Chihuahuas scampering over the hard floor with their toenails clicking. Harris maintained a cocky demeanor, irritating Chappell to no end by calling him “Doc,” as if this were a Bugs Bunny cartoon and he were Sheriff Elmer Fudd. Aelony caught the worst of it; he was thrown in with several white prisoners and cuffed around more than once.

  The Americus Four, as the activists were known, became a cause célèbre. Campus rallies were held, politicians issued statements, newspapers editorialized about justice in Georgia. At the March on Washington on August 28, SNCC chairman John Lewis, speaking ahead of King’s “I Have a Dream” oration, called for the immediate release of the four from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

  A few weeks later, midway through their imprisonment, Claude Sitton of the New York Times wrote an article about the case, terming it “a situation without parallel in the South.” He tallied the clashes of July and August—two riots, seven injured police, twenty-eight injured
demonstrators, more than 250 arrests, thirty-eight still in jail—and concluded that the Sumter County Movement had been all but crushed by the ruthless application of the law. “There is no apparent hope for a compromise.”

  Well into the article, Sitton related the tale of the religious farming commune that had been persecuted by night riders and main street merchants during the 1950s. He had covered that violence for the newspaper and found, upon his return, that some people in Americus still blamed Koinonia for the racial troubles that were now threatening to overcome their way of life.

  chapter 6

  “Not in My Town”

  A few weeks into Greg’s junior year, one of his classes held a show-and-tell session. The theme was current events; students were supposed to bring a newspaper clipping and discuss the story. Plenty of possibilities appeared in the headlines during the late summer and early autumn of 1963: the March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, America’s growing entanglement in Vietnam, the killing of four Sunday school girls in a hate bombing at a church in Birmingham. Greg chose a local story. He talked about the Americus Four, the civil rights workers who were still in the Sumter County jail facing capital charges of insurrection.

  Standing before the class as if he were delivering a book report, Greg read the article aloud, trying not to roll his eyes at the part about the young men being “outside agitators” who might have Communist connections. In his discussion afterward, he freely shared his opinion. “This writer obviously doesn’t know what he’s talking about because these guys are my friends, and they aren’t Communists.”