The Class of '65

by Jim Auchmutey

  That summer, a few weeks after Jan Jordan’s tumultuous graduation, Fortson was chatting with some school board members after a meeting had broken up when one of them acknowledged the elephant in the room. “You know,” he said, “we’re going to have to address this race question.” Seeing his opening, Fortson went home and drafted a proposal to admit a handful of black students into Americus High. He knew the board would be apprehensive and closely divided. To bolster his case, he contacted Perdew and asked him what might happen in the black community if the schools weren’t desegregated. Perdew understood that he was being invited to play the bad cop, so he complied by predicting that there could be civil disorders. “I think some people might riot and cause damage in the downtown area.”

  That was just what Fortson wanted to hear.

  He took his integration plan—and his hot intel about the risk of doing nothing—to the next board meeting. The members hashed it out until well after midnight. One of them resigned on the spot as it became apparent that he was going to lose. In the end, the board agreed with Fortson, and the next day Clarence Jordan received an understated call informing him, “Clarence, we no longer have a policy of segregation.” People on both sides of the issue were astounded, given the town’s history of resistance. One civil rights activist in Atlanta called it, simply, “the surprise.”

  Forston expected a backlash. “We knew there were going to be people who raised hell about it, but it was something we had to do. We had been sitting there watching Albany commit suicide. We didn’t want that to happen to us.”

  ____________________

  The board had approved a Freedom of Choice plan that called for volunteers to transfer into the high school. With only a few days left before the start of classes, black leaders scrambled to find students who would be willing to wade into what promised to be choppy waters. Four teenagers were selected, three sophomores and a junior. All of them were veterans of the 1963 protests and had been arrested, so they had a clear idea of what white people could do when they were challenged. David Bell and Jewel Wise, both quiet, well-behaved sophomores, had been charged in the demonstrations at the Martin Theater. Dobbs Wiggins, a junior with a feistier personality, had been jailed for picketing. The Reverend Freeman’s daughter Robertiena, a sophomore, had spent thirty days locked up in the Leesburg Stockade.

  Robertiena Freeman.

  Robertiena was the most obvious choice. The energetic fourteen-year-old had been groomed to walk through this doorway her entire life. She first realized the expectations her parents had for their children when she was a little girl and wanted to join some of her friends in the neighborhood as they headed into the fields to pick cotton. “I want to go,” she told her father. “They’re my friends, and I want to go to the cotton fields with them.” She might as well have asked to join a minstrel show.

  Freeman was a proud Morehouse man who had graduated from the prestigious college in Atlanta and also held a doctorate in theology. Besides his pastorate at Bethesda Baptist Church, where some of the mass meetings had been held, he was an administrator and teacher at the middle school for blacks. His wife taught in a neighboring county. He informed their daughter that she was not going into the cotton fields, and when she protested and demanded to know why not, he explained that it was because of who they were and what their family represented. “We stand for change,” he said. “I don’t want to get upset over something they’ve done to you in the cotton fields.”

  Robertiena got a better understanding of what he meant after the protests started in 1963 and the family’s home on Forrest Street was targeted because of Freeman’s involvement in the movement. A brick crashed through their picture window, shots were fired from the street, and someone painted “KKK” on the driveway. For a time, armed men had to stand guard at the house.

  Despite the recent history of violence, Robertiena was her usual chipper self when her father raised the possibility of attending Americus High. “Daddy, I want to go integrate that school,” she told him in her high, eager voice, sounding as if she had been asked whether she wanted to go out for cheerleading. “I’d like to go over there and make some white friends.”

  As it turned out, she would have only one white friend—and he was as unwelcome at the school as she was.

  Part 3

  Senior Year

  chapter 7

  Among Panthers

  On Monday, August 31, 1964, Americus High School was desegregated without incident. At least that’s what the Americus Times-Recorder and the Associated Press and the New York Times reported. They didn’t have the whole picture. One of the black students, Dobbs Wiggins, was struck in the back with two Coca-Cola bottles as he walked between classes. He informed the principal and his homeroom teacher, and both said there was nothing they could do unless he could identify the thrower. That afternoon, as Dobbs left school and crossed the street, more projectiles were hurled in his direction and a car full of white boys almost ran him down. Dobbs did not think his first day had gone without incident.

  But it was relatively calm compared to what the school board had feared. In not making a big public announcement about the desegregation of Americus High, board members had hoped that the presence of four black teenagers in a white student body of five hundred might attract less attention, as if people wouldn’t notice that they had barely darkened a gallon of milk with a few drops of chocolate syrup. Except for the bottles chucked at Dobbs, the wishful ploy more or less worked for about twenty-four hours. And then dawn broke on the second day of school, and Americus woke up to what was happening. Greg’s classmate David Morgan aptly characterized the reaction of many white people: “That town was spring-loaded in the pissed-off position.”

  Early Tuesday morning, Greg climbed into his red MG and drove to Barnum’s Funeral Home on the north side of Americus, where three of the black students had agreed to rendezvous for the ride to campus. They all knew him from civil rights meetings and from palling around with Collins McGee, so it wasn’t unexpected when he phoned the night before and offered to show his support by accompanying them to school. “We were glad he was there,” one of the students, Jewel Wise, remembered. “He was in the same predicament we were in. They were out to get him, too, so we felt a camaraderie.” The funeral home had agreed to provide a car and driver to help the students get to and from school safely and to avoid the kind of attacks Dobbs had suffered. As they boarded the black limousine, no one mentioned the irony that they were traveling in a vehicle typically used to ferry mourners to a graveyard.

  The Americus Times-Recorder ran an eight-paragraph

  item about the desegregation of the high school in 1964.

  A mob was waiting outside the school. Through the car windows, the passengers saw the scene unspool like a newsreel, perhaps some old footage from Little Rock: bricks, rocks, shouting, cursing, florid faces, middle fingers. It could have been a hundred people, it could have been three hundred—no one inside the sedan was thinking about counting as their pulses quickened and their breathing shallowed. “It looked like everyone in Americus had come to campus to have a riot,” said Robertiena Freeman, who was sitting in the backseat. The car pulled up in front of the glowering sheriff, his head a crimson balloon, and the occupants got out as another rock came flying toward them, narrowly missing Jewel. The black students hurried into the administrative office, where no one seemed pleased to see them.

  The disorder outside Americus High did not surprise Greg. As a survivor of the terror campaign against Koinonia, he had anticipated trouble. The ruckus actually exhilarated him. It stoked his sense of righteousness. “I knew I was part of something important and long overdue. I felt like I was carrying a banner.” In classes that day, none of his teachers and very few students discussed the momentous social revolution unfolding at their school. The only mentions came from some of the boys, who lashed out at Greg. “You think you’ve won the battle, but we’re going to w
in the war,” one of them said, putting it in terms a Johnny Reb would have appreciated.

  Greg’s feeling of triumph deflated that evening when he spoke by phone with Jewel. There had been a change in plans. To head off further unrest, school officials had decided that the black students would go to classes five minutes late and leave five minutes early. When Greg asked to go on the same schedule, he was refused. He had assumed that he would be able to hang out with the four, have lunch with them, lock arms and form a united front. That wasn’t going to happen. He was a senior and they were a year and two years behind him, so they weren’t likely to be taking the same courses. He didn’t see much of them around campus for the rest of the year, and neither did the other white students, except in classes, where teacher supervision kept down the opportunities for misconduct.

  That left Greg as the most convenient fall guy. It didn’t entirely make sense; he wasn’t a member of the school board and he hadn’t voted to admit blacks. But he had made a public display of his support for integration—and he was from Koinonia—and those were more than enough to make him the most despised person in school. “People thought he was worse than the black students,” said fellow senior Celia Harvey. “You’d hear them say he was a traitor to his race.”

  ____________________

  The coming of black students to the high school was only part of the reason for the surly mood in Americus. Many white people across the South and beyond were spitting mad at the federal government that autumn for what they saw as an unwarranted meddling with local customs. The bill that President Kennedy had introduced outlawing segregation in most public places had become a holy cause to his successor, Lyndon Johnson, who bulled it through Congress over the diehard opposition of filibustering senators from Dixie. Two days before the Fourth of July, the president signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, driving a stake through the heart of legal discrimination. Many Americans rejoiced, but to most of Greg’s classmates and their families, it seemed like a civilization was shattering before their eyes.

  When the law took effect, Greg was still recovering from the grisly farm accident that had landed him in the hospital and given him double vision. He came to town occasionally that summer to attend civil rights rallies with Collins, but he wasn’t as involved as he had been the previous year. There wasn’t as much going on in Americus anyway, not in public view. There were headlines elsewhere—riots in Harlem; Lester Maddox chasing black people from his Atlanta restaurant with an ax handle; the disappearance of three civil rights workers during the Freedom Summer voting education campaign in Mississippi—but Sumter County seemed to be taking a breather from the mass demonstrations that had packed the jails and stockades in 1963.

  The most notable local incident occurred on the night after the civil rights bill was signed when six SNCC activists decided on the spur of the moment to test the law at the Hasty House, a blue-collar café on US 19. It wasn’t such a good idea. The group took their seats amid glares and grumbling and gave the waitress their orders. She brought the food after a long delay, slamming the dishes and glasses on the table. As they left and returned to their car, a cluster of young white men who had been watching from a service station across the street approached and attacked them with tire irons. The activists managed to drive away, but in the confusion they left behind one of their party, the only white member: John Perdew, the accused “insurrectionist” who had attended the nonviolence training session at Koinonia the summer before. The tire iron posse descended on him and beat him bloody. A policeman witnessed the violence and did nothing to stop it.

  There were a few other outbursts in Americus during the days after the law took effect. A white mob formed at the Martin Theater to keep blacks from sitting downstairs. Fifteen white teenagers went on a spree through a black housing project, tossing bricks and cherry bombs—and the police actually arrested some of them.

  Greg avoided the disturbances. Going to a white restaurant to witness the death throes of Jim Crow was the last thing he wanted to do during the summer between his junior and senior years. When he left Sumter County eighteen months later, almost all the “white only” signs had come down, in accordance with the law, but everyone knew there were some places that black people—and their white friends—still should not go. But things were changing, however grudgingly. In one bow to the new reality, the King and Queen Drive-In, a burger joint that had run ads in the high school yearbook with the disclaimer “Serve Whites Only,” dropped the line in the 1965 edition of The Panther. In Americus, that was undeniable progress.

  After he signed the civil rights act, President Johnson confided to his aide Bill Moyers, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.” The backlash showed up in the presidential election that fall. While Johnson scored a landslide victory nationally, the Democratic ticket was trounced in places like Sumter County, where a dramatic reversal of party fortunes occurred. Kennedy had taken 70 percent of the vote in 1960 against his Republican rival, Richard Nixon. Four years later, Johnson won only 31 percent against Barry Goldwater, a vehement critic of the civil rights legislation. They took a straw vote in Greg’s government class, and Joseph Logan, trying to be cute, wrote in the name of an even more strident opponent of the law: George Wallace.

  It could be hazardous to support LBJ in Americus during the mean season of 1964. Lillian Carter, the future president’s mother, helped manage the Johnson campaign in the county. Children yelled at her, and her car was vandalized. Her daughter-in-law, Rosalynn Carter, came home one afternoon to find one of her sons in his room crying. His classmates in Plains were giving him a hard time because of his family’s political loyalties. The tears were because someone had pulled a chair out from under him during choral practice and he had hit the floor.

  Greg wasn’t the only white person in Sumter County being punished for his beliefs. It just felt that way sometimes.

  ____________________

  The first weeks of his senior year were worse than anything Greg had experienced at Americus High. The abuse moved beyond name-calling and guerrilla spitball attacks. In keeping with the angrier atmosphere, the boys who tormented him became more brazen and physical. They elbowed him as he walked down the hall, tried to knock the books out of his arms, occasionally launched a loogie in his direction. The instigators were always boys, typically hoodlum types or jocks who saw it as their duty to enforce the school’s traditions, all the while playing to an audience of onlookers who stayed on the sidelines laughing and taunting. Joseph Logan was a member in good standing of the peanut gallery. While he never touched Greg or threw anything at him, he cackled one day as one of his football teammates tried to boot him down a stairwell with his foot. To Joseph, the ramped-up hostility was obvious and easily explained. “Everyone blamed him for integrating the school.”

  Greg expected rough treatment from the boys; he was more affected by the cold shoulder he got from the girls. Not a single one would talk to him, the only exceptions coming during forced exchanges required by the course work. Once, in Spanish, students were assigned to bring a picture and start a conversation based on it with a classmate. Greg brought a picture of a calf and turned to Deanie Dudley, the homecoming queen, and asked whether she thought the baby cow was cute: “¿No es lindo este becerro?” He knew perfectly well that Deanie didn’t want to speak with him; he was being impish and wanted to put her on the spot. “No,” she tersely replied, almost crawling under her desk from embarrassment.

  After Greg gave a presentation in another class, one of Deanie’s friends confided to her, “I think he has beautiful blue eyes.” Deanie agreed, but she didn’t dare admit it out loud. “I couldn’t even say yes because someone might overhear me and read something into it,” she later recalled. “I was petrified of even making eye contact with Greg. He was a nice-looking guy, and we definitely could not go there.”

  Greg understood why the girls were trying so hard to act a
s if he weren’t in the same room. To show him any kindness would have been social suicide. But did they have to move against the wall or turn their backs when he walked by? When he made his way down the halls, the milling students parted as if an invisible wedge preceded him. It made him feel not just disliked but unwashed, like a leper. It corroded his self-esteem. It hurt. Years later, when he thought about high school, the part that was most likely to make him well up with tears was being so thoroughly excluded.

  Along with Spanish, Greg took four courses that fall—English, speech, typing, and government—plus a study hall period. Because of the fire during his junior year, his classes were scattered in different buildings, and he had to walk through a sort of no-man’s-land to go from one to the other. A couple of weeks into the term, a dozen guys ambushed him outside at the bottom of a flight of stairs, where they forced him behind a stand of bushes and started shoving him back and forth like a hot potato. It was all he could do to stay on his feet.

  “OK, Wittkamper,” the biggest one said, “this is it. We’re going to kill you. This is all your fault.” Greg didn’t recognize him, but he could see that he was holding a blackjack. Mercifully, he didn’t use it. Instead, he hauled off and whacked him in the jaw with the back of his hand.

  Greg was stunned and throbbed with pain. Trying to get a closer look at his assailant, he noticed another face in the pack, a familiar one, a boy who had been a playmate of his at Thalean Elementary School years before. He singled him out with a stare.