The Class of '65

by Jim Auchmutey

  “Paul, I’m ashamed of you for being here.”

  “I’m ashamed of you because you won’t fight,” Paul snapped back.

  The group quickly dispersed. Greg entered his next class rubbing his jaw and asked the teacher whether she had heard the disturbance outside. They had spoken several times, and he had found her friendly. Whether she was telling the truth or simply didn’t want to get involved, she said she had heard nothing. Greg later reported the incident to Principal McKinnon, and as usual he said he was powerless to do anything without names and witnesses. The attack shook Greg. He had endured two years of harassment at the high school, but he had never been physically assaulted so flagrantly. “My God,” he thought, “is this what my senior year is going to be like?” His jaw was sore for a month.

  Back at the farm, Collins heard about what had happened and offered to give Greg lessons in the manly art of self-defense. One of the reasons Collins was so chiseled was that he had been a Golden Gloves amateur boxer. He knew how to cover his head, feint and jab, bob and weave. While he understood that Greg was philosophically committed to nonviolence, he thought he could benefit from some instruction in case he found himself in a situation where he had no alternative. Greg agreed, and the two of them started sparring in the pecan-processing plant. The way things were going, he might need a Plan B.

  ____________________

  To one woman, Greg and the black students at Americus High were heroes, and she wanted to do something to recognize them.

  Frances Pauley—Aunt Frances, as Jewel Wise called her—was a matronly white churchwoman who directed the Georgia Council on Human Relations, a civil rights advocacy group in Atlanta. She had logged hundreds of miles visiting small towns and rural areas across the state, trying to lay the groundwork for the racial transition that was coming one way or another. She knew Sumter County well and had butted heads with its leaders during the disorders there. “I still think Americus was one of the worst towns I ever worked in,” she wrote in her memoir. “Segregation came first; money came second. Most places put money first, and you could talk to them. But in Americus the bankers didn’t move, and consequently Americus didn’t move. I was powerless. I did well to get out with my own neck, looking back on it.”

  Greg with other young people at Jekyll Island receiving an award during the fall of his senior year, 1964. Two of the first black students at Americus High are immediately to his right: Dobbs Wiggins and Jewel Wise. Courtesy of Greg Wittkamper

  Pauley often stopped by Koinonia and visited with Clarence Jordan, so she knew what the students from the farm were going through. When the high school desegregated, she was there to observe and continued to monitor the situation through the fall. On the last weekend in October, she invited Greg and the pioneering black students to the Jekyll Island resort, where the human relations council was holding its annual meeting. They were going to get an award.

  Greg drove the group to the Georgia coast, where they strolled the beach and relaxed away from the tension of attending a school where they were not welcome. They were each given certificates of appreciation at a banquet and praised for their courage and composure. David Bell, speaking for the others, acknowledged how difficult it had been. In the first two months, he had heard countless racial slurs and had swallowed his anger when someone placed a sign outside his typing class that said, “Come by and feed the monkey.” He had been suspended for fighting when a football player walked up to him in the hall and punched him in the face, and he had not swung back. All four of the newcomers had been ’buked and scorned, in the words of the old spiritual, and it didn’t look like it was going to stop anytime soon. But the cause was larger than their personal comfort, and David vowed that they would persevere and remain at the school until graduation.

  That was not going to happen. A few days after the trip to Jekyll, one of the pioneers decided he had had enough.

  When the proposition of integrating the high school had come up in August, Dobbs Wiggins hesitated to volunteer because he wondered whether he could put up with the provocation he was sure to face. He had kept his cool during his arrest for picketing during the civil rights protests, but he was part of a group then. He would be on his own at Americus High. Dobbs had spent time in reform school for truancy and knew how to handle himself in a scrap; he was strong and confident. As the Coke bottles started flying, however, he felt himself coming to a boil and wasn’t sure he could trust himself not to fight back. “I didn’t want to get into a confrontation with some white students and embarrass the civil rights movement,” he said. Nor did he want to flunk out. He told his father that he couldn’t concentrate on his studies while he was worrying about survival. “I felt like I needed to do well and set a good example for the black community if I was going to stay there, and I wasn’t sure I could do that.”

  So he left school and moved to Atlanta, where he continued his education in a less intimidating setting.

  To most of his former classmates, Dobbs’s departure was good news, their first victory in the struggle to keep the high school white. It was one down, three to go—four, if you counted Greg. And they did.

  ____________________

  The loneliest time of the day for Greg was the lunch hour. In the classroom, students were usually treated equitably and teachers kept them relatively quiet and well behaved. In the lunchroom, students had more freedom. They sat with whomever they pleased and acted more like the high-spirited teenagers they were. They always looked like they were having a good time, socializing, gossiping, joking, laughing. Greg had no part of it.

  One autumn day in the cafeteria, he was leaving the serving line with his lunch when some boys motioned for him to come over to their table. “Hey,” one of them said, “why don’t you sit with us?”

  This gesture of sudden hospitality should have seemed suspicious, a spider’s come-on to a fly. But Greg was hungry for any sort of interaction. During his junior year, he sometimes had sat with Jan Jordan at lunch, but now that he was the only Koinonia kid in the school, he was invariably alone. He tried to make his isolation as inconvenient and awkward for the other students as he could. Instead of taking a seat off to the side of the cafeteria, where he could easily be ignored, he positioned himself in the middle of a row of half a dozen tables, his back to the windows, in the manner of a poker player trying to keep people from sneaking up behind him. As the lunch room filled, students would be forced to sit closer and closer to him, a dance of discomfort that Greg rather enjoyed.

  Now this boy was asking him to sit with him and his buddies. Greg looked around the room and calculated the risk. He thought that there were too many students, too many teachers, for them to try anything. Maybe they really did want to talk. Sure, why not. He walked toward their table and pulled out a chair.

  As he was putting down his tray, he noticed something flying toward him. It was sloppy joe day in the cafeteria, and someone had launched one of the messy sandwiches toward his head, bun and all. Greg jerked backward as if he were evading a punch. The airborne food narrowly missed him and struck another boy, who was so angry that he retaliated, not against the launcher, but against Greg, mashing a sloppy joe into his face. The reddish filling glopped down his chin and onto his white shirt.

  Greg was furious. His first impulse was to flip the table and rampage like a bull. He fought back the urge to scream or cry, sighed heavily, and sat down. The lunchroom had cleared out like a saloon in a gunfight. A minute later, the sheriff himself—Principal McKinnon—appeared, looking distraught, and asked what had happened.

  “I think it’s pretty obvious,” Greg told him.

  “This is terrible,” the principal said, showing concern for once. “If you want to, you can go home.”

  “No, thank you,” Greg said. “I’ll stay.”

  He went to the restroom, washed his face, and blotted his shirt. His chest bore a soggy stain the size and color of a medium pizz
a. Greg decided to leave it. He wanted everyone to see what had happened; he wanted to wave his bloody shirt. That afternoon, in his English and government classes, boys pointed, laughing and nudging, but no one said a word to him.

  Greg had ridden the bus that day. When he got off at the farm after school, Clarence Jordan spotted his soiled clothes, tilted his head quizzically, and strode briskly toward him. He apparently thought the reddish smear was blood. As he came closer and saw that it wasn’t, he opened his arms and gave the seventeen-year-old a hug.

  A few days later, Clarence approached Greg in the community dining hall and told him that he had been discussing his predicament with one of his few friends in Americus, Lloyd Moll, the president of Georgia Southwestern College. “He had a situation like this in his high school,” Clarence began. “A kid was getting picked on, and it went on and on, and he finally broke and fought back, and they left him alone after that. Now I’m not telling you what to do; I’m just tossing it out there. But I’ve watched you work, and I’ve seen you throwing bales of hay out here in the fields, and I know you’re as strong as an ox. So maybe the next time one of them picks on you—not some puny guy, but someone your own size or bigger—maybe you should just haul off and beat the tar out of him. Just something to think about.”

  Greg was astonished. Clarence Jordan, a prominent apostle of nonviolence, a man so committed to his convictions that he didn’t even want Koinonia children to play with toy guns, was giving him permission to whoop ass. Greg was tempted to use that permission like a shield, to go back to school and coldcock the first jerk who laid a finger on him. As he thought it over in the next few days, though, he came to realize that it wouldn’t be that simple.

  “If I’m going to fight them,” he told Clarence, “I have to win. They’re not going to roll over just because I’m stronger. They have to save face. So if I fight back, I have to be willing to hurt them badly. Sometimes I do want to hurt them, but I don’t want to hurt them badly. They’re just aping what their parents believe. I guess I’m doing the same thing. If our cribs had been switched at birth, they’d be me and I’d be them.”

  As Greg saw it, he had no choice but to take the abuse. The worst was still to come.

  chapter 8

  Still Standing

  One afternoon during the fall of his senior year, Greg was slouched at his desk waiting for Mrs. Bailey’s government class to begin. It was midautumn, and the windows were still open to the lingering warmth of the season in south Georgia. Greg was daydreaming as usual, his eyes half closed, his legs splayed into the aisle, when another student walked by and brushed against one of his feet. It was Thomas Jordan—no relation to Clarence—a football player whose black-rimmed glasses made him look like an accountant in training. Reacting to the minimal contact, Thomas spun around, cursed, and pointed his finger accusingly at Greg.

  “You tripped me!”

  Greg sat up straight and listened as Thomas thoroughly tongue-lashed him. The outpouring of venom was unexpected; T.J., as most of the guys called him, had joined in some of the hounding, but he was far from the worst. Greg looked around for Mrs. Bailey, hoping the teacher could defuse the situation, but she hadn’t arrived. “Oh, come on,” he muttered below his breath, “quit being such a baby.”

  Thomas couldn’t make out what Greg had said, but another classmate thought he heard the remark and told him that Greg had used a fighting word. “You called me a bastard?” Thomas said. “I’m going to kick your ass, Wittkamper.”

  Greg didn’t take the threat seriously. In his experience, people who wanted to beat up somebody didn’t announce their intentions in front of a room full of witnesses; they just waited until school was out and then lowered the hammer. It was the final period of the day, and fisticuffs did not break out after the bell sounded. Greg went home to Koinonia convinced that T.J. didn’t mean what he had said, that he had only been talking big because he thought that was expected of him.

  But the threat did not vanish.

  Few things incite the minds of adolescent males like the prospect of a good old-fashioned fracas. Throughout the next day, word spread through the hallways that there was going to be a fight after school—better yet, a fight involving the most reviled member of the student body. Greg heard the rumors and thought he’d better tell a responsible adult that something bad might be about to happen. He had study hall after lunch in Mrs. Crabb’s class. He’d tell her. She’d listen.

  ____________________

  Gladys Crabb wasn’t from the Deep South. She came from Maryland, where racial lines weren’t as sharply drawn, and started teaching at Americus High in 1959, just before the civil rights movement awakened in southwest Georgia. She had Greg in her twelfth-grade English class and could see that he was shouldering a burden no other student had to bear. She realized that most of her colleagues and neighbors were leery of Koinonia because they considered it a den of Communism, but she didn’t think this quiet, conscientious boy was a Marxist. She sympathized with him and made a point of asking him only questions in front of the class that she knew he could answer. When other students mistreated him, she showed her displeasure subtly, with a frown or a gentle comment, but never with a lecture or a reprimand. She didn’t want the kids to turn against her, she just wanted them to broaden their minds and act more mature. Greg would come to her study hall early and talk with her before anyone else arrived. She was the only teacher he felt comfortable confiding in.

  On this afternoon, Greg told her about his encounter with Thomas and the hotly anticipated fight. “What do you want me to do?” Mrs. Crabb asked. “Do you want me to come out there with you? Do you want me to tell the principal?”

  Greg didn’t want a lady English teacher coming to his rescue, so he asked her not to do anything. “I’ve got to face this sooner or later,” he said. “I just wanted someone to know.” Mrs. Crabb never forgot the tone of sad resignation in his voice.

  Gladys Crabb.

  In government class, where the alleged tripping had occurred the day before, Thomas repeated his threat to kick Greg’s ass. Greg was growing more concerned, but he still wondered whether T.J. really wanted to mix it up. Why hadn’t he named a time and place to meet? Everyone knew the protocol for an after-school fight: you had to make an appointment, like gunslingers challenging each other to a duel.

  Near the end of the school day, when Principal McKinnon’s voice came over the intercom to make announcements, he ordered Greg to report to his office. Some of the students sniggered and said he was in trouble for using a profanity in class. Greg assumed the principal had heard about the possibility of a fight, probably from Mrs. Crabb, and wanted to stop it before anybody got hurt. Maybe, he thought naively, Thomas would be there and they could talk through their differences.

  When the final bell buzzed, Greg went to the principal’s office and asked to see Mr. Mac. The secretary said he was in a meeting and would be there soon. Greg didn’t much like the principal and figured he wasn’t really in a meeting, he was just hoping Greg would stay in his office long enough for Thomas to grow tired of waiting and leave campus. Greg wanted no part of that evasion. He didn’t want people to think that he was hiding out in the principal’s office, that he was a Communist and a coward.

  “If Mr. McKinnon wants to talk to me, he can find me tomorrow morning,” Greg told the secretary as he moved for the door. “I’ve got to go home and feed the cows.”

  ____________________

  Greg had been driving to school in the red MG that he had bought cheap in Atlanta. He parked in the black neighborhood a couple of blocks from the school, his car hidden from potential vandals in the yard behind an elderly woman’s house. He left the principal’s office and walked briskly through the sand-and-gravel parking lot beside the baseball grandstand, the oldest surviving structure on the campus. In the distance, he saw Thomas and three or four others standing there waiting. “Uh-oh,” Greg thought, “t
his is for real.” He quickened his stride and imagined that he could outrun them if he had to, like a halfback breaking into the clear. If he could just make it to the black neighborhood, he’d be in the end zone—no one would follow him there.

  But Thomas had teammates. As Greg drew closer, more boys moved out from behind the grandstand: two dozen, three dozen, maybe more. It looked like half the school. Greg’s mind raced. “My God, am I going to get lynched? Are they going to stone me?”

  Thomas stepped into his path. He was still wearing his black-rimmed glasses, which made Greg question again whether his heart was in this. Maybe he was being pushed into it. Maybe he was as scared as Greg was.

  “I’m giving you five seconds to put down your books,” he announced. Greg was toting a bulky stack of textbooks; he had to carry them around because his locker had been pissed on and generally trashed, and he could no longer use it.

  As he stood in front of Thomas weighing the ultimatum, an underclassman sneaked up from behind and kicked the books out of his grasp, scattering them across the parking lot. Greg was angry now. He squared off against the underclassmen and heard people shouting, “Fair fight! Fair fight!” His recent conversation with Clarence about nonviolence flashed into his mind. Clarence had suggested that sometimes, under extraordinary circumstances, perhaps a Christian, especially a young and strong one, was justified in fighting back. Maybe this was one of those times. Maybe Greg should duke it out. His hands were empty, available to deploy as weapons.

  “Hit him!” someone shouted.

  “Knock the hell out of him,” someone else called.

  Greg felt the circle of boys closing around him. He was badly outnumbered and knew it wouldn’t be a fair fight. As he turned away from the underclassman and back toward Thomas, the mob finally got what it had been screaming for. Thomas balled his right fist and swung, striking Greg directly on the left cheek. He staggered and felt his knees buckle, but he didn’t fall. Through the stars in his eyes and the ringing in his ears, a biblical vision came to him. He imagined Thomas as a young Roman soldier and himself as Jesus. It was a passion play, and he knew his part.