The Class of '65

by Jim Auchmutey

  His cozy world was upended when he was in the third grade and his father, only thirty-nine, abruptly died of kidney failure. His mother went back to school to earn an insurance license and remarried a year later to a former beau who lived thirteen miles away in the little town of Ellaville.

  Joseph’s stepfather, Sherman Walters, was a dogged man who had contracted polio as an adult and been told that if he ever got out of his wheelchair, he would never walk without crutches. When he did learn to walk again, with great difficulty, he was so sensitive about his awkward gait that he refused to go to church or school activities with his new family because he didn’t want people staring. Joseph resented him at first and couldn’t understand why he didn’t attend his football games, but he came to respect his stepfather’s determination, and they eventually grew close.

  Mr. Walters ran a small business making office cabinetry and store displays in a woodworking shop behind his home. Joseph often worked with him and absorbed many of his opinions and attitudes, which were typical for that time and place. Mr. Walters believed completely in white supremacy and the separation of the races. “I hate to say it, but we thought black was dirty, so a black person had to be dirty,” Joseph explained. “You’ve seen those Westerns where the good guys wear white hats and the bad guys wear black hats? That was pretty much our mentality. You grow up believing the things that the people around you believe. You’re going to believe what your daddy says and what your uncle who takes you fishing and baits your hook says.” Joseph went so far as to root for the New York Yankees—the Yankees!—when they faced the Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series, simply because Jackie Robinson played for the Dodgers. Most of his teammates in youth baseball felt the same way.

  Mr. Walters employed several black men in his wood shop and was capable of paternal acts of kindness toward them. When one of his charges, a brawny fellow named Dallas, was shot in a domestic dispute, Mr. Walters was enraged to hear that the emergency room had stopped the bleeding but refused further treatment unless payment was guaranteed. He told the hospital that they’d better treat Dallas or they’d hear from his lawyer. “He had no use for black people, but that was our nigger—and that’s what he called them,” Joseph said. Another time, when a doctor was summoned to look after one of their workers, Joseph was startled to hear that the physician was not white. “I didn’t know how that could be. You have to go to college to become a doctor, and I didn’t know any black people who had gone to college.” It had never occurred to him that they might aspire to something more in life than being maids or manual laborers.

  After his brush with racial violence on the streets of Americus, Joseph left for college in the fall of 1965 and became preoccupied with his studies. He rarely thought about the issues that had turned his hometown into a battleground and only later recognized that the night he had joined the rock throwers was a moment of epiphany. While Auburn had integrated a few months before Americus High, Joseph never noticed a black student in his classes. One of the few times he saw one on campus was at a football game, and he was lining up with the opponents.

  The Auburn Tigers were still an all-white football team in those years, as almost every major-college squad in the Deep South was. During the kickoff game of the 1968 season, Joseph watched as Southern Methodist University, energized by its first black player, wide receiver Jerry LeVias, upset the home team. Joseph had never competed against black players when he was in Americus, but he was curious about them and used to park his ’65 Chevelle near the practice field at the black high school to scout them secretly. Now that he was sitting in the stands at Auburn watching LeVias blow past defenders, he was amused by the way some of the fans changed their tune in a matter of minutes. “At the start of the game, people were saying, ‘Kill that . . . black guy!’ By the end, it was: ‘We got to get us one of those.’”

  While he was at Auburn, Joseph married the girlfriend he had been seeing in high school, and before long they had a son and daughter. Mindful of supporting his young family, he signed up for a state fellowship that allowed him to stay in school and pursue a master’s degree in teaching in exchange for working as an instructor in an Alabama junior college. He was assigned to Enterprise State Community College in the southeastern corner of Alabama and began teaching business and economics. Given the demographics of the area, many of his students were minorities taking advantage of educational opportunities that would have been closed to them a decade before.

  “They really wanted to learn,” Joseph said. “They’d come and ask me questions before and after class, and we’d talk. And I began to see through some of the darkness that had been around me at home, where there were so many people who made ugly jokes about blacks. I thought less and less about color with every term I taught.”

  When Joseph returned to Georgia to visit his family, his stepfather would ask how many blacks he had in his classes, peeved that there would be any. “I couldn’t tell you,” Joseph would answer. “I don’t count them.”

  He found his stepfather’s attitude off-putting. They weren’t talking about racial politics; they were talking about students—his students—and they had as much right to better themselves as any of the white kids at the community college. For the first time, Joseph found himself siding with the changes he had once reflexively opposed. He loved his stepfather and admired many things about him—especially his work ethic and his tenacity in overcoming his disability—but he did not admire his stubbornness on race. Joseph thought he was moving on; his old man was not.

  Their exchanges reminded him of the highest-rated TV show in America during those years, Norman Lear’s All in the Family. His stepfather obviously bore some resemblance to the bigoted Archie Bunker, although he hadn’t been around enough ethnic groups to spout Bunkerisms like “spic” and “wop.” The surprise for Joseph was that he found himself identifying with Archie’s bleeding-heart son-in-law, Michael “Meathead” Stivik. “Here I was starting a career and dealing with blacks like I never had in Americus, and my dad was saying things that made me realize that bigotry was stupid and deserved to be made fun of.”

  Norman Lear couldn’t have said it better himself.

  ____________________

  Just because David Morgan felt bad for Greg didn’t mean that he was pleased with the way their world was changing. He wasn’t. He was particularly sore about the integration of his high school. “I sure didn’t like seeing Robertiena Freeman walking down the halls of our school, but there she was. That was the law, and we couldn’t do anything about it. We had to accept it.”

  David was keenly aware that he was witnessing the passing of something. He liked to brag that he was a member of what would probably be the last all-white graduating class of Americus High School. At the time, it seemed like something worth bragging about. His perspective would mature.

  The Morgans were a solidly middle-class family who lived in a modest frame house in a postwar subdivision near the school. David was the middle of three children—bracketed by sisters—and knew Joseph from an early age. They went to the same kindergarten, the same grade school, the same church, and belonged to the same Scout troop. David’s family, on his mother’s side, went back as far in Americus as Joseph’s. When he rode his bicycle through the historic district, David might pass half a dozen fine old homes where his kin lived or once had dwelled. “By the time I got to town, three or four ladies had called my mother and told her that they had seen me ride by. Everyone looked out for you. Growing up in Americus was just the sweetest time imaginable for me. I realize it wasn’t that way for other people sometimes.”

  His father, Dave Morgan, taught aircraft mechanics in the vocational school at Souther Field, an airstrip north of town where aviation history had been made. Built during the Great War to train pilots, the field was abandoned by 1923 when Charles Lindbergh arrived to acquire a surplus Curtiss biplane. He slept in a hangar for two weeks while the craft was being assembled and
then took to the skies over Sumter County in his first solo flights. Mr. Morgan, who was from neighboring Dawson, came during World War II as a flight instructor.

  David learned a softer style of prejudice from his parents. They didn’t mind colored people—their preferred term—as long as they knew their place and stayed in it. Mr. Morgan would get ticked off when they were watching TV and Ed Sullivan would embrace a black performer like Nat King Cole. Later, at a church youth program, David was similarly annoyed when a visiting speaker prayed that God would remind everyone that Jesus was not a blue-eyed, auburn-tressed Caucasian but a dark-skinned, black-haired Jew. “You could hear a lot of stirring and grumbling in the room,” he recalled. “We all talked about it later and thought that was a cheap shot. But it did make me go off and think, and I could see that the man was probably right, even if I didn’t like it.”

  When David was thirteen, his happy-go-lucky childhood changed as his father fell ill and died of a strangulated hernia. He became the man of the house, taking on more responsibilities, working part-time jobs. While his mother was able to support the family through veterans benefits, Social Security, and stock dividends, she never got over the loss of her husband and cried herself to sleep for years. When David shook Greg’s hand at their graduation, his generosity of spirit had a lot to do with his emotional state of mind and his memories of who was not there.

  After high school, David bounced between Auburn and Georgia Southwestern College, where he earned a degree in math and physics. He enlisted in the navy and entered the aviation officer candidate school, wanting to be a pilot like his father. He finished the program but left the service soon afterward, a decision he later regretted. He was newly married and expected that he could find good-paying employment with a navy commission on his résumé. “I thought people were going to be lined up to hire my sweet ass. Nuh-uh.” He had trouble finding a job and ended up applying with the Americus school system, using the teaching certificate he had gotten in college. His first position was rather ironic. He taught at Staley Middle School, formerly all black, where he worked with a black principal and a black assistant principal: Robert L. Freeman, Robertiena’s father.

  David had driven by the school but had never set foot inside. By the time he started teaching there in the fall of 1970, the student body was split evenly between the races, a situation that he could not have imagined when he was a senior five years before.

  “That’s where the changes really hit me in the face,” he said. “It helped that I had been in the navy. The navy doesn’t care about black and white. They don’t stand for that crap. I didn’t know many black men in the navy, but there were a couple of guys I worked with who were wired up good and did their job. I didn’t think anything about it. When I grew up, I tried to put all my learned prejudice behind me.”

  David taught social studies, industrial arts, and physical education, focusing much of his attention on keeping order, not instruction. Teenagers, he found, do not obey like military personnel. He got to know and like several of the black faculty members, including Robertiena’s father (“a straight-up guy”) and a peppery young woman who was a civil rights activist and later became a member of the Americus city council. “She was pretty militant,” he said. “I’m not sure I would have liked her when I was in high school.”

  David remained at Staley for two years and then moved on to a school thirty miles away in the town of Cordele. He and his wife were starting a family. Wanting to earn more money, he soon left teaching and began a long career as a loan officer with the Farm Credit System.

  Years later, David was reading a book by a best-selling Georgia writer, Ferrol Sams, called The Whisper of the River. The autobiographical novel follows a young man who wants to be a doctor as he goes away to college in Macon and finds himself challenged by new ideas. During the student’s senior year, Clarence Jordan comes to campus during Christian Focus Week to speak about the experimental farming community he wants to establish outside Americus, Koinonia. Clergymen from miles around come to listen and quiz him about his controversial beliefs. One of them wants to know whether he’s a Marxist. Another asks, “Dr. Jordan, how would you like your daughter or sister to marry a nigra?”

  As David read the novel, a rush of recognition came over him. He realized that Dr. Jordan was one of the founders of the commune people in Americus had wanted to run out of the county, the farm whose market he had seen in smoking ruins as a boy, the place his classmate Greg had come from.

  Greg Wittkamper—David had to smile. He wondered what had happened to him since they last saw each other at commencement. And then his mind moved on to something else.

  ____________________

  Celia Harvey had never thought of herself as particularly bigoted. Growing up in Americus, she found racial slurs crude and cringed when she heard them spew from the mouths of others, which happened all the time—sometimes within her home. She was the youngest of three daughters in an upper-middle-class family. Her father, James Harvey, was a conservative man of his time, a bank vice president who joined the John Birch Society and was chairman of the Americus school board when it voted to exclude the three students from Koinonia. He was one of the first witnesses called in the federal lawsuit brought by the Brownes, Jordans, and Wittkampers. “Daddy was a very strong figure in our household,” Celia remembered. “If he didn’t agree with something in the news, he’d let us know. He did not want integration at all. He wanted blacks to stay on their side of town and in their schools.”

  Celia Harvey.

  Celia believed she took more after her mother, who never used racial vulgarities and who made a point of being considerate with the domestics they hired. When Mrs. Harvey drove their maid home, the maid rode in the front of their car, as if she were a member of the family; her father had her sit in the back. It was one of the little behaviors that suggested how kindly someone felt toward the Negro race. Celia’s mother once took her along to attend a birthday party for one of their maids at a black church, giving her a closer look at a part of her hometown that she usually saw only glancingly.

  Even so, Celia never seriously questioned segregation or the subservience of one class of people. It was just part of the scenery of her youth. “I felt it was wrong,” she said, “but I didn’t know what to do about it.” When civil rights protests arose in Americus, however, she reacted with a low-grade defensiveness, like many of her well-raised friends—especially when it came to integrating their high school. “We felt like people were trying to push it down our throats. This system was something that had been going on for generations and generations. People weren’t going to be changed quickly just because others wanted it to happen.”

  After graduation and a short stint at Georgia Southwestern College, Celia’s life veered away from Americus. Through the boyfriend of a cousin, she met a soldier from New York and married him, which did not go over well with some of her kin. They moved several times in the mid-Atlantic states and then settled outside Charleston, South Carolina, after he left the army in the early seventies. To bring in extra money, Celia started selling Tupperware. The area was thick with military families, many of them black, and some became her customers. She visited their homes, ate their food, used their kitchens and bathrooms. This was different from dropping in on a maid’s birthday party in Americus; now she was the working woman, meeting her clients in social settings where everyone was equal.

  There was one moment that knitted everything together for her. At one of her Tupperware demonstrations, Celia couldn’t take her eyes off the young hostess’s toddler. “I fell in love with that little girl. She was all over me, kissing me, wanting me to hold her. That baby just melted me.”

  It occurred to Celia that she had never touched a black person like that before. When she was a girl, she had loved her family’s maid, Christine, but that was no different from the warm regard thousands of southern children had for their mammies. Holding a dark-sk
inned baby girl humanized a people for Celia as never before. “I just hadn’t been around black families that much,” she reflected. “Almost everything we heard about black people in Americus was negative. If you talked about them at all, it was because something bad had happened. Now I was going into their homes and working, getting friendly with them. It really changed my attitude. It made me realize that there’s no difference here.”

  As farfetched as it sounds, Celia began to see the light at Tupperware parties.

  ____________________

  If Americus High School had chosen a Miss Congeniality, Celia’s best friend, Deanie Dudley, would have been a leading candidate. Not only was she a cheerleader and the homecoming queen, but she styled herself as a sort of goodwill ambassador for the senior class. It was a running joke that you couldn’t pass Deanie in the hall without her saying hello. Sometimes she even nodded to the black students. The sole exception to this outpouring of hospitality was Greg. Her aloofness toward him wasn’t so much selective meanness as a defense strategy; it grew out of a mind churning with fear and insecurity, the result of a racial drama that had shaken her family when she was sixteen. More than with any of Greg’s classmates, Deanie’s experience suggested how threatened and confused many white people in Americus and elsewhere felt during the civil rights reformation.

  Deanie was the oldest of four children in a family that had been in Americus since its founding in the 1830s. There was an Andersonville guard somewhere in her ancestry, but she didn’t pay much attention to such things until years later. Like many white children in that era and setting, she first learned about racial barriers through her family’s relationship with “the help.” Once, when she was little, she insisted that their maid, Pearl, sit down beside her and eat with everyone else. “It bothered me that she was going to have to sit by herself. I didn’t realize until later what the deal was. And then I didn’t think about it much. It was just part of our lives.”