The Class of '65

by Jim Auchmutey

  I believe the story about what happened at AHS is a story that should be told, not to find fault, but to give hope to all who hear it. If you have any memories or insights, I would love to hear them.

  I have free long distance and am better at talking than writing. If you would like to talk, let me know and I will call you. Also, I would love to read anything you might like to write.

  May You Stay Young Forever

  Your friend,

  Gregory Wittkamper

  As Greg reread the letter, he lingered on the line above his signature: “Your friend.” He never dreamed he would be writing those words to these people.

  But he still wasn’t finished. He had one more thing to do before he could turn the page on high school.

  Epilogue

  On a sweltering afternoon in August 2013, Greg Wittkamper walked inside his old high school for the first time in forty-eight years. He hardly recognized the place. Much of the complex had been rebuilt after he left—construction necessitated by the fire during his junior year—and little remained as it existed in his imagination. There was a new main building, the cafeteria wasn’t where it used to be, and the structure that had housed the government class where he “insulted” Thomas was no longer standing. The biggest difference was the student body; an administrator who took him on a tour around campus estimated that almost 90 percent of the children enrolled at Americus–Sumter County High School South, as the institution had been rechristened, were black. They looked neat in their school uniforms of blue and khaki and barely paid attention to the older white man peering down the hallways as if he were trying to see something that was no longer visible.

  Greg had come to Americus to take part in a panel discussion at Georgia Southwestern State University about the civil rights movement in Sumter County. He made several such trips in the years after his class reunion, but this visit stood out because the program included an event at the scene of his stormy exit from high school. The weekend was going to culminate with a Saturday night banquet in the gymnasium where he received his diploma to a round of catcalls. That building, at least, had survived, although it had been updated, mercifully, with air-conditioning.

  As Greg approached the gym on Harrold Avenue, a wry look came over his face. “This is about where they started throwing bricks at us after the ceremony,” he said. He motioned up the hill to a side street. “And that’s where the car was. You should have seen us running; we couldn’t get out of here fast enough.”

  Inside the arena, the basketball goals were raised, dinner tables covered the court, and a buffet was being readied along one of the sidelines. Large blue letters on a wall proclaimed it “The Panther Den,” with matching blue paw prints. As Greg was taking it all in, a heavyset man with a long, gnomish beard came over to say hello. It was Tommy Bass, the classmate who had welcomed Greg to Americus High as a freshman by firing paper clips into his back with a rubber band. He had changed, too; he was wearing an Obama T-shirt.

  Greg wandered around the room speaking with other guests, many of whom he vaguely recognized from the protests and mass meetings of the 1960s. The banquet was sponsored by the Americus–Sumter County Movement Remembered Committee, a group that believes the local civil rights struggle has not received its due and has been unfairly relegated to near obscurity in comparison to Selma. “What happened in Americus is an untold story,” Congressman John Lewis, who saw action in both campaigns, said at one of the committee’s earlier functions. Its members dream of a museum or some kind of permanent exhibition and have begun collecting artifacts like the door of the cell where Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed in Americus. But on this evening, they just wanted to celebrate, raise money, and honor a handful of leaders who were instrumental to the cause.

  One of them was the Reverend Robert L. Freeman, the late father of Greg’s classmate Robertiena. In accepting the award, his son, Robert Jr., told a story about the desegregation of Americus High that Greg had never heard. It happened on the day he, Robertiena, and two others rode to classes in the funeral home limousine and found themselves in the center of a howling mob.

  Robert was home from school that afternoon when his father charged into the house, disappeared into a back room, and then left without a word. He returned a few minutes later and departed again hastily. Some time afterward, he told his son what the comings and goings had been about: at the end of the school day, Robertiena had gone to the principal’s office and couldn’t leave because another angry rabble had formed outside. Someone phoned Freeman at the middle school where he worked, and he rushed home with a grim determination to defend his daughter at any cost. “Son,” he said, “I came home to get my gun. And then I thought about it and decided I didn’t want to do something I would regret. So I brought the gun back home and put the situation in the hands of the Lord.”

  Greg had no idea that the day he remembered so vividly had come so close to ending in disaster. If Robertiena’s father had waved a gun in front of those people at the school, something horrible might have happened. It had taken courage for him to overcome his anger and remember what he stood for.

  ____________________

  Greg never forgot about the others. From the week he received the first letters from his fellow class members, he thought about the four who had desegregated Americus High—Robertiena, Jewel, David, Dobbs—and wondered whether anyone had ever apologized to them. He hoped so; reconciliation, he had discovered, was a wonderful thing.

  When Greg returned to West Virginia after the class reunion in 2006, he glowed for weeks with the warmth of a healing he had not fully realized that he needed. More letters and phone calls helped prolong the feeling. Richard Crutchfield, whom Greg recalled as a studious boy with kind-looking eyes, wrote from north Georgia to thank him for coming “as I believe it meant so much to everyone to finally accept you as a classmate . . . something we all should have done so many years ago.” Ellen Marshall Beard, who had been head cheerleader and one of the most popular girls in school, sent him a card from Atlanta with a picture of a thickly fleeced sheep. “Saw this card and it reminded me of the Class of ’65 in 1965,” she wrote. “Hopefully we are not so sheepish anymore.” She went on to say that Greg’s coming was the highlight of the reunion. “Maybe love does conquer all!”

  The most unusual communication was a call from another class member who lived in Oklahoma and had not been able to make it to the reunion. He told Greg that he had felt bad for him in school and thought, in another setting, they might have become friends, if only because they both played the guitar. Then he dropped a stunner; he confided that his father had been a Klansman, something he didn’t discover until he saw him marching in his white KKK regalia. “That’s strange to think that your dad was in the Klan, and they were the ones shooting into the houses where we lived,” Greg said. “Yes,” his classmate agreed, “that is strange.”

  In all, a dozen members of the Class of ’65 took the trouble to write or call Greg—one out of eight—and many more spoke to him at the reunion. The whole experience had been gratifying beyond all his hopes. It had also proved beneficial for his mental well-being. After they returned from Americus, Anne noticed that her husband was able to talk about things in a way he had seldom been able to in the five years they had been together. “He really opened up,” she said, then added with a laugh: “This saved us a lot of money on counseling.”

  The reconciliation wasn’t limited to Greg. The sense of remorse that led Deanie to square things with him also drove her to track down two other students from Koinonia who had been in the class ahead of them. She phoned Jan Jordan in Highlands, North Carolina, where she and her husband were running a bed-and-breakfast, and Lora Browne in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where she had settled with her husband. When Deanie heard that Lora occasionally visited her mother-in-law near her home in Naples, she invited her to drop by, and she did, the two of them talking for four hours. More tears fell.


  In the midst of all this apologizing and forgiving, Greg felt compelled to reconnect with the black students who had braved Americus High in 1964. He hadn’t spoken with any of them since he left town a few months after graduation. He wondered how the rest of their schooling had gone, what had become of them, how they dealt with the traumatic memories they must carry. His journey would not be complete until he talked with them.

  ____________________

  A little more than a year after the class reunion, Greg returned to Americus for a Labor Day weekend of events celebrating the activists who had participated in the Sumter County movement. He used the occasion to get together with three of the people who had broken the color line at the high school—Jewel Wise, Dobbs Wiggins, and David Bell—taking them to dinner at one of the chain restaurants that had sprouted along the highways on the fringes of town, Ruby Tuesday. As the party took its seats at a table by the windows, David looked around and chuckled. “You know, we couldn’t have done something like this in the old days. Stewart’s and all those other places downtown didn’t serve black people.”

  “I guess we could have gone to Koinonia,” Greg said.

  Greg Wittkamper today. Courtesy of Sallie Wittkamper

  For the next hour, they talked mostly about what daring kids they had been: the church rallies, the street protests, the truculent cops, the resulting arrests. “All my friends were in jail,” David remembered. “If you weren’t locked up, you were out of it.” The three of them didn’t dwell as much on Americus High. They were proud of their part in ushering the school into the future, but the details of the day-to-day hazing seemed less stirring than the memory of marching through Americus with a crowd of teenagers singing freedom songs. Going to the white high school seemed like a grinding battle without glory that ended in a tactical retreat, because none of these three had stayed. “That’s not my alma mater,” Jewel said. “I just happened to go there for a while. I have no happy memories of that place.”

  David told a story about an unlikely person who knew about his role. After he finished at the black high school, he served in the army for twenty-two years and then came back to southwest Georgia to work as a corrections officer. One day an inmate asked him whether he was the David Bell who had helped integrate Americus High School. David said yes and wondered how he knew about it. His mother had told him. “He seemed impressed to meet me. That made me feel good.”

  All three of Greg’s dinner mates had spent years away from Americus. Two of them had returned to the area to live, and Dobbs, who had retired from a business career, would soon move back into the house where he grew up. They all agreed that the civil rights revolution they had fought for had changed the town for the better in so many ways. “But then you see something that makes you realize that some things haven’t changed much at all,” Jewel said. “Did you see those photos in the paper today?”

  She was referring to a special section in the Times-Recorder previewing the football season. Most of the front page was taken up by two photos of the local high school teams. They made quite a contrast. The Americus–Sumter High Panthers suited up seventy-six players, all but four of whom appeared to be black (with a few white coaches around the edges). The Southland Academy Raiders dressed forty-seven players, all of whom appeared to be white. The two teams don’t play each other. Less than three miles apart, the schools might as well be in different towns.

  The photos were a topic of discussion at the civil rights commemoration that weekend. While some conceded that Americus wasn’t that different from hundreds of other communities where parents had taken their children out of the public schools, others pointed out that Southland was founded specifically because those public schools began to admit blacks. It moved beyond its origins as a “seggie” academy and evolved into a well-regarded institution that stresses religious instruction and advertises a nondiscrimination policy—and does indeed have a small percentage of minority students. Greg couldn’t see any of them on the newspaper page. To him and Jewel and many others at the civil rights gathering, the football photos looked like a disturbing reminder of a time they had hoped was past.

  ____________________

  In the fall of 2012, Greg traveled back to Americus twice for a symposium marking the centennial of Clarence Jordan’s birth and then a reunion of more than a hundred people who had lived at Koinonia over the years. As he listened to the speakers at Georgia Southwestern and strolled the grounds of the farm during the pecan harvest, he was struck by how much local feelings toward his onetime communal home had shifted.

  Greg could remember when some of the gray-headed elders at the reunion were children and tried to hide where they lived from outsiders. If a student who didn’t know him asked his brother David where he was from, he’d mumble something about the north end of the county—anything but admit that he came from that strange place on the opposite end. In the years after Greg left, attitudes toward Koinonia softened as more people realized that it was not an outpost of Soviet Communism and really did spring from a fundamentalist reading of early Christianity. He noticed that the Americus visitors center was even displaying brochures about Koinonia. “People are curious about it. There’s almost a caché attached to being from there now.”

  The fact that Habitat for Humanity traces its birth to Koinonia helped immeasurably. During Habitat’s fledgling years, some people advised Millard Fuller to distance himself from the commune in order to make his housing ministry more acceptable to the community. He refused, telling them, “I’m not going to disown my mother.” Those lingering sentiments against Koinonia faded as Habitat grew and became a cornerstone of Sumter County’s identity. Even after the organization moved many of its operations to Atlanta a few years ago, Habitat has remained one of the county’s largest employers, occupying one of the most prominent structures in Americus, the handsome old Rylander Building on Lamar Street. It isn’t the only housing ministry of its kind in town; after Millard parted ways with the nonprofit he founded, he and his wife, Linda, established the Fuller Center for Housing, which has similar ambitions to alleviate poverty housing around the world. Millard died unexpectedly in 2009, but his latest endeavor has continued to spread. Both ministries grew from the seedling of an idea that he and Clarence planted at Koinonia during the late 1960s. The two are buried near each other on Picnic Hill.

  As Greg saw during the reunion, Koinonia is thriving. Around two dozen members and interns live there, although it usually seems more crowded because so many people visit for retreats and sabbaticals. The fellowship still professes brotherhood and peacemaking, along with a newer emphasis on sustainable farming practices—permaculture, in the argot of its devotees—which would no doubt please Koinonia’s original Mr. Natural, Will Wittkamper. They still ring the dinner bell for a communal lunch at noon, and the questers and pilgrims still wander in. In front of the property on Highway 49, there’s a history marker bearing testimony to the community’s complicated past.

  When Greg goes back to Americus now, he can drive down Habitat Street, turn left onto Millard Fuller Boulevard, and continue until it runs into Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. On the sidewalk in front of the Rylander Theatre, he can look down at a plaque memorializing Clarence Jordan, part of a Walk of Fame display honoring notable people from Sumter County.

  One of those notables was among the first speakers at the Clarence Jordan Symposium. Before he took the stage inside the Rylander Theatre, Jimmy Carter lingered over the sidewalk and noticed something interesting about the company Clarence was keeping. “I looked at some of the other names, and it was kind of ironic because I remember that some of those other names who are inscribed in front are partially responsible for the bombs and the bullets and the fires that tried to destroy what Clarence Jordan did at Koinonia.”

  With a flash of his grin, Carter mentioned the farm’s mail-order slogan during the boycott years, the quip about shipping the nuts out of Georgia. “A lo
t of the nuts who tried to burn out Koinonia have been converted into supporters of what Clarence Jordan stood for. And I’m very grateful for that.”

  Clarence himself foresaw the day when Koinonia would be accepted. During an interview in 1965, he predicted that it would happen as naturally as the hatching of a chicken egg. “You watch, and you think it will never hatch. Then one day you look at it, and what was a lifeless object yesterday is a warm, living, and beautiful thing. But you know all that change didn’t happen since you looked at it yesterday; the change had been going on all the time, but you couldn’t see it.

  “Who knows?” he continued. “Maybe in twenty years the white people in Americus will be willing to speak to us.”

  ____________________

  Greg found Robertiena Freeman at the Houston Medical Center in Warner Robins, an hour northeast of her hometown, where she worked as director of the pharmacy. Distracted in the middle of a busy workday, she didn’t recognize his name over the phone at first. Then he mentioned riding to school in the funeral home limousine, and it all came back: the crowd, the hollering, the rock throwing. “I thought we were going to get killed,” she said.

  Robertiena (or Tiena Fletcher, as she was now known) had come a long way since the end of Greg’s senior year. She spent three nights in jail that spring after police found her necking with her boyfriend and charged her with fornication—a transparent attempt to oust her from the white high school, in the view of her parents. The case was eventually dismissed, but while it was being adjudicated, the court and her family agreed that it would be a good idea if she got out of town for a while. That summer, while Americus erupted in its worst racial violence, she was in Berkeley, California, attending an enrichment program called the Encampment for Citizenship, where she learned about hippies and lefties and peaceniks.