The violence against Koinonia was widely publicized. One of the best overviews ran in Redbook, which was more of a general-interest magazine in those days (“The Conflict of a Southern Town,” October 1957). The five-page spread featured a haunting photo of Florence Jordan peering into an oval mirror that had been cracked by one of the bullets intended for her husband, which just missed their oldest daughter. When I visited Koinonia more than twenty years later, you could still see bullet holes in some of the wood-frame buildings.
Koinonia’s plight drew comment from several prominent Americans. Reinhold Niebuhr’s editorial about the situation appeared in the May 7, 1957, issue of the Evangelical and Reformed Church’s publication The Messenger. Eleanor Roosevelt’s plea for Koinonia ran on July 31, 1958, in her syndicated column “My Day.” (She later wrote a letter on behalf of the farm to the US Department of Agriculture.) Dorothy Day’s account of her trip to Koinonia during the terror time appeared in the May 1957 Catholic Worker. One person who read the article and remarked on it was Flannery O’Connor. While she admired Day, the Georgia writer confided in a letter collected in The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor that she was dubious about the wisdom of someone riding a bus from New York to share in the sufferings of a group of southerners: “All my thoughts on this subject are ugly and uncharitable—such as: that’s a mighty long way to come to get shot at, etc.”
The letter I quoted from Martin Luther King Jr. to Clarence Jordan is dated February 10, 1957, and appears in volume IV of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Jordan spoke at King’s church in Montgomery a little more than a year later; Jan Jordan remembered going to his house afterward for dinner.
A reporter for the Times-Recorder witnessed the motorcade of Klansmen who drove to Koinonia on February 24, 1957, to demand that it sell out and move. (Margaret Wittkamper also recounted the scene in her oral history.) The grand jury presentment attacking the commune ran in the newspaper on April 5, 1957. The bombing of the feed store that had been selling supplies to the farm was reported in large headlines on the front page of May 20, 1957. On the following Sunday, May 26, a group of Americus leaders met with Koinonia partners to propose that the farm relocate. We know exactly how it went because the session was tape-recorded. As the transcript in the Koinonia archives shows, the discussion got testy at times. When one of the Americus delegation suggested that 99 percent of the people in Sumter County wanted Koinonia to leave, Ora Browne asked whether he was including the slight majority of the population that was black, “or just the white people?”
Clarence Jordan’s reflections on whether Koinonians were serving any purpose in letting people ride by and shoot at them appeared in Faith at Work magazine (April 1970), in a Q&A titled “The Legacy of Clarence Jordan: His Final Interview.”
Chapter 4: The Children’s Hour
The lawsuit Koinonia parents filed to get their children into the Americus schools was covered in the Atlanta and Americus newspapers. Transcripts of the federal court hearing on the case—William Wittkamper et al. v. James Harvey et al. and the School Board of Americus, Georgia—are at the National Archives regional repository outside Atlanta, in Morrow.
My account of the hostility Lora Browne, Jan Jordan, and Billy Wittkamper faced at Americus High is based mostly on my interviews with them. Greg and Carol Browne detailed the harassment they encountered when they started at the school the following year. Greg’s classmates Deanie Dudley, Celia Harvey, Joseph Logan, and David Morgan shed light on how he was viewed by the student body.
Margaret Wittkamper’s oral history was a good source of information about her family’s year away from Koinonia in North Dakota, as were my conversations with Greg and David Wittkamper. The changes at Koinonia when they returned are outlined in Lee’s and K’Meyer’s books. Almost fifty years later, Conrad Browne still found it hard to talk about his family having to leave the community.
A word about Clarence Jordan’s “Cotton Patch Gospels,” his translations of much of the New Testament into the common language of the South: they’re wonderful—funny, folksy, pointed. To give a sample, here’s his introduction of John the Baptist from Matthew 3:4: “This guy John was dressed in blue jeans and a leather jacket, and he was living on cornbread and collard greens. Folks were coming to him from Atlanta and all over north Georgia and the backwater of the Chattahoochee. And as they owned up to their crooked ways, he dipped them in the Chattahoochee.” Jordan’s writings inspired an off-Broadway play in 1981, Cotton Patch Gospel, by Tom Key and Russell Treyz, with music by Harry Chapin. I’ve seen it performed several times, none more memorably than when Key, a respected Atlanta actor and playwright, delivered an animated solo version at the Clarence Jordan Symposium in Americus in 2012.
Chapter 5: Welcome to the Revolution
Greg’s pal Collins McGee is well remembered in Americus as a larger-than-life character. Greg, Sam Mahone, and Dobbs Wiggins were my principal sources of information about McGee, who also makes cameo appearances in several Koinonia histories and in the Jordan papers at the University of Georgia.
The Albany Movement is a familiar chapter in accounts of the civil rights era, tucked between the rise of the sit-ins and the riots over desegregation at Ole Miss. I relied on Taylor Branch’s and Juan Williams’s histories for an overview and on memoirs by Ralph David Abernathy and Andrew Young for particulars about Martin Luther King Jr.’s stay in the Sumter County jail. Young wrote that when he first met Jimmy Carter a few years later and heard him refer to Sheriff Chappell as a friend, it took him some time to form a better opinion of Carter. King made his remark about the sheriff being “the meanest man in the world” to a reporter for Jet magazine (January 4, 1962).
One of the best sources for understanding Koinonia’s involvement in the civil rights movement is “Six Years Behind the Magnolia Curtain,” an unpublished memoir by Dorothy Swisshelm, a social worker who lived at Koinonia and briefly shared quarters with Greg after his family had departed for North Dakota. Lora Browne kept a journal during those years that captures the youthful idealism of the Koinonia kids and the spirit of the mass meetings she attended. Vincent Harding, the Mennonite clergyman who set up the meeting between King and Clarence Jordan, recollected that encounter for me.
I spoke with three SNCC veterans about the spread of the movement to Americus: Sam Mahone, Don Harris, and John Perdew (whose memoir, The Education of a Harvard Guy, described the orientation session at Koinonia and his later jailing on insurrection charges). Zev Aelony, one of the other Americus Four arrested for fomenting revolution, wrote about his time at Koinonia in his alumni magazine at the University of Minnesota. He also discussed his experiences for the Freedom Riders 40th Anniversary Oral History Project at the University of Mississippi. (Aelony was a freedom rider, too—he got around.)
The story of the Leesburg Stockade—the extended jailing of almost three dozen girls arrested during protests in Americus—was the subject of a powerful article in Essence magazine by Donna M. Owens (“Stolen Girls,” June 2006). I’ve interviewed several of the young women who were held in the stockade, including Robertiena Freeman, who later desegregated Americus High School. SNCC photographer Danny Lyon, who sneaked into the stockade and documented the awful conditions, has a chapter on Leesburg in his book Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement.
Claude Sitton’s article summarizing the first months of protest and white resistance in Sumter County ran in the New York Times on September 29, 1963 (“Strict Law Enforcement Stifles Negroes’ Drive in Americus, Ga”). The businessman who blamed all the unrest on Koinonia, it’s worth noting, was also the foreman of the 1957 grand jury that investigated and condemned the farm.
Chapter 6: “Not in My Town”
Greg and David Wittkamper told me about their experiences during the 1963–1964 school term, including the afternoon of the Kennedy assassination. The fire that destroyed most of Americus High on January 26, 1964, was c
overed exhaustively in the Times-Recorder and in the AHS newspaper, the Paw Print. David Morgan still had the February 3 issue, headlined: “A Lovely Day, Then—Tragedy.” The old school was indeed a handsome building.
Jan Jordan described the punishment of one of her tormentors in speech class in an article she wrote for Faith at Work magazine (May–June 1965). Lora Browne had a similar experience in Mrs. Fennessy’s class. Apparently, the lady didn’t take any mess. (There were other teachers at Americus High who kept discipline; Robertiena Freeman recalled that Jimmy Hightower, the football coach, told his students that no one was going to harass anyone in his class, whatever they thought about the changes at their school. She appreciated his stand, although some of his players were among the worst harassers.) My account of Jan Jordan’s graduation day came from her and from a letter her father wrote to the school superintendent later that summer (in the Jordan papers at the University of Georgia).
The panel that held hearings about school desegregation in Georgia was the Sibley Commission, named for its chairman, Atlanta lawyer John A. Sibley. His papers are at the Emory University Manuscript and Rare Book Library and include voluminous records of the commission’s public forums in ten cities around the state. The first hearing was held in Americus on March 3, 1960. Warren Fortson told me the behind-the-scenes story of the desegregation of Americus High. John Perdew also contributed pertinent recollections. Robertiena Freeman, David Bell, Dobbs Wiggins, and Jewel Wise filled me in on how they came to enter the formerly white school.
Chapter 7: Among Panthers
My reconstruction of the first days of desegregation at the high school are based on news accounts and on my interviews with the participants. Each of the black students also wrote contemporary first-person pieces about their experiences for the civil rights newsletter Voice of Americus.
While there weren’t as many protests in Americus during 1964, there were several outbreaks of racial violence after the passage of the civil rights act outlawing segregation in most public places. In his memoir, John Perdew told of his beating after he and several black people sat down at the Hasty House café. Homer Bigart of the New York Times reported on the tense mood of the city in an article on July 9, 1964: “White gangs, consisting mostly of teen-agers, foray nightly into the Negro residential district. Their object is to frighten Negroes from any further testing of the new liberties they may enjoy under the Civil Rights Act. Racing down the red clay roads, carloads of youths in battered automobiles pepper Negro homes with birdshot, firecrackers and rocks.”
Years before I began this book, I had the pleasure of writing about Frances Pauley, a remarkable woman who worked for social change as executive director of the Georgia Council on Human Relations. She died in 2003, but through her papers at Emory University, I was able to read her reports about compliance with the civil rights law and about the progress of school desegregation across the state. She knew Americus well. Kathryn L. Nasstrom’s biography, Everybody’s Grandmother and Nobody’s Fool, makes it clear that Pauley considered Sumter County one of her toughest nuts to crack.
Chapter 8: Still Standing
My account of the confrontation behind the baseball grandstand—and the events surrounding it—was based on interviews with Greg, Gladys Crabb, David Morgan, and Joseph Logan, whose written reconstruction of the scene in his 2006 letter to Greg was also helpful.
Chapter 9: A Lesson Before Leaving
Andy Worthy’s suicide made the front page of the Times-Recorder on January 8, 1965. He was not the only member of the senior class to die that year; another boy perished in a plane crash later that spring.
Donnie Smith discussed his senior English paper about Greg during a taped interview at the class reunion in 2006. His classmates thought his choice of subject was the desperate act of a desperate student. The Southern Patriot, an education newsletter, ran an article about Greg in its November 1965 issue under the headline: “One Student Who ‘Overcame.’”
The story of Robertiena Freeman’s legal ordeal is based on interviews with her and her lawyer, Warren Fortson; on an oral history she did for the Sumter County Oral History Project at Georgia Southwestern State University; and on a case summary done by Frances Pauley for the Georgia Council on Human Relations.
The Americus High commencement was covered in the Times-Recorder (June 8, 1965) in a story that took note of the weather, the number of people in attendance, and the songs that were part of the ceremony—which is how I knew that they sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” I love small-town newspapers.
Chapter 10: The Next Selma
The election-day arrests that provoked the protests of 1965 in Americus were covered in the local, regional, and national media. My account was based on those reports; on retellings in Stephen G. N. Tuck’s Beyond Atlanta and Laughlin McDonald’s A Voting Rights Odyssey; and on an interview with the candidate who was arrested, Mary Kate Bell Tyner. I also heard her speak about that day during a panel discussion at Georgia Southwestern State University that included one of her poll watchers in 1965, Lena Turner-Fulton.
The near-fatal beating of Hosea Williams in Americus during the 1940s is mentioned in many articles about him, including his obituary in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (November 17, 2000). The Atlanta papers wrote numerous stories about the turmoil in Americus during the summer of 1965. So did the Times-Recorder, which had virtually ignored the protests of 1963, no doubt reflecting the town leadership’s wish that the movement would just go away. Willy Siegel Leventhal, a California college student who worked in Sumter County as a volunteer with the SCLC’s SCOPE project, published a helpful book about that initiative and the strife he encountered in southwest Georgia, The Scope of Freedom. Warren Fortson told me about his ill-fated efforts to foster a dialogue between the races in Americus.
Greg’s classmate Joseph Logan was remarkably candid about what he saw and felt and almost did during the disturbances of 1965. In some of the news photos, a line of young men can be seen standing atop the steps at First Methodist Church, ready to repel any unwelcome visitors—the same duty Joseph was drafted for. The efforts to desegregate the churches also figure in the memoirs of one of the men who was arrested, now Congressman John Lewis (Walking with the Wind). That was his ticket to jail in Americus.
The killing of Andy Whatley and the unrest that followed made national news and brought a new level of media scrutiny to Americus. Among the accounts I found particularly useful were ones in the New York Times (July 29, 1965), the Los Angeles Times (July 31), and the Baltimore Afro-American (July 31). I called Tom Brokaw because I had read that he regarded his brief conversation with a young protester in Americus in 1965 as perhaps the most memorable interview he had ever done. Some of the footage shot for his reports on WSB-TV in Atlanta and NBC can be viewed at the University of Georgia’s Civil Rights Digital Library.
Warren Fortson’s last, troubled days in Americus attracted the attention of two great journalists. Ralph McGill wrote a column about him leaving town in the Atlanta Constitution on September 16, 1965. Marshall Frady covered his tribulations for Newsweek and Atlanta magazine and included a profile of Fortson in his collection Southerners (“What Happened That Summer to Warren Fortson”). Frady found a lot of material in Americus. In the Newsweek Atlanta Bureau records at Emory University, there’s a draft of a story he wrote after the Whatley killing that begins: “In the South’s gazetteer of racial crucibles, the name Americus has a special viciousness all its own.” And this description of Sheriff Chappell: “looks rather like a florid Boston terrier in glasses.” Frady returned to Sumter County a few years later and wrote a kinder story about integration at Americus High for Life magazine (“A Meeting of Strangers in Americus,” February 12, 1971).
Chapter 11: Breaking Away
The story of Greg’s singular college education comes from my conversations with him and from literature in his possession about the founding of Friends Wo
rld College and the book donation campaign that paid for his tuition. The college is now known as LIU Global—part of Long Island University—whose website relates its roots in the Quaker tradition during the 1960s.
The account of Millard and Linda Fuller’s arrival at Koinonia is based on interviews with them and on Lee’s and K’Meyer’s books about Koinonia, as well as on several histories of Habitat for Humanity. When I first interviewed Millard in 1987, he told me about the night he and the party from Koinonia were thrown out of First Baptist Church in Americus. When Greg told me the same story some twenty years later, from a slightly different perspective, I experienced a powerful feeling of déjà vu.
My telling of the James Meredith march was drawn from Taylor Branch’s At Canaan’s Edge, Aram Goudsouzian’s Down to the Crossroads, and “The Meredith March,” an article in New South magazine (summer 1966), in which writer Paul Good reported seeing a Mississippi state trooper threatening Morris Mitchell, the Friends World director.
The section about Greg’s return to America and Americus was gleaned from my interviews with him and his brothers and from his mother’s oral history.
The death of Clarence Jordan figures large in Lee’s The Cotton Patch Evidence. Millard Fuller was codirector of the community then and told me about the hassles of dealing with the local authorities after the death. Jordan’s passing was front-page news in the Times-Recorder and rated an obituary in the New York Times (October 31, 1969). The cabin study where he died has been preserved as a shrine—“Clarence’s Shack,” the sign calls it—where visitors to Koinonia can see his manual typewriter and his little desk.
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