The Class of '65

by Jim Auchmutey

  Koinonia eventually found coverage through a novel program called the Christian Brotherhood Insurance Plan. Two thousand people across the country signed pledges to insure the farm for up to $100,000, splitting any claims equally among them. Insurance, it seemed, was a fundamentally communal proposition.

  At the time the violence started, fifteen black people were living at Koinonia—about a quarter of the farm’s population. In the winter of 1957, members of the Ku Klux Klan, who were presumed to be behind the shootings and bombings, began a campaign of intimidation intended to drive the black residents away. They burned crosses and torched outbuildings at Koinonia and on nearby farms that were occupied by black families with ties to the community. The sight of flaming crosses was unnerving for people who had been raised on stories of lynchings and vigilante whippings. Rufus and Sue Angry, a black couple from Sumter County who lived at Koinonia with their children and wanted to become members, were particularly concerned that they might be singled out for punishment.

  Most of the farm’s black residents moved away as the population dropped by a third within a matter of weeks. Koinonia arranged to send the Angrys to New Jersey, where a communal farm called Hidden Springs was available. Some of the Georgians wanted to establish a sister community there, or at least a refuge. Others wanted to move the whole operation there and be done with Dixie.

  Another group in Sumter County had the same goal.

  One Sunday afternoon, Margaret Wittkamper was outside pushing a baby carriage with her youngest son, Danny, when she looked up to see a procession approaching the farm. “There was a long string of cars coming real slow, and they had their headlights on, so I thought it was a funeral,” she said. It was a motorcade of seventy vehicles, and it was carrying members of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. They had been holding a rally at the fairgrounds in Americus and were coming with a proposition.

  Margaret noticed Slappey, Koinonia’s old nemesis, get out of a car, and she asked him what was going on. “Whose funeral is this?”

  “It might as well be yours,” he answered.

  Another Klansman appeared and intoned, “Show me to your leader.” It sounded like bad dialogue from a science fiction movie, and Margaret couldn’t help but giggle. But the men were dead serious. They wanted to know whether Koinonia would consider an offer for its property. They wanted them to sell out and leave south Georgia.

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  A ray of hope appeared in the spring of 1957 when Herbert Birdsey, a farm supplies merchant in Macon, offered to provide Koinonia whatever feed and seed it needed from his stores in Americus and Albany. He had read about the boycott and didn’t understand why anyone would turn down sales like that. The farm took advantage of his overture and bought seven hundred pounds of chicken feed. There would be no more purchases.

  The first indication of trouble came on Friday, May 17, when Birdsey received a phone call from a man in Americus who loudly demanded to know who had given instructions “to sell to Communists down here.” Birdsey said he had. Offended by the man’s abusive tone, he hung up.

  That weekend, around 1 a.m. on Sunday morning, several sticks of dynamite were tossed at the store in Americus from a car speeding down Forsyth Street. The explosion heavily damaged the front of the building and blew out fourteen windows in the Citizens Bank, the chamber of commerce, and the county courthouse, where the glass face of the venerable clock was chipped out between the numerals two and three. When Birdsey arrived later that morning to inspect the damage, his manager resigned on the spot, saying he had never wanted to do business with Koinonia in the first place. The establishment never reopened.

  Among the stream of curious people who came by to see the crime scene was Greg’s future high school classmate Joseph Logan, then finishing fourth grade at Furlow Grammar School. Joseph had never met anyone from Koinonia and was only hazily aware of its existence. Still, the episode made an impression on him. His father’s insurance agency had been on that block. His mother worked in an office across the street. Joseph examined the three-inch gash in the sidewalk where the dynamite had gone off and wondered who might have been hurt if it had happened on a weekday.

  Attacks on an unpopular farming community out in the country were one thing; a bombing on one of the city’s main streets was quite another. Civic leaders decided that things had gone far enough. “Regardless of how we feel toward Koinonia,” the Times-Recorder editorialized, “this violence, from whatever source it comes, must be stopped.” The city, county, and chamber of commerce backed up the newspaper’s words by offering a reward of $1,100 for information leading to the perpetrators.

  On the Sunday after the blast, a delegation of ten businessmen and community leaders drove to Koinonia after church to talk with residents about how they could resolve the conflict. The delegation included the mayor, the chairman of the county commission, the editor of the Times-Recorder, and the president of the largest bank. They met with eight full members of the community—including the Jordans, Brownes, and Wittkampers—in the Jordans’ living room.

  Charles Crisp, the head of the Bank of Commerce, spoke for the visitors. He was the eldest of them and the bluest blood in town, the grandson and namesake of a man who had served as speaker of the US House of Representatives during the 1890s. He tried to couch his message as a moral appeal.

  “Now your experiment has provoked the sensibilities of the vast majority of our people. Some of our people feel that you are out here to create trouble and chaos or to make money, which, if that’s true, why, there would be no use for us to come out here. We come out here on the basis that you are serving what you believe to be Christian principles and are dedicated Christians. You say you are and we accept that. Now our philosophy is that the first duty of a Christian would be to—well, peace on earth, goodwill to men—to make brotherly love in the community. Unfortunately, your experiment has not done that; it has set brother against brother. It has created bitterness. It has created hatred. It has created every emotion that is contrary to my concept of Christianity.”

  He got to the point. “It is our belief that unless this experiment is moved to other fields that tempers will get to such a point that somebody is going to get hurt. We deplore it; we don’t want it. We want to appeal to your good judgment to pray over it and think over it and see if you don’t think you’ll be serving the best interests of your Lord to move and leave us in peace.”

  The people who ran Sumter County were giving Koinonia an ultimatum: get out or there would be blood, and it would be on their hands. It was essentially the same offer the Klan had made earlier that year.

  Clarence thanked the gentlemen for coming and considering the problem. “Suppose we did leave,” he said. “Would it be an admission to the rest of the nation and to the rest of the world that Sumter County could not or would not preserve law and order within its bounds? Would it be an admission on our part that we felt people were not free in Sumter County to worship God as they saw fit, so long as they did not harm anyone?”

  “We would take that responsibility,” Crisp said.

  “Another thing,” commission chairman George Mathews interjected. “There’s no way in the world for us to furnish you with police protection out here, and we don’t have any control over folks slipping around at night and throwing a stick of dynamite, not only on your place but up there on the streets of Americus.” Later in the discussion, Mathews opined that the sheriff was doing a good job of investigating the crime, and then he added an offhanded remark that was closer to the truth of the situation. “Somebody asked me the other day who that was threw that dynamite up on the sidewalk, and I told him if I knew I wasn’t going to tell anybody, because I don’t want any of it in my automobile, ’specially with me in it.”

  It was a telling admission. The county’s chief executive was saying that he was too scared of the bombers to try very hard to find out who they were. Of course, this was the s
ame man who earlier that year had told an Atlanta freelancer writing for The Nation what he thought about Koinonia. “We aren’t going to have that gang down here stirring up our Americus niggers. . . . We got no room for people like that here, and we don’t aim to have them around much longer.” No wonder he wasn’t chosen to speak for the delegation.

  The two sides talked awhile longer and then broke up with little agreement or understanding. A few weeks later, Koinonia invited the men back and suggested that a third party—perhaps someone from Georgia who understood southern attitudes—could mediate. The proposal went nowhere. If nothing else came of the summit meetings, at least the violence tailed off. While no one was prosecuted for the bombings or the attacks on the farm, word apparently went out to the Klan and its ilk that further terrorism would not be tolerated, even if the authorities more or less agreed with the terrorists.

  As for the suggestion that Koinonia relocate to a more hospitable setting, Clarence was asked about that after a speech he gave that year. He answered with some of the most passionate words he ever spoke:

  I want to tell you why we don’t sell out and move away. Fifteen years ago, we went there and bought that old eroded piece of land. It was sick. There were gashes in it, and it was sore and bleeding. I don’t know whether you’ve ever walked over a piece of ground that could almost cry out to you, “Heal me, heal me.” I don’t know whether you feel the closeness to the soil that I do. When you fill in those old gullies and terrace the fields, you begin to feel the springiness of the sod beneath your feet, and you see that old land come to life. When you walk through a little ole pine forest that you set out as little seedlings and now see them reaching for the sky and hear the wind through them. When you walk a little further over a bit of ground where your child is buried. [The Jordans lost a newborn son in 1955.] And you go over to a hill where your children and many visitors have held picnics. When you walk across a creek that you’ve bathed in during the heat of summer.

  His voice suddenly rose in indignation. “And men say to you, ‘Why don’t you sell it? Move away.’ You might as well say, ‘Why don’t you sell your mother?’”

  He continued in a softer tone. “Somehow God has made us out of this old soil, and we go back to it and we never lose its claim on us. It isn’t a simple matter to leave it.”

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  Not all the threats came from bombers and nightriders. That summer, more than a year after the violence started, Greg’s family faced a calamity that millions of parents in the fifties feared almost as much as the risk of nuclear war.

  The water in the swimming hole seemed especially cold when some of the kids went for a dip late one afternoon. Climbing out, Greg noticed that his youngest brother, Danny, was shivering uncontrollably and that his skin was bluish. They wrapped him in blankets and put him to bed. He awoke the next morning unable to move his legs. His parents took him to the hospital and heard the dreaded diagnosis: infantile paralysis—polio.

  Greg and the other Koinonia children who attended Thalean had been inoculated with an early version of the Salk vaccine at school, but Danny, not yet three, was considered too young to receive it. He spent most of his youth on crutches or braces, his mother shuttling him to an endless series of exams and operations at charity treatment centers. When Danny started school a few years later, his condition afforded him a measure of protection from harassment. Once, when a boy popped him in the face and he fell to the bathroom floor, a couple of other kids came to his defense. “What are you doing?” one of them said sharply. “Leave him alone. Can’t you see he’s crippled?”

  After Danny came down with polio, the Wittkampers faced another health crisis when Will almost died of pneumonia. Greg watched through the window of their cottage as the adults in the community gathered around his father’s bed to pray for his soul—his condition was that critical. But Will was a tough old bird. Once he recovered, he became a health-food nut, making smoothies, which he called “green shakes,” with half-spoiled food and plants that most people wouldn’t put in their mouths. “They were the worst things you ever tasted,” Greg said.

  Will was an early environmentalist who didn’t believe in using chemicals, which put him at odds with Clarence, who considered pesticides a practical tool of modern farming. Will also thought that Christian stewardship called for reusing everything, including spent nails, which he collected in buckets of water to let them rust and then spread across the garden to amend the soil. It peeved Clarence, who pointed out that even partially disintegrated nails could puncture tractor tires. “Your father has some strange ideas,” he told Greg. “Do you know why this soil is red? Iron. It doesn’t need any more iron.”

  While Clarence appreciated Will’s efforts in the garden, he didn’t think it was necessarily the best use of time or resources. What Koinonia really needed during the boycott, he thought, was a new source of income.

  ____________________

  With no place to sell its eggs or row crops, Koinonia looked around for another business to sustain the community—one that would be less susceptible to local hostility. The members settled on pecans, which thrived in south Georgia and could be turned into a number of products sold nationwide by mail order. They planted pecan trees to supplement their existing orchards, and until the young trees bore fruit, bought nuts from the federal government and from farmers in Alabama who didn’t know or care who they were dealing with. They purchased grading and sorting equipment from an Italian family in Albany who were getting out of the pecan trade. Clarence studied up on commercial baking and candy making, and one of the poultry houses was converted into a kitchen producing confections and dense fruitcakes soaked in wine. The solicitations went out under a pointed slogan: “Help us ship the nuts out of Georgia.”

  In the meantime, Koinonia set up an assembly line of slaughter to liquidate its former business. For days on end, Will Wittkamper yanked the heads off thousands of laying hens, while Greg plunged the bloody carcasses into scalding water and sent them on to the kitchen to be plucked, processed, and frozen. They had more fricassee on their hands than anyone knew what to do with. In the coming months, the farm served so much poultry that some residents grew queasy at the smell of stewing birds. “We ate chicken till we grew feathers,” Con Browne said.

  Con was in Americus that November taking mail-order packages to the railroad express office when he became the victim of another spasm of hatred. A man approached his car demanding to know what he was doing, and then jerked off his glasses and hit him in the face with brass knuckles. Con fell back into the passenger seat bleeding, and the man pounced on him, striking him repeatedly. The railroad express manager took him to a doctor and drove him back to the farm, where he went to bed with his wounds. Greg stopped by the house to look in on him and flinched at the sight of his raw, lacerated face.

  A short while later, Sheriff Chappell knocked on the door. He wasn’t there to investigate the assault; he was there to arrest Con. A city policeman had noticed that he was driving a car with an illegal license tag, and the sheriff intended to book him for it. He took Con from his bed, bandaged and groggy, and hauled him to jail, where he locked him up with a convicted murderer. The Browne children saw their bruised father carted off. It was all their mother could do to keep them from kicking the sheriff in his shins. “I actually went to find an ax,” Charlie Browne remembered. “I was going to chop his head off.”

  The assault of Con Browne and his subsequent arrest dramatized like nothing before the trauma and frustration of living at Koinonia during the terror years. Schooled as they were in Christian nonviolence, the children understood why they were not supposed to fight back. But that didn’t quell their emotions. They were angry. They wanted to hurt the people who were hurting them. Some of them could not accept that their parents wouldn’t make it stop or at least move them all away. “I thought my father wasn’t man enough to defend us,” Charlie said. “For a long time, I was kind
of ashamed of him.” Greg directed blame outside the farm; the attack on Con and his subsequent arrest taught him, at the tender age of ten, to be leery of law enforcement officers.

  The adults discussed whether it would be better to evacuate the children. The question caused them considerable pain. “I’ve wondered many, many times how much good we were doing by letting those people ride by here and shoot at us,” Clarence said years later during one of his final interviews.

  Con had a particularly hard time squaring the responsibilities of fatherhood with the requirements of his faith. He resolved that, while he wouldn’t commit violence in defense of his children, he would stand between them and anyone meaning to harm them. Taking a bullet for his kids may have been a valid position intellectually and morally, but it didn’t reassure his family and it didn’t still the doubts churning inside Con’s subconscious. He started seeing a therapist in Columbus. He was having a terrible dream: one of his children had been killed, and all he could do about it was to lay the body on the courthouse steps in Americus.

  The farm’s dilemma reminded Greg of the Old Testament story of Abraham. When God asked him to sacrifice his son Isaac as a show of faith, he bound him to an altar and started to slit his throat before an angel intervened and stopped him. It seemed to Greg that the people at Koinonia were putting a lot of trust in angels.