The Class of '65

by Jim Auchmutey

  In other circumstances, Joseph and Greg might have been teammates. Greg would have made a fine gridiron prospect. He was strong for his age, his upper body pumped up from hours of lifting hay bales on the farm, and he could run like a colt. When they picked sides for football in physical education class, he was usually one of the first guys chosen, his objectionable background temporarily overlooked. Greg could do more chin-ups in a minute than anyone else and could climb the rope to the gymnasium ceiling with ease—an exercise that panics many a young teenager. One coach, watching him run, asked him to try out for the track team. Greg said he was too busy with farm chores and told him no.

  There was more to it than that. PE was mandatory; competing on the track or football teams was elective. Greg had no interest in going out of his way to glorify Americus High School on the fields of athletic endeavor. He certainly didn’t want to attend football games, the biggest events on the school calendar, where he would have made an easy target for his enemies. He secretly pulled against the team and would have been pleased if it had gone 0–10. If his classmates were going to have nothing to do with him, he was going to have nothing to do with their most exalted pastime.

  As the school year wore on, Greg got through his classes by withdrawing from his surroundings and creating a sort of mental bubble around himself, tuning out other people and daydreaming about arrowhead hunting and other things he enjoyed doing on the farm. He was an indifferent student who didn’t like to spend time inside reading when he could be outside tinkering with a tractor or walking through the woods. He drifted through his courses and paid only intermittent attention to the lectures. His grades slipped, and he flunked Latin and algebra, where a particularly mean-spirited teacher seemed to delight in asking him questions he couldn’t answer. His silence and lack of engagement only added to the sense that he was an alien presence, someone who could be ignored or picked on without consequence.

  Even the yearbook editors dumped on him. In the 1962 annual, The Panther, his freshman portrait was misidentified as “Grey Whitthamper,” as if he were a pile of dirty laundry.

  ____________________

  Greg might not have endured four straight years at Americus High. Fortunately, he didn’t have to. While he was in ninth grade, his family decided to move about as far north as they could move and still remain in the Lower 48 of the United States—not because of what was happening to their son at school, but because of the farm’s struggle to survive. As a side benefit, Greg received a temporary stay from harassment that helped replenish his sanity.

  The years of violence and boycott had diminished Koinonia, chasing off residents to the point that virtually no one lived on the farm except the Brownes, Jordans, and Wittkampers. The adults held lengthy discussions about whether to shut down the community or join another group. There was a possibility in North Dakota. Koinonia had a long relationship with a family there, the Maendels, who had supported the Georgians during the years of persecution and had taken in Jim Jordan after he fled Plains High School. The Maendels were Hutterites, members of a sect that originated in Austria and bore similarities to the Amish and the Mennonites in that they wore plain clothing and believed in pacifism and simple, communal living. Their farm had hosted a Hutterite colony, but they were reevaluating their affiliation and considering their options. In the spring of 1962, Will and Margaret Wittkamper volunteered to relocate their family and explore a merger between Koinonia and the North Dakotans.

  Greg stayed behind for a couple of months to finish his freshman year. It was the loneliest time of his life. Unwelcome in class, separated from his brothers and parents, he felt like he had been abandoned and began to brood and have fleeting thoughts of suicide. His mood lifted when he boarded a northbound Greyhound in June and saw a comely, blue-eyed brunette traveling by herself. They sat together and talked for hours, Greg telling her all about Koinonia and the way its young people were being treated in school. She seemed to understand. As she got off the bus in Indianapolis, he impulsively kissed her good-bye, and she kissed him back. He couldn’t remember feeling more lighthearted.

  Greg arrived in North Dakota to find a communal setup not unlike Koinonia. Joe and Mary Maendel had fourteen children and were a virtual colony unto themselves, living on a farm called Forest River that spread across six thousand acres on the boundless plains near the Canadian border. Greg and his brother David worked long hours collecting and grading eggs from a ceaseless production line of twenty thousand hens. That fall, they attended public school without incident, and Greg’s marks improved dramatically. He made up algebra with the help of a sympathetic teacher and earned Bs on his report card. He started reading more and found that it could be enjoyable. Outside the classroom, he joined the track team—the only extracurricular activity he ever participated in—and ran the hundred-yard dash. The other students knew he lived in a religious community and thought some of their customs were peculiar, but they didn’t regard Greg and David as freaks. For the first time, high school seemed kind of normal.

  The Wittkampers felt welcome at Forest River despite the cultural differences. The Maendels worshipped in the Hutterite fashion, speaking in a German dialect and separating the men from the women in church. They wore black clothing like the Amish and disapproved of certain accessories like belts, which they considered an unnecessary expression of human vanity. That wasn’t an issue since the Wittkampers brought very little with them from Georgia and allowed their hosts to dress them. But other issues were looming.

  The Maendels were thinking about making Forest River a full-fledged Hutterite colony again. That meant inviting other members of the faith to live there and adhering more strictly to its rules. Among them were two that the Wittkampers could not abide. The Hutterites prohibited music outside church. Will had a problem with that: he loved to sing and play the cello, and could take a bow to a wood saw and produce eerie-sounding tunes that seemed to issue from another century. His sons didn’t like the music restrictions either. One day, when a group of Hutterite elders were visiting to evaluate the community, Greg saw them outside his open window, put Dvořák’s Fifth Symphony on his record player, and cranked up the volume. He might as well have lit a cherry bomb.

  The other rule had to do with whiskers. According to tradition, husbands were supposed to wear a beard while single men kept a clean-shaven face. Will thought that was silly. Though he was entitled to a beard and had cultivated one for some time, he promptly shaved it off to show what he thought of all the strictures. Margaret was getting tired of the family’s new home as well, especially the winter weather, which depressed her. She learned a new word—snirt—to describe the mixture of snow and dirt that lingered through early spring.

  The Wittkampers decided that they weren’t cut out for North Dakota winters and Hutterite ways. At the end of the school year, they departed for Koinonia in a gray 1949 Plymouth sedan that the Maendels, generous as always, had given them for the trip. Greg drove most of the sixteen hundred miles back to Georgia. It was the first time he had ever taken a car out on the highway, and he was excited to be behind the wheel using his learner’s permit, but his adventure was tinged with sadness and apprehension. He would liked to have stayed at Forest River, belt-less or not; to him, almost anything would have been better than going back to Americus High School.

  ____________________

  When Greg’s family returned in June 1963, Koinonia was still in transition. With fewer people living there, the fellowship decided that it would no longer be a true commune where members pooled their resources and earned no income for their labors. It adopted a quasi-capitalistic model, with each resident assuming work responsibilities and receiving a stipend. Will Wittkamper would get $100 a month for tending the garden. Greg would earn $25 a week for taking care of a hundred cows, a consuming task that involved everything from baling hay and setting out feed to castrating bulls and birthing calves. Clarence Jordan would remain the de facto leader of the far
m, but he would spend more time on the road speaking and more of his time at home writing. He had been working on a new project, an outgrowth of some of his talks at Koinonia, translating the New Testament from Greek into the vernacular language of the South in an effort, as he explained, “to help cotton-picking Christians understand what their pea-picking preachers had been saying.” The first volume of what Clarence called the “cotton patch” version of the Gospels would soon be published.

  There was one other change at Koinonia that grieved everyone. As the adults saw it, the farm could no longer support three families. They came to the painful realization that one of them would have to go. It couldn’t be the Jordans. Clarence was indispensable; not only was he the community’s cofounder and spokesman, but he knew more about agriculture than anyone else. The Wittkampers weren’t going anywhere. Will was entering his seventies, losing his hearing, and could no longer be expected to find a job to support his wife and sons. “You all do what you want,” Margaret declared, “but we’re going to stay here until we die.”

  That left the Brownes. Con was in his midforties and had better employment prospects than Will. He arranged a job as associate director of the Highlander School, the training center in Tennessee where Rosa Parks had learned about nonviolent resistance before the Montgomery bus boycott and where Koinonia had moved its interracial summer camp when the Sumter County authorities shut it down. As the Wittkampers were coming home, the Brownes were reluctantly packing up after thirteen years and leaving for Knoxville, where Lora and Carol would have to finish school. There would be two fewer Koinonia kids at Americus High, one more reason for Greg to be wary of going back.

  His classmates had not forgotten him. That spring, when they signed each other’s copies of the 1963 Panther yearbook, one of Joseph Logan’s pals ended his inscription with a jab at the boy none of them had seen in months:

  “P.S. Hasn’t it been great with no Greg?”

  chapter 5

  Welcome to the Revolution

  At some point in his adolescence, every preacher’s son seems drawn to a friend who knows his way around the shadow world of temptation and gratification. When Greg returned to Georgia in the early summer of 1963, he found such a friend helping out in the pecan plant at the farm.

  Collins McGee did not move to Koinonia to become a member of the commune; he came to work. The goateed young black man did everything from handling livestock to putting up hay to repairing tractors. He was a couple of years older than Greg and far more experienced in the sweet mysteries of life that a sixteen-year-old boy is naturally curious about—namely, the pursuit of women and alcohol. After he came back from North Dakota, Greg no longer stayed with his family in the house they had occupied before but instead took up residence in a room across from Collins, under the old Jordan quarters. They quickly became running buddies, in part because Greg had something Collins needed. He didn’t own a car, and Greg, now old enough to drive legally in Georgia, had access to that clunky old Plymouth he had steered back from the Hutterite farm.

  Collins was from Americus and seemed to know everyone in the black community. When Greg drove him into town for errands, Collins would take him to the places he frequented and show him a side of Sumter County few whites ever saw up close. They shot pool together, listened to the blues in juke joints, and hung out along Cotton Avenue, where the black cafés and businesses were congregated in between all the streets named for Confederate generals. Sometimes they drove out in the woods to buy moonshine, which Collins preferred to most store-bought spirits. Greg had tried beer and brandy, but he had never tasted liquor. He kind of liked it.

  People in the dives eyed the young paleface suspiciously at first, but Collins vouched for him. “He’s OK,” he’d say. “He’s from the Farm.” That’s what they called it—the Farm, like it was the only one around. Being from there was recommendation enough; it meant Greg wasn’t like most of the other white kids. “It meant that I was on their side. They treated me like I was some kind of minor celebrity. I was the honky they tolerated.”

  As Greg got to know Collins, he could see that there was more to him than a thirst for the nightlife. He was smart and funny. He was intense and worked as hard as two men. Best of all, he was caring and took a sincere interest in his younger friend. Greg told him about his troubles at Americus High in a way that he had never confided to some of his family members. He came to regard Collins as an older brother, especially now that Billy was spending most of the year in Illinois completing high school.

  Collins McGee and Greg on the farm,

  mid-1960s. Courtesy of Leonard Jordan

  The first thing most people noticed about Collins was his physique. He was short and solid and as thickly muscled as a young Joe Frazier. He exuded fearlessness. “We thought he could kill a bear with his bare hands, and he’d try it, too,” said one of his best friends in Americus, Sammy Mahone. “There was nothing he wouldn’t do.”

  That derring-do served Collins well in the cause that mattered more to him than anything: civil rights. During the year Greg was away, young black people in Sumter County had started to come together in a protest movement, with Collins McGee and Sammy Mahone among its leaders. Little more than a month after Greg returned, marchers hit the pavement in Americus, and all hell broke loose. For weeks, Collins would head into town to attend mass meetings at the black churches accompanied by his new bud and driver, and afterward they’d shoot pool and maybe take a nip. Greg had never known Americus could be so interesting.

  ____________________

  Greg had actually experienced the righteous fervor of a civil rights rally before. His introduction came in Albany, thirty-five miles south of Koinonia, where the movement mobilized in southwest Georgia a few weeks after he started high school, in the fall of 1961.

  With a population of fifty-six thousand, All-BENNY (as the natives pronounced it) was the only city of much size in the agricultural quarter of the state below Macon and Columbus. More importantly, it was the site of Albany State College, a black school where students were keenly aware of the lunch counter sit-ins that had spread from black colleges in Nashville, Atlanta, and Greensboro, North Carolina. In September 1961, the organization that grew out of those protests, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), dispatched two field representatives to Albany, where the NAACP and local civil rights groups had been stirring. They formed a coalition, the Albany Movement, and launched the largest campaign against racial discrimination in a southern city to date.

  The revolution began at a bus station. The Interstate Commerce Commission had issued a ruling against segregation in bus and train terminals, and activists across the South were itching to test it. On November 22, the day before Thanksgiving, five students were arrested for refusing to leave the area of the Trailways station reserved for whites. Two of the students declined to post bond and stayed in jail through the holiday, eliciting widespread sympathy because they were away from home and missing their families’ turkey dinners. Hundreds of people turned out for the movement’s first mass meeting and to protest outside city hall on the day of the trials.

  Another round of demonstrations began in December after a group was arrested for trying to desegregate the train station. The city responded with mass incarceration on a scale never before used against the civil rights movement. More than five hundred protestors were locked up, far too many for Albany to detain, so the overflow was sent to a makeshift gulag of jails in surrounding counties. Running low on people and resources, the leaders of the Albany Movement summoned the biggest name they could to publicize their struggle; they asked Martin Luther King Jr. to come from Atlanta to speak at back-to-back church assemblies.

  King intended to rally the troops, not join the street protests. In the emotion of the moment, however, he agreed to lead a march and was promptly arrested along with Ralph David Abernathy, his closest associate at the Southern Christian Leadership Confere
nce (SCLC). The two were driven to Americus under the guard of an officer carrying a Thompson submachine gun and delivered into the custody of Sheriff Chappell, who threw them into a cell together in his new county jail. King spent two nights there and was galled by the rudeness of the sheriff and his deputies, who kept calling him “boy” and worse. Chappell refused to let reporters speak with his distinguished guest, telling two of them, “Ain’t you glorified that damn nigger enough?” A few days later, bailed out and back in Atlanta, King drolly characterized the high sheriff to a journalist: “I had the displeasure of meeting the meanest man in the world.”

  Over the next few months, Albany descended into a war of attrition. The city refused to negotiate, and the movement tried to apply pressure with boycotts and continued protests. There were more arrests—including King, again—and an endless series of mass meetings that were celebrated for their revival spirit and passionate singing. Still, by the summer of 1962, little had changed in the racial status quo.