When Greg finished, most of the class stared. Only then did it dawn on him that he had confirmed their darkest suspicions: that he hung out with pinkos and lived in a community that harbored the kind of people who got arrested for treason.
For Greg, reentering high school in Georgia felt like stepping back into a cold shower. He had grown accustomed to being treated like a normal young person during his sophomore interlude in North Dakota. Now that he was starting his second stretch at Americus High, the hectoring resumed as if he had never left. The same wise asses called him names, the same tough guys fired spitballs and paper clips, the same girls completely ignored him. Nothing had changed. The prospect of retracing the worst time of his life left him more depressed than ever.
At one point that fall, Greg grew so resigned and apathetic that he stopped bathing. He walked around for days in a peculiar and increasingly funky statement of dissent, figuring that if his classmates were going to shun him anyway, he’d give them good reason to keep their distance. “I guess I wanted people to smell my pain. I really hit a low.”
Greg’s mother spoke with him about the message he was sending. “Until now,” she said, “the kids didn’t have a good reason to dislike you. Now you’re giving them one. You’re letting them win.” Principal McKinnon called him in and suggested that he would stand a better chance of making friends if he didn’t stink like a goat. Even Collins McGee weighed in; he thought Greg’s hair was too long and slicked back and made him look like a common peckerwood—not the best guise for a white boy who was trying to make connections on the black side of town. Collins prescribed a shorter cut with a clean, straight neckline that he called a “tape job.” Greg ditched the Brylcreem and started combing his locks forward in short bangs. Oddly enough, his new do made him look like some of the athletes who enjoyed messing with him.
None of it helped. Showered and shorn, Greg simply made a better-smelling target.
His friends at the farm and in the movement worried about him. Zev Aelony wrote from the county jail, where he was languishing on the insurrection charge that Greg had spoken about in his show-and-tell: “How [are] Greg and Jan? Concerned about their reception in school.”
Jan Jordan, now a senior, was one of two other students from Koinonia at the high school that fall. The other one was David Wittkamper, who was entering eighth grade and was a year younger than his brother had been when he first had to run the gauntlet. He was ill-equipped to take it.
David was a sensitive child, shy and insecure, and when the boys found out that the slight thirteen-year-old was from Koinonia, some of them took delight in knocking him around. They tore the books out of his hands, pushed him down, and tripped him during a footrace, ripping his clothes. Once he suffered a black eye and a bloody nose. Most of the roughhousing happened after school or between classes, where teachers did little to stop it. On the bus ride home, Greg would see his brother crying and try to comfort him, telling him that he knew what he was going through. David would have nightmares about his family being attacked and then wake up, get ready for school, and catch the bus for another round of abuse. “It was like going to torture every day,” he said. Not surprisingly, he was failing most of his courses. Sometimes he daydreamed about suicide.
One of the worst moments for David happened on the Friday before Thanksgiving—November 22, 1963—the day President Kennedy was assassinated. The terrible news was even more traumatic for the eighth grader because, at first, he misunderstood what had happened.
David was in history class that afternoon when one of the boys who had been beating up on him rushed into the room calling out, “They got him! They shot him down!”
David froze for a few seconds, imagining that the someone who had been shot down was his brother. It wasn’t an unreasonable fear; Greg was despised, and the Koinonia children had been targets of gunfire. When David realized that the victim was the president of the United States, his horror turned to shock and then to revulsion when a few hotheads clapped and cheered as the class learned that Kennedy had died of his wounds. “Calm down!” the teacher objected. “That isn’t right.” A similar outburst occurred in Greg’s algebra II class. Not everyone celebrated—certainly not the girls, nor most of the boys—but there were enough instantaneous whoops to underscore how detested the president had become in certain quarters of the South. He may have been the leader of the free world, but John F. Kennedy supported civil rights, and for some children and their parents, that was all that mattered.
In Americus, as across America, students were sent home early that afternoon. The Wittkampers listened to radio coverage of the national tragedy well into the evening, Greg’s mother quietly weeping.
The student newspaper reports
the fire, 1964. Courtesy of David Morgan
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Two months after the Kennedy assassination, there was another shock—a local one. No one perished this time, but for many in Sumter County, the loss was profoundly sad nonetheless. Americus High School burned down.
It happened on the last Sunday in January. Around 10 o’clock that night, passersby noticed smoke coming from the august colonial-style building and called the fire department. As the first men arrived to investigate, an explosion erupted and a wall collapsed. The structure burst into flames, fueled by heart-of-pine floors that had been burnished for years with oil-based cleaning solvents. Although there were lingering suspicions of arson, the most likely cause was that someone had neglected to turn off a gas burner in the chemistry lab.
The light from the fire could be seen for miles and attracted a crowd of people who watched helplessly, tearfully, as a beloved part of their town was destroyed. Greg’s classmate David Morgan walked from his home two blocks away and never forgot how hot the winter night felt. Greg rode to Americus with a carload of people from Koinonia. By the time they got there, the flames were waning and the main building had been reduced to a heap of rubble and the sooty remnants of the entry façade. The library, the language lab, the typing room, the home economics department, sixteen classrooms, the administration offices—all were lost.
While other students mourned, Greg could muster little sentiment for a place that had been the setting of so much unhappiness. He admired the school building itself and did not enjoy seeing it laid to ruins. But he had seen fires before—fires that had not been accidents. During the terror years at Koinonia, he had witnessed the eerie glow of tenant houses torched in the night at the hands of parties unknown. As he stood watching this latest conflagration, a practical thought popped into his head: maybe he wouldn’t have to go back to school there.
But he did, and sooner than he expected. In fact, the fire made things worse for Greg.
It took only three days for Americus High to reopen. Trailers were moved onto campus, and classes were held in subdivided spaces in the youth center, the newer annex, and other detached buildings that had not been damaged. In the stopgap configuration, students had to walk outside between periods, around corners, past shrubbery. Some of the kids took advantage of the enhanced cover and began to harass Greg more openly, out of sight of their teachers. Going from class to class became more hazardous. He came to miss the days when they were usually under one roof.
Beyond the fire, the early months of 1964 were eventful for Greg. Koinonia was bustling with visitors who were using the farm as a staging ground for the southern leg of a transcontinental peace walk to protest US government policy toward Cuba. At the same time, Greg was beginning to enjoy some of the fruits of capitalism. After the old Plymouth he had been driving conked out, he saved money from his livestock duties and bought a used car in Atlanta, a cherry-red 1959 MG two-seater. His classmates, clueless about the workings of Koinonia, wondered how a socialist like Greg could afford to buy such a sporty automobile.
His most cherished acquisition—the first thing he bought with his earnings—was a J-50 acoustic Gibson guitar, whi
ch he got for $175 at a pawnshop in Albany. He played songs by Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and other folk singers, whose protest lyrics he much preferred to the early music of the Beatles, which was all the rage among his peers but too teenybopper for Greg. As usual, he was out of step with his classmates.
As Greg’s second year at Americus High came to a close, there was one final trauma: he almost got killed. During the last weekend of spring term, he was working at the farm, helping to repair a wagon used to pull hay behind a tractor, when the heavy steel carriage fell on top of him and struck his back and his head. Blood gushed from his mouth and ears and seeped out of the corners of his eyes. One side of his face was skinned clean, and the nerve that controlled movement in his left eye was injured, giving him double vision for months. He had to wear a patch until the nerve mended, which made him look a little like a beatnik.
Greg was taken to the emergency room in Americus and spent the night swallowing and vomiting his own blood. He had suffered a concussion and had to stay in the hospital for a week. He missed his final classes, but even in the hospital, he couldn’t escape one more indignity from his schoolmates. One day, laid up in his bed, he saw several of them in the hallway pointing at him through the open door. They must have thought he looked funny in his bandages because they were laughing at him.
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Of the three Koinonia students admitted by federal court order, only one made it all the way through Americus High. While Billy Wittkamper escaped to Illinois and Lora Browne’s family moved to Tennessee, Jan Jordan endured the slings and arrows for the entire four years.
Jan tried not to let her emotions show—Greg thought she was more stoic than any of them—but the constant badgering got to her as well. One incident in her speech class stood out. On a day when she was supposed to deliver an oral presentation, she returned from lunch to find her textbooks strewn across the classroom. “I don’t think I can give my speech today,” she told the teacher, bolting down the hall in tears. A few minutes later, she came back from the restroom to witness a dramatic display of belated justice. The boy who had trashed Jan’s books was standing in front of the class looking distressed, and the teacher, Mrs. Fennessy, was conducting an angry inquisition.
“What have you learned today?” she demanded.
“Not to knock someone’s books on the floor,” came the meek reply.
“What else have you learned?”
“To say I’m sorry.”
“What else?”
“I’ve learned not to be so prejudiced.”
Mrs. Fennessy wasn’t finished.
“Do you feel like crying?” she asked the boy. Then she turned to the class. “Do the rest of you feel like crying? Well, I feel like crying.”
Jan was thunderstruck. For the remainder of the year, no one bothered her in speech class. She wished there had been more no-nonsense teachers like Mrs. Fennessy and more students like the two girls who had broken ranks and started eating lunch at her table in the cafeteria. Jan never doubted that there were decent people at Americus High School. As for the ones who behaved less decently—the name callers and food throwers—she had begun to take a philosophical view. She didn’t really blame them; if she had been born to different parents, she might have acted the same way.
But all that was nearly behind her now.
As her high school days dwindled, Jan clung to a D average that barely qualified her to graduate with the Class of 1964. She had never earned high grades, given the stress and distractions, and she was relieved to be donning a gown and collecting a diploma at all. Fittingly, the final scene did not go smoothly.
Among the friends Jan invited to the commencement exercises at the football stadium was Collins McGee, who was still working and living at Koinonia. When he learned that Collins wasn’t planning to attend, Clarence Jordan asked him a pointed question. “Are you not going because you don’t want to, or are you not going because you’re a Negro?”
That clarified matters; Collins decided to go.
At the commencement, Jan was standing in line with the other students when her father walked up and told her that Collins had been stopped at the gate and denied entry to the section where the other families and friends—all of them white—were seated. The school authorities offered to let him sit in the grandstand, where a few places remained near the top, but they didn’t want to upset people and cause a scene by allowing a black person into the reserved area. In their fear of causing trouble, they provoked a different kind of scene.
Jan found the superintendent, Clay Mundy, and told him that she wanted no part of the ceremony if her friend couldn’t be treated like everyone else. The processional music was about to start.
“What do you want to do?” her father asked.
Jan exited the queue of students and climbed into the grandstand. She watched the exercises from the top row, conspicuous in her white gown and mortarboard, seated with her father, mother, younger brother, and Collins. During the roll call of graduates, the person at the microphone skipped over her name, as if she didn’t exist.
After the service, Clarence confronted the superintendent and blessed him out. In parting, he made a prophecy that sounded like a threat. “Next year,” he said, “this school will be integrated.”
He followed up on it. The Jordans placed an ad in the Times-Recorder giving Jan’s account of what happened at the commencement, headlined: “Why I Did Not Graduate with My Class at Americus High.” Several times over the summer, Clarence phoned or wrote the school board to check what they were doing about their segregation policy. His letter of July 29 laid out what he expected of the board members:
Almost two months have elapsed since my previous letter to you, and as there has been no response, I take it that you do not intend to reply. . . . I can assure you that your “head-in-the-sand” position will become increasingly difficult—and miserable—in the days ahead. The experience of other communities surely teaches us that our problems do not go away if we but hide our faces from them long enough. Nor will they evaporate into the mists of accusations, rumors, and evasions. They must be faced—courageously, intelligently, and openly. It is my deep wish that you may thus respond, so that our community—both white and Negro—may be spared the suffering which so often follows in the wake of unwise, stubborn leadership.
Clarence was unaware that a plan to admit a token number of black students to Americus High was already in the works, at least in one person’s mind. If he had known who that person was, he would have found it ironic indeed.
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Warren Fortson, the school board member who had gone along with rejecting the Koinonia students a few years before, had come a long way in his thinking. When he moved to Americus and joined a law partnership in 1959, he was too busy with his job and his family to spare much thought for relations between the races. Later, during the Albany Movement, he regarded the long-running battle as someone else’s problem, even though it was unfolding less than an hour’s drive down US 19. “People in Americus reacted to Albany like people in America did to World War II in the beginning,” he later explained. “People said: That’s happening over there. I hope it doesn’t happen here.”
Then it did.
The turning point for Fortson came when the mass arrests started in Americus. On the way to his law office, he passed a vacant building that had once housed the local newspaper. One day in August 1963, he saw that the city had turned it into an emergency jail overnight. Forston thought it looked like a holding pen for frightened livestock. “That thing was chock-full of kids. Eighth graders, ninth graders, tenth graders—kids. When I saw all those children locked up, I thought: not in my town.”
Fortson resolved to work as quietly as he could to ease Americus through the inevitable racial transition. Later that year, he phoned John Perdew, one of the Americus Four, who had been freed with the others by a feder
al judge after more than two months in jail on treason charges, and invited him over to his house for a beer. Perdew was wary. One of his SNCC buddies advised him not to go because it might be a trap. He went anyway and stayed late into the night talking with Fortson, who impressed him with his sincerity. “He said he was so sick and tired of Jim Crow and he wanted to bring it down,” Perdew remembered. Fortson asked him to stay in touch and let him know what was happening in the movement—and to be sure to call from pay phones so they wouldn’t be discovered. He also initiated back-channel communications with two black people he knew from his legal practice: Lena Turner, a young activist who had been arrested in protests, and Robert L. Freeman, an educator and minister who also headed the local chapter of the NAACP. His daughter, Robertiena, was a star student at the black middle school.
As a member of the school board, Fortson’s biggest concern was peacefully desegregating the city schools, especially the flagship, Americus High. It wasn’t going to be easy.
Local opinion on the issue was apparent in 1960 when the Georgia legislature created a commission to hold hearings around the state about whether to close public schools or submit to federal law and begin to integrate them. The first hearing was held in Americus. Of the fifty-seven people who testified, all but nine favored segregation at any cost. In essence, they said that they would rather eliminate the school system and rely on private academies than allow white and black children to mingle in the classroom. “I believe our people can educate their own,” said banker Charles Crisp, one of the civic leaders who once had tried to get Koinonia to sell out and move.
Pushed to the brink, state officials came to a different conclusion. Governor Ernest Vandiver backed away from his pledges to perpetuate segregation and asked lawmakers to repeal a constitutional amendment denying state education funds to any systems that integrated. That left the decision to local school boards. In the fall of 1961, Atlanta allowed nine black teenagers into its formerly white high schools, earning praise from President Kennedy, and a few other city systems across the state soon did likewise. But in most of Georgia—and definitely in Americus—schools remained as segregated as ever in 1964, ten years after the Supreme Court had spoken.
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