Greg and Collins going to the prom at
the black high school. Courtesy of Faith Fuller
Despite such a checkered history between the races, Greg always felt accepted in the black community, even when he was going out with one of their young women. He figured he was a novelty, an allowed exception. It helped that he was still hanging out with Collins McGee, who knew everybody and every place. Greg sold his red MG that spring, and the two of them tooled around in his latest import, a gray Volkswagen Beetle. “Collins saved my life,” he said. “If he hadn’t shown me around, I probably would have become a stark raving lunatic.”
The local police took note of Greg and Collins and jerked them around on several occasions. One night, Sheriff Chappell himself tailed their car for a while, breaking off the surveillance by firing his revolver several times into the air. Another time, a city officer pulled over the twosome, checked their license and registration, and then told Greg to get out of town.
“But I live here,” he protested.
“Well, you know what I mean,” the officer said, glancing toward Collins. “Quit going to that side of town and quit carrying them around.”
Fortunately for Greg, neither he nor Collins had been drinking excessively that night. That wasn’t always the case. At times during his last two years of high school, Greg overindulged, returning to Koinonia with his pal in the wee hours when no one was awake to see them staggering to bed. One night, getting home around 3 a.m., they were startled to find Clarence and Will stirring in the barn. A cow was giving birth.
Will took a whiff of his son and went into stern father mode. “What’s the meaning of this?” he demanded. “I know what you’ve been doing.”
He wasn’t talking about alcohol; Greg and Collins had been shooting pool in a dive, and Will was smelling the tobacco smoke on their clothes, which was as objectionable to him as booze. Greg didn’t dispute his daddy. He gathered himself and got to work helping out with the birth. The calf didn’t make it.
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A funny thing happened in senior English that spring. One of Greg’s classmates wrote a paper about him titled “Four Years Without a Friend.” The author, Donnie Smith, a good old boy who apparently had forgotten that his main character lived out of state for one of those years, had been antagonistic toward Greg like most of the fellows. Perhaps the coming end of their high school days put him in a more generous, reflective state of mind. Or perhaps he just needed a topic for his final English theme and knew that their teacher, Mrs. Crabb, was sympathetic to Greg. She didn’t think much of the composition, but she gave Donnie a C for his choice of subject matter, which is pretty much what he had been angling for anyway.
As for Greg, his final English paper was a polemical essay calling for the US government to lift its ban against travel to Castro’s Cuba. He had long since stopped caring what others thought about him and his ideas.
As the school year dwindled to its last month, Greg was more relaxed than he had ever been at Americus High. Except for the occasional wisecrack, the jocks and ruffians who had pestered him since the fall of 1961 had left him alone for most of the second half of the school year. The respite didn’t last. A few weeks before the end of the term, Greg started to hear threats from some of the repeat offenders as he walked from building to building between classes: Don’t screw up our graduation . . . Why don’t you stay away? . . . Don’t bring any of your friends, or someone’s going to hurt you . . . If we see any niggers, you’re going to get killed.
The menacing talk was rooted in the previous year’s commencement, when Jan Jordan had invited Collins and other black friends to watch as she received her diploma. The superintendent, afraid that their presence would provoke some spectators in the otherwise white crowd, wouldn’t let them into the reserved seating area. So much had changed since then—the outlawing of legal segregation, the arrival of black students at Americus High—but one thing had not: many white people in Sumter County simply did not want to sit with black people. As in 1964, the school authorities saw graduation as a potentially combustible situation.
They came up with a new plan to avert trouble. Seniors would be given a limited number of tickets for family members to sit in a roped-off area of the football grandstand. Other relatives and friends would have to sit farther away in unreserved seating. Given that there were no black graduates in the Class of ’65, the restricted zone would remain white, just like the old days.
Principal McKinnon dispensed the tickets at the commencement rehearsal. When he asked whether anyone needed extras for friends, Greg sauntered up and said he could use a few. Mr. Mac could see what he was up to. This thorn-in-the-side was trying to inflict one last prick by slipping his black buddies into the roped-off area, where they would most decidedly be unwelcome.
“Greg,” he said, “you wouldn’t do that, would you? People are going to be coming from all over, and who knows what they’d think.”
“If that’s the way it’s going to be, I don’t want any of your tickets,” Greg replied, handing them all back to the principal. He was so peeved that he forgot his own family needed to sit somewhere.
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One day that spring, Greg was pleasantly surprised to see Robertiena Freeman in the hallway between classes. He had rarely glimpsed her around campus in the months since they rode together in the funeral home limousine and weathered the disturbances on the second day of school. As a sophomore, she took different courses and ate lunch on a different schedule from seniors and juniors. She was still coming to classes late and leaving early as part of the administration’s plan to circumvent any disturbances. Hardly anyone spoke with her as Greg was doing now.
“How have you been doing?” he asked her.
That was a loaded question.
By the time Greg ran into her, Robertiena was the only black student left at Americus High. Dobbs Wiggins had departed during the fall because he didn’t want to do constant battle with white boys. David Bell, who had pledged to stay at the school when the group received certificates of recognition from the Georgia Council on Human Relations, was the next to go. He grew weary of people shoving him and calling him “Martin Luther Coon,” but the racial garbage was only part of his motivation for returning to the black school, Sumter County High. The plain truth was that he was flunking. He had always known that black classrooms received fewer resources than white ones—he could see that in the tattered, hand-me-down textbooks he had grown up with—and now he understood the consequences of that unequal education from his own experience. “Going from my old school to Americus was like going from sixth grade to college,” he later reflected. “It was much more intense. I wasn’t prepared for it.” Jewel Wise left for the same mixture of reasons. While she hadn’t been mistreated as much as David and Dobbs, she sensed that the odds were stacked against her. “I felt like the teachers were ignoring me. I didn’t get the help I needed. I wanted to get a better education than I had been getting, and I felt like my purpose was totally defeated.”
One night soon after their departures, Robertiena’s father appeared in the doorway of her bedroom and told her that the other students had transferred. “You’re going to be the only one left. I don’t want to ask you to do anything you don’t want to do. It’s your decision. Whatever you decide, we’ll support you.”
Robertiena knew what her father wanted to hear—he was the head of the NAACP, after all—but she had to be sure that it was what she wanted. After a long silence, she told him, “You ain’t raised no quitter. I’m going to stay.” Her father seemed pleased.
Robertiena withstood the same sort of harassment that Dobbs, David, and Jewel had endured, but as the honor roll daughter of educators, she was better equipped to handle the course work at Americus High. As it happened, her biggest obstacle to finishing her first year didn’t come at school. It came on the side of a road.
One Friday evening in late May, as darkness was falling, Robertiena and her boyfriend pulled their car off US 19 on the north side of Americus and started engaging in a little teenage necking. The smooching came to an abrupt halt when a police cruiser appeared, lights pulsing, and a state trooper scribbled out a ticket for illegal parking. At least that’s what Robertiena thought it was. “All I could think was, ‘Daddy’s going to kill me.’” She did not tell him about the incident when she returned home.
On the following day, Warren Fortson, the attorney who had worked to desegregate the high school, phoned Mr. Freeman and told him that the police were on the way to Americus High to arrest his daughter. Mr. Freeman immediately sent a car for her. When she arrived at the middle school where he was employed, he asked her what had happened, and she handed him the citation. He read it and realized that she was being charged, not with illegal parking, but with fornication, an antiquated morals offense that carried a much harsher penalty. He had been through the movement wars and knew a trumped-up charge when he saw one. One way or another, he thought, they were trying to get his daughter out of that school.
Robertiena turned herself in, was booked and fingerprinted, and locked up. She spent three nights in jail, much of it crying, cowering in the corner of her cell, trying not to listen to the lewd comments of the male inmates. She found the jailing much more traumatic than the thirty days she had done in the Leesburg Stockade during the civil rights protests of 1963. The conditions had been horrible then, but she was part of a spirited group of girls standing up for justice. Now she was alone and scared, facing the kind of public embarrassment that could ruin a teenage girl.
Robertiena’s mother brought some of her textbooks to the jail and suggested that she could occupy herself studying for her final exams, which were coming up soon. Back at the school, tongues were wagging about the scandal that had entangled the student body’s one remaining black person, the sole survivor. “They thought it was funny,” Greg said. “You’d hear people laughing about it. They thought she was going to get kicked out, and it’d be an all-white school again.”
Robertiena did manage to take her exams that spring and pass. For all of her legal anguish, she was not finished with Americus High.
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When graduation day finally came for the Class of 1965, the weather did not cooperate. It was the first Monday in June, and a late afternoon thunderstorm boiled up in the early summer heat, forcing administrators to move the ceremony at the last minute from the football stadium to the much smaller gymnasium. In the process, the restricted seating scheme was forgotten, and the eighteen hundred spectators found space wherever they could in the roll-out wooden stands on either side of the basketball court. Hearing the first rumbles of thunder, Greg thought maybe God was looking down and clearing his throat.
As the seniors waited under the breezeway outside the gym, one of the few girls who had openly disparaged Greg all year confronted him with the rumor that he had invited black people to the ceremony. She had heard right; Greg had driven to town that afternoon with Collins and expected to see him and a couple of their civil rights friends in the stands. As far as this girl was concerned, that was tantamount to lighting a stink bomb during the alma mater.
“Greg Wittkamper,” she whined, “you’re ruining our graduation.”
“This is my graduation, too,” Greg corrected her.
A few minutes later, David Morgan walked up with a more amiable expression on his face. It had been an emotional day for David. Before he left home for the ceremony, he had burst into tears when an aunt told him how proud his father would have been. Mr. Morgan had died shortly before his son started high school. His memory hovered over the proceedings for David and put him into a state of nostalgia and heightened sensitivity. As he looked over the Class of ’65, assembled for perhaps the last time, he noticed Greg standing there in his blue gown and mortarboard and felt something like admiration for the outcast he had once disdained. “I didn’t think I’d ever see him again,” David said later. “Even though I disagreed with him, he had always been honorable. He had endured against the odds, and I thought he deserved something from me. It felt good to put all that hatred to bed.”
David Morgan.
The “something” was a simple, sincere expression of congratulations. “I don’t know how you made it,” David told Greg outside the gymnasium, “but somehow you did.” With that, he shook his hand in front of everybody.
Greg was dumbfounded. He had suspected David was different, especially after his comments in government class that winter, but he never would have anticipated such a public display of decency. In three years at Americus High School, it was the most considerate gesture any member of his class had ever made toward him—maybe the only considerate gesture. No wonder Ann Geeslin, the editor of the school newspaper, the Paw Print, wrote in David’s annual: “May you always continue to have that virtue of thinking for yourself.”
Many of the graduates did not possess that virtue, not yet. The commencement exercises provided one last opportunity for them to hiss at the kid from Koinonia. It was a typical program for 1965: an invocation, a few awards, a word from the valedictorian, some yawn-inducing speeches, a couple of inspirational anthems (“Climb Ev’ry Mountain,” the showstopper from the hit movie The Sound of Music, and “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” which took on a certain irony for Greg under the circumstances).
Then came the roll call, in alphabetical order; almost the entire class of one-hundred-plus had collected their sheepskins by the time they reached the W’s and “Wittkamper,” the next-to-last name, was announced. Spectators applauded at first, some of them no doubt out of repetition, but as the name sank in, a chorus of boos rose and drowned out the clapping. Most of it was coming from the seats directly facing the stage, from the graduate section—a final raspberry from some of the guys. Greg strode toward the lectern and accepted his diploma with a quick handshake. He smirked slightly, savoring his triumph of survival, and returned to his seat feeling drained and inexpressibly relieved.
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There was one more hurdle before Greg could leave Americus High School for good. Remembering the ominous threats he had received in the weeks leading up to graduation, he decided that it would be wise to make a quick getaway. Collins had dropped him off and knew where the car was. He scanned the stands to locate him—it wasn’t hard; he was the only black man in sight—and as soon as the exercises were concluded, the two of them hurried out of the arena and started to cross the street in front of the gym.
They didn’t get far before twenty or thirty adult men pursued them, shouting and cursing and throwing rocks and bottles that Greg could hear smashing into the wet pavement. It was a reprise of the beginning of the school year, a fitting bookend for a bad time. As the two continued toward the car, some of the men blocked their way, and one of them broke from the pack and smashed Collins in the head with a rolled-up umbrella. The amateur boxer instinctively raised his fists and coiled into a fighting crouch.
“Don’t hit him, Collins!” Greg yelled.
Al Henry, a minister who was living at Koinonia with his family, witnessed the attack and rushed to Collins, throwing his arms around him to keep him away from the man with the umbrella. Collins collected himself and uncoiled from his fighting stance. Then he took off running for the car with Greg, the two of them dodging more rocks and bottles. They sped away in his Volkswagen Beetle, both of them shaken and laughing nervously about their close call.
That evening, many of the graduates went to a dance at the Americus Country Club, capping the celebration with a midnight breakfast. Greg was not among them. He and Collins were partying on the other side of town, bouncing around the black neighborhoods, getting blissfully wasted. Greg did not toast his alma mater.
Part 4
Continuing Education
chapter 10
The Next Selma
>
Mary Kate Bell dressed like she wanted to make an impression that day. On Tuesday, July 20, 1965, the twenty-four-year-old college student and mother of three donned her bright new sorority outfit—pink dress, green shoes, pink turban hat—and went to the Sumter County courthouse to vote in a special election for justice of the peace. She was a candidate for the office, the first black woman ever to run in a countywide election, and she wanted to monitor the polls as well as cast her ballot. She never got the chance.
Bell saw two voting lines—one designated for white men, the other for white women—and then noticed a small sign reading “colored” that pointed to a third line in the back for black people of either sex. She couldn’t believe it; she thought the civil rights act had ended segregation in public places, and here county authorities were still conducting elections as if nothing had changed. Her husband was home on leave from the US Army and would soon go back overseas, eventually to Vietnam. Was this what he was fighting for?
“Can I help you?” the lady behind the check-in table asked.
“I want to vote.”
“You want the colored line. This one’s for women.”
“Last time I looked in the mirror, I was a woman.”
By then, three of Bell’s campaign workers had joined her at the doorway leading to the polling area. A sheriff’s deputy told the four black women that if they wanted to vote, they’d have to go to the colored line. An onlooker cursed one of them and spat on her. When the women still didn’t budge, the deputy arrested them on charges of obstruction. The bond was set at $1,000 apiece. Saying they’d rather go to jail than pay, the women were locked up, the candidate still in her assertive pink and green.
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