The Class of '65

by Jim Auchmutey

  In the coming weeks, Americus found itself constantly in the news as residents took to the streets to express their resentments and grievances and were met, sometimes violently, by opposition. Hundreds of people carried picket signs and others wore white robes and tapped pistols in their holsters. Stores were boycotted, churches barricaded themselves, neighbors turned against each other, and the seat of Sumter County had neither justice nor peace.

  Greg, who turned eighteen the week the disturbances started, would be pulled into the conflict along with a fellow member of the Class of ’65, Joseph Logan, whose sentiments rested with the opposing side. It would prove to be a life-altering experience for one of them.

  ____________________

  The arrests in Americus were just the sort of outrage civil rights leaders at the national level were looking for. The legislation that would become the Voting Rights Act was still making its way through Congress, and until the last compromises were struck and the final roll calls taken, another episode of white southerners behaving badly could be used to ratchet up political pressure.

  The final stage in the battle for voting rights had opened that March in Alabama when state troopers kicked and clubbed demonstrators in a well-publicized melee at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma—one of the news events students discussed in Greg’s government class. If it hadn’t been for Bloody Sunday, as the assault became known, President Johnson might not have pushed so swiftly for a bill to guarantee the ballot to all eligible Americans.

  When he heard about the arrests in Sumter County, Hosea Williams, Martin Luther King Jr.’s pugnacious lieutenant at the SCLC, called a press briefing and vowed to make Americus the next Selma. Sitting next to him was John Lewis, chairman of SNCC, the student organization that had spearheaded the protests of 1963 in Sumter County. Both men had been beaten in Selma—Lewis bore a fresh scar on his head from a trooper’s nightstick—but Williams also carried much older wounds that he had suffered in Americus.

  Williams came from southwest Georgia, near the Florida line, and left home as a teenager to serve during World War II in an all-black army unit under General George S. Patton. Wounded and awarded the Purple Heart, he was returning home by Greyhound in 1945 when the bus stopped in Americus and he took a drink from a water fountain reserved for whites. A group of men attacked him so savagely that an undertaker was called to collect his body. On the way to the funeral home, the driver noticed that the corpse was still breathing; it took him five weeks to recover.

  There was trouble in Americus? Williams eagerly led a cadre of organizers from Atlanta to whip up the protests. They joined a group of students who were already in Sumter County conducting a voter registration drive, part of an SCLC offensive across the South called SCOPE (the Summer Community Organization and Political Education project). They, in turn, coordinated with the SNCC field workers who had been there since ’63. To many in Americus, it felt like an invasion.

  During the next few weeks, anywhere from a hundred to a thousand demonstrators marched almost daily from the black side of town to the courthouse and the jail. People filled the pews for mass meetings at two of the stalwart black churches, Friendship Baptist and Allen Chapel AME, where they sang hymns and freedom songs and heard speakers exhort them to stand up for their rights as American citizens. Paramount among them was the right to vote. Sumter County did not make it easy for black people to exercise the franchise; while they made up 53 percent of the population, they accounted for fewer than 13 percent of the registered voters.

  The white response to the protests, at least initially, was more measured than it had been in 1963. The police didn’t arrest everyone in sight, as they had then. A handful of white moderates saw the demonstrations as an opportunity to deal with an issue that had to be faced whether people liked it or not. Warren Fortson, the school board member who was also county attorney, had been trying for some time to get white and black representatives to sit down and discuss their differences. Once, when he thought he was getting somewhere, the effort foundered after a couple of white participants backed out because they couldn’t imagine calling Mabel Barnum, the matriarch of the black funeral home, by her last name. Such was the fear of violating racial customs.

  Protest march in Americus, 1965. The Reverend Robert L. Freeman is second from left. Courtesy of the Americus–Sumter County Movement Remembered Committee

  Two days after the arrests, Fortson persuaded a delegation of twenty-five white businessmen to accompany him to a mass meeting so they could hear for themselves what the other side wanted. He warned that the rhetoric might get rough, and it did. “They were just pouring it on,” he recounted. “One of the businessmen said he was going to leave, and I told him, ‘No, we’ve got to sit here and take it.’”

  Greg was in the sanctuary that night and was surprised to see Fortson’s party. Considering the brutal response to protests two summers before, the presence of white men in a black church was a promising development. The Americus Merchants Association even passed a resolution opposing the segregated voting lines and offered to bail the women out of jail. Movement leaders declined, saying that freeing them didn’t go far enough; the charges were illegitimate and had to be dropped.

  On the day after the church meeting, Fortson’s idea for a biracial committee disintegrated as word of the initiative spread and men who had been open to the possibility a few hours before retreated in the harsh light of a July afternoon. He blamed the John Birch Society, which had replaced the White Citizens Council as the center of reactionary opinion in Americus. As the dog days wore on, he noticed that people who had once been friendly to him ducked into stores or crossed the street when they saw him coming. Sometimes they’d phone and offer a weaselly apology: “Warren, you know I love you, honey, but I just can’t afford to be seen with you.”

  The time for moderation was running out.

  ____________________

  Joseph Logan kept himself busy that summer. After graduating with Greg, he spent most of his time working in a cabinetry shop and getting ready to leave home to start classes at Auburn University. He probably should have stayed away from the racial brawls in Americus, as most of his former schoolmates were doing, but he couldn’t help himself. It was like a car wreck on US 19. He had to look.

  Joseph could see an aspect of the conflict in the church he had attended his whole life. First Methodist stood across Lee Street from First Baptist, forming the twin pillars of Protestantism in Americus. Several times that year, interracial groups of worshippers showed up at the churches to test their dedication to Christian brotherhood. The churches always failed, most notably when John Lewis of SNCC was barred entry at First Baptist and arrested after he staged a “pray-in” with others in front of the sanctuary.

  The leadership of First Methodist had decided to keep out civil rights testers by informing them that this was a white congregation and that they should go back to their congregations. In case the polite approach didn’t work, the church recruited its most imposing male specimens to stand at the doors of the sanctuary like God’s own bouncers. As a recent cocaptain of the Americus High football team, Joseph was among the recruits. One of the others advised him to bring a pair of brass knuckles in the event of trouble, and if he didn’t own any, to at least place a couple of rolls of pennies inside his clenched hands to turn them into fists of steel. “Brass knuckles?” Joseph thought. He didn’t know exactly what brass knuckles looked like. He certainly didn’t know anyone who owned a pair. In his whole life, Joseph had never been in a fight. He wondered what would happen if he hit someone with a fistful of pennies. Would the coins go flying? Would he hurt his hands?

  If there was any doubt about how seriously some people in the congregation took the threat of unwanted visitors, a regular usher laid it out for Joseph. “The only way they’re coming in this church,” he told him, “is if they step over my cold, dead body.”

  The anticipated showdown ca
me one Sunday morning when cars pulled up in front of First Methodist and several well-dressed people of both races climbed out. The minister met them on the sidewalk.

  “We’ve come to worship with you,” one of them said.

  “No, you haven’t. You’ve just come to stir up trouble.”

  The visitors asked if they could kneel and pray, and the minister said yes, as long as they weren’t on church property. They knelt and departed without further incident. Joseph watched it all from the top of the steps in front of the sanctuary, standing shoulder to shoulder with the others, looking like the defensive line of a football team. He was fingering two rolls of pennies in his pockets, ready to hit someone if he had to. He was relieved it hadn’t come to that.

  On several occasions that summer, Joseph drove to Americus to watch protest marches with the white men who stood on the sidewalks heckling. Late one afternoon, as a double file of demonstrators passed by, some of the onlookers peppered them with rocks and bottles. Joseph didn’t like the protests any more than the hecklers did, but he didn’t throw anything, and when he saw others doing it, he cringed and found himself wondering whether anyone had been hurt.

  He hung around after the march. As twilight fell, his better instincts almost failed him, and he did something he would regret for the rest of his life.

  A black man was walking up the street by himself. “Here comes one!” shouted a white fellow in cutoff jeans and a shirt tied at the waist, like the comic strip character Li’l Abner. “Let’s get him.”

  An impromptu pack of young men formed, some of them picking up whatever rocks or bottles they could find. Joseph didn’t recognize any of them and had no good reason to join the group. But in the tingle of the moment, in the ambiguity of the dying light, he grabbed a jagged chunk of concrete and followed their lead as they confronted the black man. He looked to be about forty and seemed more weary than frightened.

  “Look, guys, I don’t have anything to do with these protests. I just got off work and I’m walking home . . .”

  Before the man could say anything else, someone threw a rock and struck him under the eye. He covered his face with his hands and let out a woeful moan. Blood moistened his cheek. As the pack scattered, Joseph dropped his chunk of concrete and backed away in revulsion. He ran several blocks to the courthouse, to his car, as if he could reverse the last few minutes with his feet, and drove straight home.

  ____________________

  A week after the voting line arrests, civil rights leaders called for an all-night vigil to pressure authorities into dropping the charges against the four women. Greg had attended most of the mass meetings in the company of Collins McGee, who was still living at Koinonia but was spending more time in town working with the movement. Collins had been at the courthouse on the day of the election acting as a poll watcher and had complained about white intimidation of black voters. As he later testified, a sheriff’s deputy told him, “If you don’t get your black ass out of this goddamned building, I’ll kick it out,” and then followed him outside and punched him in the face. As he had at Greg’s graduation, Collins resisted the urge to take a swing at the lawman. He found other ways to fight; he wasn’t about to miss this nocturnal vigil. On the afternoon of Wednesday, July 28, he joined Greg in his VW bug and they drove to Americus for the day’s preliminary event, a march from Friendship Baptist Church to the courthouse.

  It was hot in more ways than one. As the protesters wound their way through the business district, Greg noticed that many of the white spectators were carrying guns openly, some of them in holsters. They looked like cowboys in a western movie. Greg was used to being menaced, but not like this. This was dangerous.

  The marchers arrived at the courthouse two hundred strong and found the grounds already occupied by a hundred white counterprotesters. The police ushered the civil rights crowd to a nearby parking lot, where they settled in for a long night of speeches, singing, and intermittent tedium.

  Late that evening, a young white man named Andy Whatley got off work at the Sunset Drive-In out on US 280, where he was a projectionist, and headed into town to see what was going on. He was twenty-one and had just enlisted in the Marine Corps. He stopped at the Sing gas station three blocks from the courthouse and fell in with a cluster of guys who were standing around talking. An hour before, reported Gene Roberts of the New York Times, a group of about twenty had been loitering at the same corner yelling “nigger” at passersby and throwing rocks and bottles at them. There had been a number of such incidents since the protests began; a few nights before, a black teenager returning home from a mass meeting had been shot and wounded by a white man in a pickup truck.

  Now came the terrible retaliation.

  At midnight, a car sped by the gas station. Shots were fired. Whatley collapsed, bleeding from his head. Men darted into the street discharging their pistols toward the car. A police cruiser gave chase. The assailants’ vehicle overturned, and the driver was taken into custody. A few hours later, the alleged shooter was caught. Both men were black.

  News of the incident quickly spread to the vigil, where it had begun to rain and the crowd was hunkered under umbrellas and tarps. Around 3 a.m., someone announced that Whatley had died. Given the circumstances, the vigil was canceled and the protesters trudged back to Friendship Baptist under a wary police escort. It was a solemn procession: no freedom songs, no picket signs, precious little talk. As they retraced their steps across town, Greg and Collins peered into the shadows beyond the sidewalks and wondered if someone might be lurking, bent on revenge.

  The church offered to let the marchers stay the rest of the night in the sanctuary, where they would be safer from vigilantes. Greg and Collins didn’t want to drive back to Koinonia in the dark—a white guy and a black guy in a small foreign car might make a tempting target—so they stretched out on the pews with dozens of others and nodded off. They awoke near sunrise, slipped out of the sanctuary, and left Americus as quickly as they could, passing the Sunset Drive-In on their way back to the farm.

  ____________________

  The killing of Andy Whatley crippled any chance for racial reconciliation in Sumter County that summer. Both sides dug in. The mayor tabled plans to form a biracial committee. After a brief mora­torium, protest leaders resumed their marches. Georgia Governor Carl Sanders ordered one hundred state troopers into the city to keep the peace, a task that was complicated by the proliferation of firearms. Retailers said guns were selling like never before, mostly to white people. “You wouldn’t believe the fear you meet in these streets,” a future Americus mayor, Russell Thomas, told a correspondent for Newsweek magazine.

  Among the journalists who rushed in to cover the unrest was a young reporter from WSB-TV in Atlanta, Tom Brokaw. He arrived to find Americus clogged with pickup trucks full of gun-toting Klansmen threatening to punish any blacks who got out of line. He visited Whatley’s mother, who told him that further violence wouldn’t bring back her son. Then he went to a church meeting and asked a black teenager if she was scared to march with so many armed white supremacists wandering around.

  “I’m absolutely terrified,” she said.

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “March. We have no other choice.”

  Brokaw’s footage made The Huntley-Brinkley Report and helped land him a network job. Years later, near the end of his long tenure as anchorman of the NBC Nightly News, he would say that the most memorable interview he ever did wasn’t with a president or a prime minister, but with that teenager in Americus. He never got her name.

  The unrest in Americus during the summer of 1965 made front-page headlines.

  Time magazine called the town “Americus the Violent.”

  Two days after the killing, a federal judge issued an injunction prohibiting segregated elections in Sumter County and ordering Mary Kate Bell and the other women freed. Such a decision might have calmed the protes
ters a week earlier, but there had been too much rancor. “It’s too late to talk now, boss man,” said one of the SCLC organizers, Willie Bolden. “You bought a whole lot of hog, and now you’ve got to eat a whole lot of hog.”

  The next couple of weeks were as bizarre as that statement. On the last Saturday in July, as Whatley’s funeral was about to begin at First Baptist Church, a group of whites attacked picketers who were protesting employment discrimination at the Kwik Chek grocery store a few blocks away, injuring five of them. At another demonstration that day, police arrested a white man dressed in a Santa Claus suit and an army helmet, who had been delivering an extended segregationist rant with a Bible in one hand and a bayonet in the other. Lester Maddox, the Atlanta restaurateur who had closed his fried chicken joint rather than serve blacks, came to town to speak at a states-rights rally, a rehearsal for the campaign that would win him the governorship the next year. Robed Klansmen led a silent parade of six hundred to the courthouse, stopping to pay their respects at the gas station where the young white man had been slain.

  Of all the demonstrations that summer, the most significant one occurred on Friday, August 7, when the movement achieved its national goal as President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in Washington, with Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks looking on. In Americus that day, the comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory led a voter registration march to the courthouse. “Let’s get everyone registered,” he said. “If your grandma won’t come, hide her snuff and tear up her pension check.” Some three hundred black voters signed up. To everyone’s astonishment, the Sumter County board of registrars, yielding before the new law, appointed three black clerks to help with the rush, which continued for days. By summer’s end, more than seventeen hundred black voters had been added to the rolls. Fortson went to the courthouse to witness the spectacle and was moved by the sight of people lined up to participate in representative democracy for the first time. He never forgot the young woman who kept repeating “beautiful, beautiful,” as tears streamed down her face.