The Class of '65

by Jim Auchmutey

  Things weren’t so beautiful for Fortson. His efforts to foster a racial dialogue irritated many townspeople and made him, like Greg at the high school, a scapegoat for all the changes they resented. His enemies collected two thousand names on a petition demanding that he be fired as county attorney, while his defenders (including Jimmy Carter) mustered only a hundred. While the Sumter commission did not discharge him, it did bypass him by hiring another county attorney. Fortson’s law practice dwindled. Clients who owed him money didn’t pay. A neighbor’s child pointed a rifle at his son. There were threatening phone calls and suspicious cars stopping in the night outside the big house his family had recently moved to in the historic district. Fortson kept watch from the living room, a revolver in a nearby desk drawer.

  His church provided no refuge. When the interracial group of worshippers were turned away at First Methodist, he walked out of the sanctuary in protest. He was a member of the congregation’s governing committee, the board of stewards, and taught a men’s Bible study class named for one of the other teachers, Lloyd Moll, the retired president of Georgia Southwestern College, who was also suspect for his conciliatory views on race relations. (Moll was the one who suggested to his friend Clarence Jordan that Greg might be able to tame his enemies by fighting one of them.) The church was in no mood for dissent and sent word to both of the members that they were no longer welcome.

  Fortson had had enough. In September, he left with his family for Atlanta—Moll departed a few weeks later for Pennsylvania—and journalists from Newsweek’s Marshall Frady to the Atlanta Constitution’s Ralph McGill composed sermons about the price of conscience in the small-town South. “The Devil,” McGill wrote, quoting an unnamed minister, “has made Jesus look bad in Americus.”

  Fortson took a more measured view. He soon went to Mississippi to offer his legal services to the movement, gaining some perspective on his summer of discontent in Georgia. “I found out there was nothing really exceptional about Americus,” he told Frady. “The whole white South—maybe all of white America—was Americus.”

  ____________________

  On the morning after he ran with a pack of rock throwers, Joseph drove a hundred miles west to acquaint himself with Auburn University. The unsettling events of the night before receded in his mind as he toured the campus, met other students, and learned some of the school’s customs, such as the way Auburn people greet each other by saying “War Eagle,” not hello. But the unpleasantness all came back the next day in the dining hall when one of the other incoming freshmen asked, “Aren’t you from Americus, Georgia?”

  Joseph nodded.

  “Well, I think somebody got killed over there last night.”

  Although he hadn’t known Andy Whatley, Joseph felt a little queasy when he heard of the shooting. On his last evening in Americus, he had been standing across the street from the gas station where the killing had occurred. If that car had sped past a day or two earlier, he thought, that could have been him.

  After the campus visit, Joseph returned home and worked until classes began at Auburn in September. He stayed away from the demonstrations, which continued off and on the rest of the summer and then petered out with little to show in the way of progress except for the voter registrations. He didn’t tell anyone—not even his mother—about what had happened that night in July when he picked up a chunk of concrete and started to threaten another man. But he couldn’t forget that pitiful moan, that pained face, that patch of blood. Even though he had not struck the man himself, he had watched it happen. He felt like the driver of a getaway car in a robbery. He was ashamed.

  Joseph later came to realize that his attitudes about black people started to change the moment he almost assaulted one.

  chapter 11

  Breaking Away

  That fall, as Joseph and other members of the Class of 1965 left for college, Greg stayed behind and worked on the farm. He had no plans for higher education, a lack of ambition that worried his mother. “It seemed like all Greg wanted to do was travel,” she said, and she was right. Greg wanted to earn some spending money and see the world. He had no intention of living at Koinonia indefinitely. Nothing against the community; he was just sick of Georgia.

  He certainly didn’t want to leave courtesy of Uncle Sam. Greg turned eighteen a few weeks after graduation at a perilous time when the Vietnam War was escalating and the US troop deployment was rising by the tens of thousands. He registered for the draft as a conscientious objector, choosing not to take up arms as his father had done decades before. He knew he would have to perform some kind of alternative service unless he changed his mind and decided to go to college.

  Then, abruptly, he changed his mind. Greg’s ticket out of the South turned up when a white Cadillac pulled into the farm followed by several Volkswagen vans full of young people. They were from Friends World Institute, an experimental new school based in New York and conceived by America’s best-known pacifists, the Religious Society of Friends—the Quakers. As part of their program, they had come to tour Koinonia, this semifamous outpost of dissent and courage.

  Talking with the students, Greg learned they were part of the first class at Friends World and would soon be departing for Mexico to begin months of foreign travel and study. The man in the Caddy was the director of the school, Morris Mitchell, an old friend of Clarence’s, who said the institute needed recruits for its second year. Greg raised his hand. This was exactly what his wanderlust was craving. The only problem was money; the Wittkampers had lived in a commune for twelve years and had shared everything, saving nothing for college. How were they supposed to pay $2,625 a year in tuition?

  Mitchell had an idea. The school needed to stock its library; if Koinonia could ask its supporters to send books to Friends World, he agreed to credit it against tuition. Greg tried to write a solicitation letter, but when he recounted some of his experiences in high school, he thought he came off sounding like a pathetic victim. He asked Clarence to find the words, and his letter was sent out to hundreds of people on the farm’s mailing list.

  While Greg was waiting to see whether the appeal would bring results, Koinonia received a couple of visitors who would have a profound effect on the community. Millard and Linda Fuller didn’t intend to stay long when they stopped by in November. They were on a driving trip and remembered that a minister friend of theirs was living in a religious fellowship near Americus, some place with an odd-sounding name that started with a K. They decided to look him up, just briefly—two hours tops. They stayed for a month.

  Millard was a tall, lanky lawyer from Alabama who had defended Klansmen and had made a fortune selling mail-order cookbooks and other products. In his rush to amass a million dollars, he had neglected his marriage and was crushed to learn that his attractive young wife had been having an affair. They tearfully reconciled and resolved to give away their wealth and commit their lives to some kind of Christian service. On the day they arrived, they listened as a reporter interviewed Clarence and were so enraptured by his answers that they couldn’t bring themselves to leave.

  When the Fullers shared their story at the farm, Greg’s eyes lit up at the part about them giving away their money. Maybe, he suggested, they could direct some of it toward his tuition. Millard stared blankly at Greg.

  Fortunately, no such help was required. Friends World went ahead and enrolled Greg, anticipating that the books would come. And they did—fifty thousand of them. It was enough to cover all four years of his tuition. In a letter to donors, Mitchell attributed the overwhelming response to the story of Greg’s “plucky struggle” in high school. His tribulations had been good for something after all.

  That Christmas season, as he prepared for college, Greg had one last encounter in Americus that served as a reminder of everything he wanted to leave behind. The father of a Koinonia resident was speaking at First Baptist Church and invited her friends from the farm to go hear him. Greg was
part of the group that night, along with the Jordans, the Fullers, and his pal Collins McGee. First Baptist had been one of the churches that turned away black worshippers earlier that year. Clarence hoped things were changing in Americus but cautioned everyone to stay calm, whatever happened.

  The Koinonia party was met at the door of the sanctuary by an usher whose eyes widened with alarm at the sight of a black hand reaching for a bulletin. He looked at Greg and asked, “Who’s he?”

  “Why, that’s Collins McGee,” Greg answered and kept going.

  A few people moved away as the group settled into a pew and turned its hymnals to “It Came upon a Midnight Clear.” Just as the carol reached the line about “peace on Earth, goodwill to men,” the usher hurried over and grabbed Collins by the collar.

  “You gotta get out of here.”

  No one stirred. The usher got more excited.

  “Am I going to have to drag you out of here?”

  The Koinonians left peacefully. Outside the sanctuary, Clarence was struck by the way the white-columned church and its floodlit steeple stood out against the vast night sky. “I want you to notice,” he told everyone, “how much darkness there is.”

  ____________________

  A few days into the new year, Greg left Georgia and began one of the damnedest educations imaginable. Friends World wasn’t a school as much as an extended, enlightened field trip. The idea was to send students from different countries to a series of educational centers around the globe, where they would explore humanity’s biggest problems—poverty, racism, war, environmental degradation—while they immersed themselves in local cultures. Experience would be stressed over traditional classroom time. “Our stated mission,” Greg said dryly, “was to save the world.”

  The campus was located, of all places, on a mothballed military installation on Long Island, the decommissioned Mitchel Air Force Base. There were only sixteen or so students in his class, most from alternative communities like Koinonia or from wealthy liberal families in the Northeast. Greg settled into his new digs, which had been officers’ quarters for flyers training for war, and quickly learned a valuable lesson in 1960s student life: he smoked pot for the first time.

  The group spent the first few weeks listening to lectures and taking short excursions to see organic farms and other exemplars of countercultural living. In the spring, the students boarded a couple of VW vans and took a swing through the South, visiting Berea College in Kentucky, the region’s first interracial institution of higher education, and the Highlander Center in Tennessee, where the Browne family had gone after it left Koinonia. By June 1966, the class was in Selma, Alabama, scene of the great voting rights battle of the year before, when news came of another outbreak of violence. James Meredith, the man who desegregated Ole Miss, had been shot and wounded in Mississippi during an odd solitary walk he was undertaking to protest racism.

  The students voted to suspend their tour and join a motley army of civil rights supporters who were assembling in Mississippi to continue the march in Meredith’s name. Once they arrived, Greg spotted a black activist he knew from Americus and went over to say hello. The man didn’t seem happy to see him. “We can handle this ourselves,” he said. “We don’t need whitey.” Greg, feeling a bit stung, had innocently wandered into a fault zone, a growing break between establishment black leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and younger firebrands like Stokely Carmichael, of SNCC, who were less patient and less willing to enlist white allies. Both were at the Meredith march, where Carmichael attracted attention by exhorting protestors with a new rallying cry—“Black power!”—a phrase King preferred not to use.

  On June 23, as the marchers reached Canton, a few miles north of their ultimate destination in Jackson, Greg and the other students were getting ready to pitch tents for the night on the grounds of an elementary school. The authorities said they didn’t have the necessary permits to stay there. A phalanx of state troopers ordered them to disperse, fired tear gas, and waded into the marchers, striking some of them with rifle butts. Mitchell, the Friends World director, witnessed an officer beating a medical student and scolded him, “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  “You get back or I’ll put it into you,” the trooper warned.

  Greg spent the night sleeping on the floor of a black family’s home. In the confusion after the ruckus, one of the school’s vans—the one carrying his luggage—drove off without him. He continued with the march, which grew into a throng of fourteen thousand as it entered Jackson, and then hitchhiked home to Koinonia, his clothes still reeking of tear gas. He recuperated for a few days and returned to school in New York.

  His education was just beginning.

  ____________________

  In the fall of 1966, Friends World sent Greg overseas to begin his international studies. His first stop was Sweden. The college had arranged for him to attend a folk school near the Arctic Circle, part of a continuing education system that welcomed foreign students. Unfortunately for Greg, the programs were in Swedish. He had picked up little of the language, making the classes fairly pointless, so he stopped attending them and started hanging out with a group of musicians. He told them he was an American folk singer like Bob Dylan and pulled out his guitar, and they let him play some gigs with their band. The Swedes appreciated his rustic voice; kids asked for his autograph, and girls found him intriguing. For a nineteen-year-old who had been so detested in high school, popularity was novel and intoxicating.

  Even so, Greg became homesick for his family and Koinonia. During the interminable hours of darkness and cold that winter, he was alone with his thoughts and sometimes brooded about his turbulent school days. One night he dreamed he was back at Americus High facing down the usual suspects. In the waking world, he had turned the other cheek. Not in Dreamland. He calmly leveled a machine gun at his tormentors and cut them down. Waking in a panic, Greg was relieved that it had only been a nightmare. Clearly, he was sorting through some posttraumatic stress. It might have helped if he had talked it out with someone, but the language barrier would have made that difficult. Besides, he didn’t want his new friends to know that this cool American folk singer had once been thoroughly loathed.

  Greg left Sweden in the spring of 1967 and reported to the Friends World coordinator in Vienna, Ernst Florian Winter, who ran a school of diplomacy and was married to one of the von Trapp daughters of The Sound of Music fame. Winter laid out his options: Greg could stay with the other students in Austria or begin an independent study program that would let him travel as widely as his daily allowance of $8 would permit. Greg wanted to ramble.

  Greg as a troubadour on the Spanish coast during his travels with

  Friends World Institute, 1967. Courtesy of Greg Wittkamper

  He spent the next few months bumming around Europe. He went to Geneva and fell in with some Canadians he met at a youth hostel, and they decided to have an adventure. They reconditioned an old canoe and lit out for France, where they paddled past the castles and cliffs of the Rhone River. Near Lyon, their vessel capsized in a discharge of water from a dam, and they lost all their money and passports, although Greg was able to salvage his guitar. As soon as he could replace his passport and scrape together some dollars, he left by himself and hitchhiked to Spain for the summer.

  In the United States, that was the Summer of Love, the high season of hippies and flower power. For Greg, it was skid-row time in Barcelona. The stipend payments stopped coming, despite his pleas to Friends World. Nearly out of funds, he slept on park benches and the beach, playing music for tips in the tourist areas or selling his blood for cash. He survived on food the markets were throwing out and learned to ply the shoreline and catch small octopuses, pulling out their entrails and boiling the tentacles in a tin can. He looked like a tramp, his beard scraggly, his hair long and greasy, his jeans riddled with holes. “I was like Jesus in rags,” he said. For weeks, he forgot to send his
parents the occasional postcard he had been mailing them. They grew increasingly concerned, not knowing where their son was or whether he was still alive. He eventually dropped them another card.

  After the college finally wired him some money, Greg backpacked down the Mediterranean coast to Gibraltar and then across the strait to Morocco. He traded his leather vest for a djellaba, the hooded robe worn by the Berbers of northern Africa, and passed several weeks in Tangiers and Marrakesh sipping tea and puffing dope with the local artisans. When he made his way back to Austria that fall, it occurred to him that he hadn’t been inside a classroom for months. “We learned by living,” he said.

  Greg stayed in Vienna long enough to clean up and collect $300 in back stipends. Then he was off to Africa, where Friends World had scheduled classes at an educational center in Nairobi, Kenya. The seminars on African history were interesting, but as usual, Greg was more enthusiastic about educational opportunities outside the lecture hall. He tried LSD and enjoyed it so much he was afraid to try it again. He climbed Kilimanjaro, reaching the summit on Christmas Day and witnessing a full-circle rainbow that was more spectacular than anything he had experienced on acid. He walked through the slums of Nairobi and realized for the first time how poor much of the world was—the frugal life at Koinonia seemed lush by comparison. “The kids would befriend us and try to get us drunk on the local brew,” he said. “It tasted like piss, but we drank it in the interest of world peace.”

  While he was in Kenya, Greg received a letter from the draft board in Americus ordering him to report for alternative service at a mental hospital in Kansas. He wrote back saying that he was in college overseas and couldn’t come. This displeased the board, which responded that he shouldn’t have left the country without notifying it and that his college wasn’t accredited anyway. If he didn’t show up in Kansas on the appointed date, he could be arrested the next time he set foot in the United States. So much for going home, Greg thought.