When Robertiena returned to Americus High that fall for her junior year, she was no longer alone. Forty black students were entering the city’s once all-white schools. By November, fourteen of them had dropped out because of widespread abuse, physical bullying, and threatening phone calls to their homes. The US Commission on Civil Rights examined the Americus system, interviewing many of the students and administrators, and reported that “a pattern of harassment and violence in the secondary schools had developed, accompanied by a lack of supervision and enforcement of discipline by the high school officials.” Greg could have told them that.
It never got easy for Robertiena. During her final two years at the school, some kids continued to spit on her, shove her into the lockers, call her “that smart little nigger.” The longer it went on, the more outspoken she became. She remembered one day in senior English when Mrs. Crabb encouraged the white students to ask Robertiena anything they wanted, as long as they remained civil, and one of the girls said, “Why do you want to go to a school where you’re not wanted?”
“Because it’s my right to go to this school,” Robertiena replied. “I don’t have to go to a black school just because you want to put me there. I don’t have to sit in the balcony at the movie theater just because you want me to stay up there where it’s dirty and dingy. You shouldn’t get the best of everything, and we get whatever’s left over. We’re human beings, too.”
As Robertiena recalled it, the classroom fell quiet. Some of the students, she believed, were beginning to listen.
Robertiena graduated from Americus High in 1967 along with Emmarene Kaigler and Bessie Walton—the first black students to earn diplomas from the school. The inscription under her portrait in the senior annual was, oddly, the same one that ran next to Greg’s, with only the pronouns changed: “She shows her true nature in what she does.” Robertiena went to Mercer University in Macon on a scholarship, launched a career in pharmacy, got married, and started a family. She served on the county school board, the chamber of commerce, and was eventually appointed by the governor to the state board of human resources, which she would later lead. She was, by any measure, an accomplished alumna.
When Greg reached her on the phone in 2006, he told her about the reunion and how heartening it had been to get the invitation and to read the expressions of regret from members of his class.
“That’s great, Greg,” she said. Robertiena herself had not been offered those same kind of apologies.
“Have you ever been to a class reunion?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I’ve never been invited.”
She had been to reunions of classes at the black schools, but she had never been to one at the formerly white high school where she received her diploma. If she were invited, she admitted, she wasn’t sure she would want to go.
She was tethered to Americus High in another way, though. More than twenty years after Robertiena graduated, her older sister, Juanita Wilson, became principal of the school. One day she asked Robertiena to speak during Black History Month. “I begged her not to make me do it,” she said. “I’d never been back inside that school, and I didn’t want to go then.”
After Robertiena spoke, a white teacher named Susan Parker made her way to the stage and asked if she could say a few words. “You probably don’t remember me,” she began, “but I went to school with you. I didn’t do anything to you, but I stood by while others did, and I am so sorry for that. I’d like to welcome you back to Americus High School.” With that, the teacher reached for Robertiena’s hand and asked her to join in singing their alma mater.
As he listened to her story, Greg only wished he could have been there.
Acknowledgments
This book began for me during a vacation to Rocky Mountain National Park when I did something that’s not a very healthy thing to do if you’re trying to get away from the office and commune with nature: I checked my voice mail at work. There was an intriguing message.
“Jim, this is Ann Morris. I just got together with some people who told me the most wonderful story, and it made me think of you.”
Ann had been my editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and had gone on to become managing editor of the News & Record in Greensboro, North Carolina. The voice mail was a little hard to follow, but it seemed that a friend of hers had a sister who was married to a guy in West Virginia who had just gone back to Georgia for a high school class reunion that had something to do with the civil rights era and a farming commune called Koinonia, and she thought it sounded like my kind of tale. Her paper couldn’t do anything with it because it was set in Georgia, not North Carolina, so she passed along the contact information. Thanks for the tip, Ann.
As soon as I returned to Atlanta, I contacted the guy in West Virginia, Greg Wittkamper, who filled me in on the backstory and sent me copies of the letters his classmates had written to him apologizing for the way people treated him in high school. Over the next few years, I interviewed Greg at least thirty times at his mountain home, during trips to Georgia and elsewhere, and over the telephone. I couldn’t have wished for a better protagonist; I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to tell his story. Thanks also to his wife, Anne, who was always supportive and usually patient.
Greg introduced me to the people he had grown up with at Koinonia, a rich supporting cast that included Brownes (Conrad and his children Carol, Charles, John, and Lora), Jordans (Jan and Lenny), and Wittkampers (Bill, Dan, and David). Thanks to all of them for sharing their time, and special thanks to Conrad Browne, Lora Browne, and Lenny Jordan for sharing their archival materials.
Greg’s classmates were helpful and forthcoming in reflecting on parts of their past that weren’t always easy to talk about. Many thanks to Deanie Dudley Fricks, Celia Harvey Gonzalez, Joseph Logan, and David Morgan for going there—and to their teacher, Gladys Crabb, for preparing the way. I’d also like to thank Robertiena Freeman Fletcher and the other students who desegregated Americus High—David Bell, Dobbs Wiggins, and Jewel Wise—for revisiting some tough times with me. And I should mention Sam Mahone, one of the young activists who worked for change in Americus and is now trying to preserve that history.
I’m especially indebted to Faith Fuller, a filmmaker who recorded the reunion weekend and made a copy of her video for me.
I already knew about Koinonia when I met Greg. During my first job out of college, as associate editor of Presbyterian Survey, the denominational magazine of the southern Presbyterian church, a colleague of mine, Lynn Donham, told me about the farm and its history of persecution and wrote an article about it for me. A couple of years later, when I went to work for the Atlanta newspaper, one of the first out-of-town assignments I received was to drive to Americus and do a feature about how Koinonia was faring. It had been almost exactly eleven years since its cofounder and guiding spirit, Clarence Jordan, had died, but I was able to speak with his widow, Florence, and feel the soul of the place.
I returned to Sumter County many times to write about Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter; the Andersonville POW camp; and Habitat for Humanity, whose founders, Millard and Linda Fuller, had lived at Koinonia and recognized it as the birthplace of the nonprofit housing ministry. Americus is one of the most interesting towns in America, and I’ve always felt welcome there. That’s especially true at Koinonia, where I’ve stayed several times and spent hours trying to imagine the ways things were. I’d like to thank Bren Dubay, the fellowship’s director; Amanda Moore, who set me up in the archives; Kat Mournighan, who assigned me to bunk in the Martin Luther King Jr. Room; and everyone who had a hand in cooking the communal meals that are an enduring part of life at the farm.
Several former colleagues at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution deserve recognition. Valerie Boyd, an arts editor who went on to become a journalism professor and successful author, long urged me to write a book and read an early version of my proposal for this one. Her biography of
Zora Neale Hurston, Wrapped in Rainbows, was an inspiration. Fellow reporters Drew Jubera, Cameron McWhirter, and Gary Pomerantz have all published books and encouraged me directly and by example. Other staffers, past and present, who have acted as sounding boards and morale officers include Howard Pousner, Susan Puckett, Ralph Ellis, Michelle Hiskey, and Eileen Drennen.
The newspaper story that contained the kernel of this book was edited by Diane Lore and Jan Winburn. I’ll never forget walking around Centennial Olympic Park in downtown Atlanta one sunny September afternoon as Jan and I talked out the narrative structure. She’s pretty good. Our managing editor, Hank Klibanoff, who did a final read on my piece, set a lofty standard for aspiring authors in his newsroom as coauthor of The Race Beat, a Pulitzer Prize–winning history of media coverage of the civil rights movement.
I’d like to thank a couple of my historian friends: Clifford Kuhn of Georgia State University, who knows volumes about Sumter County and conducted some of the oral histories I consulted; and Steve Oney, author of And the Dead Shall Rise, about the Leo Frank case, who listened to my outpourings and said, “You have a book there.”
Several archives and libraries were essential to my work. Thanks to Kathy Shoemaker at Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library; to the staffs at the University of Georgia’s Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the University of Tennessee’s Hodges Library, and the National Archives in Morrow, Georgia; to Ru Story-Huffman at the James Earl Carter Library at Georgia Southwestern State University; and to Jill Dalton Kloberdanz at the Lake Blackshear Regional Library in Americus.
I’d also like to thank my agent, David Black, who helped me learn the difference between long-form newspaper writing and doing a book. David’s reputation for ushering journalists through that transition is well deserved. My editor at PublicAffairs, Benjamin Adams, took it from there. Ben even stopped by Atlanta on his way back from a family trip in Florida and spent two days hashing out the book with me, at a time when I really needed that kind of interaction. We talked a little baseball, too.
Finally, I’d like to thank my wife, Pamela Brown Auchmutey, a fine editor and writer herself, who kept her day job at Emory University so I could leave the newspaper after twenty-nine years to undertake projects such as this one. That’s love.
Jim Auchmutey
September 2014
Notes
The principal source for this book is its main character, Greg Wittkamper, whom I have interviewed for many hours at his home in West Virginia and during visits to see other Koinonia alumni in Florida, Illinois, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and, of course, Georgia. We’ve gone back to Americus together five times. The story is much broader than Greg’s experiences, however, and there were many other sources of information that helped fill in the narrative.
Prologue
“Negroes Quietly Enter AHS Today,” read the small headline at the bottom of the front page of the Americus Times-Recorder on August 31, 1964. A more accurate picture of the desegregation of Americus High came from interviews with Greg and the first black students: David Bell, Robertiena Freeman, Dobbs Wiggins, and Jewel Wise. Greg kept the letters he received from his former classmates before their 2006 reunion and cherishes them. Some of them are so eloquent they make me want to cry.
Chapter 1: Farming for Jesus
The Wittkamper family’s story is based on interviews with Greg and his brothers Bill, Dan, and David and on an oral history that their mother, Margaret, did in 1987. I learned much about the family’s background from Ferrill Wittkamper, a cousin of Greg’s who lives in Indiana near the farm where Greg’s father grew up. He still had the letters Will Wittkamper had written him during World War II, trying to persuade him to become a conscientious objector.
There have been half a dozen books and at least that many dissertations done about Koinonia and Clarence Jordan. The most comprehensive ones are Tracy Elaine K’Meyer’s The Story of Koinonia Farm and Dallas Lee’s The Cotton Patch Evidence. K’Meyer is an academic historian whose book started as a dissertation and is particularly detailed about the inner workings of the commune. Lee was a journalist and had the advantage of living at the farm and interviewing Jordan before his death in 1969—hence his colorful portrait of the man. Jordan told Koinonia’s story in numerous speeches, articles, and interviews, and I read as many of them as I could run down at the farm’s archives and in the Clarence Jordan Papers at the University of Georgia’s Hargrett Library. Conrad Browne, whose family lived at the farm from 1949 to 1963, described Koinonia’s early days in our interviews. He also started a memoir and shared what he had finished of that manuscript.
For context about intentional communities such as Koinonia, I consulted Timothy Miller’s The Quest for Utopia in Twentieth-Century America and William Hedgepeth and Dennis Stock’s The Alternative: Communal Life in New America, for which they visited Koinonia shortly before Jordan died. They must have been impressed; they dedicated the book to him.
Chapter 2: “We Made Our Reality”
Americus was founded in 1832, a few years after the Muscogee Creeks ceded the territory to the state of Georgia. (That was the tribe that left the arrowheads Greg collected as a boy.) The town fathers literally pulled the name out of a hat full of suggestions. Americus is the male form of America, itself a feminized tribute to the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci.
My main sources for learning about Americus were William Bailey Williford’s Americus Through the Years, a 1975 history that deals forthrightly with Koinonia and the civil rights traumas; and several books by Alan Anderson, an Americus historian who has written a history column in the Times-Recorder for years. Thanks to Anderson, I learned that “Shoeless Joe” Jackson played minor league baseball in Americus not long after he had been banned from the majors for his part in the conspiracy to fix the 1919 World Series—a different sort of outcast.
My understanding of what it was like to grow up at Koinonia during the 1950s and early ’60s was based on my interviews with members of the Browne, Jordan, and Wittkamper families, and on the Lee and K’Meyer histories of the farm. I also consulted oral histories Koinonia has posted on its website. Another useful source of information came in the mail when Lora Browne sent me seven cassette tapes of reminiscences her parents had recorded in the early 1970s. I wish I could have met her mother, Ora—she sounds like a pistol. It was Lora who related the details of the visit to her friend’s house and of the ensuing debate over what the Bible says about black people.
The section about Koinonia and its pacifist convictions was informed by my conversations with Conrad Browne and the Browne and Jordan offspring. Greg and his brothers described their father’s devotion to nonviolence—and how it didn’t extend to the unwanted farm animals that he coolly dispatched. It’s worth noting that the denomination that ordained him, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), gives a Will Wittkamper Peace Award every two years to a person who has worked for peace and justice.
Chapter 3: Terror in the Night
Ralph McGill’s column anticipating the Supreme Court decision on public school segregation appeared in the Atlanta Constitution on April 9, 1953—more than a year before Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. He prophesied that the court would outlaw racially separate schools, but that it would be years before the changes would actually come to pass. Wise man. The Times-Recorder published several pieces reacting to the ruling during the week of May 17, 1954.
The event that provoked the terror campaign against Koinonia—Clarence Jordan’s endorsement of black students attempting to enroll at the Georgia State College of Business—made the front page of the Times-Recorder on March 24, 1956. An accompanying box showed his photo and pointed out that the commune was on the Dawson road. More than a year of vandalism and violence followed, much of it covered in the local newspaper, all of it recorded in great detail in the monthly (more or less) newsletter Koinonia sent to its suppor
ters across the country. Jordan spoke and wrote about the farm’s persecution many times. I found two examples very useful: “Christian Community in the South,” an article he did for The Journal of Religious Thought in its autumn–winter 1956–1957 issue; and a talk he gave in November 1956 at the Fellowship House in Cincinnati. I found the 46-minute audio on YouTube under the title “Clarence Jordan Tells the Koinonia Story.” It provides a vivid example of his humor and heartfelt emotion—and his accent. If the man sounded any more southern, you could pour it over pecan waffles.
Sumter County’s efforts to shut down the interracial summer camp for children at Koinonia are detailed in Lee’s and K’Meyer’s books. The farm took out three ads in the Times-Recorder during the summer of 1956, responding to the first bombing of its roadside market and trying to explain the community to its neighbors (July 24, July 31, and August 8). The economic boycott against Koinonia is documented in its archives and in the Jordan Papers at the University of Georgia. In December 1959, the commune made one last effort to reach out to local businesses, sending them letters asking to meet about their differences. One of the few replies came from an executive with the Citizens Bank: “On July 6, 1957, we wrote you as follows: ‘We prefer not to accept any further deposits from your Corporation and if tendered, they will be declined.’ That is still our attitude, and we do not see where any change could come from any conference with you.” Conrad Browne, who was in charge of the farm’s egg marketing, gave me an eyewitness view of the way that business and others dried up.
The relationship between Koinonia and Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter was examined several times after he rose to political prominence, most memorably in an article that accompanied the November 1976 Playboy interview that became infamous for Carter’s admission that he had “lusted” in his heart for other women (“Jimmy, We Hardly Know Y’all,” by Robert Scheer). In my interviews with the Carters, they were mystified as to why Florence Jordan told Scheer that she had never met them. When I interviewed Mrs. Jordan during my first visit to Koinonia, a couple of weeks before Carter lost his reelection bid in the fall of 1980, she had softened her tone toward the first couple. Carter’s White House chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, devoted twenty-five pages to his Uncle Clarence in his book No Such Thing as a Bad Day, holding him and Koinonia up as profiles in courage.
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