This story was originally published on Oct. 22, 2006. Read more about Greg Wittkamper and Koinonia in an excerpt from Jim Auchmutey’s book, “The Class of ‘65.”
One morning last May, Greg Wittkamper drove to the post office near his home in the West Virginia mountains and found a surprise in the mail: an invitation to his high school class reunion in Georgia. It had been four decades since he graduated from Americus High, and he had never heard from anyone in the Class of ‘65. He figured they were too embarrassed.
Wittkamper’s senior year was the worst of his life. On the first day of classes, he rode to campus with four black students to show his support as they desegregated the school. A mob pelted the car with rocks and bricks. It wasn’t the first time the white boy inside had felt like an outcast.
As he sat in front of the post office, Wittkamper reread the invitation and smiled. Finally, he thought. He began to leaf through the rest of his mail and noticed a familiar name on one envelope: David Morgan. He opened the letter.
"I expect you will be quite surprised to hear from me, " it began. "If you remember me at all, it will likely be for unpleasant reasons."
Wittkamper remembered. While Morgan hadn’t called him names or tried to jump him, he was one of many classmates who jeered as others did. They spit on him, dumped food on him, tore up his books, pushed him down the stairs, peed in his locker. A couple of guys even hit him in the face.
"Throughout the last 40 years, " the letter continued, "I have occasionally thought of you and those dark days that you endured at our hands. As I matured, I became more and more ashamed, and wished that I had taken a different stand back then."
Wittkamper stared at the letter. He had gone to the post office expecting bills and payments from people who were buying land from him. Instead, he found the promise of reconciliation.
"You won't believe this, " he told his wife when he got home. "Something wonderful is happening."
The next morning, when he went for his mail again, Wittkamper found three more letters from classmates. He started to drive home but couldn’t wait to open them. He pulled his Subaru Outback to the side of the road and put on his reading glasses.
One letter was from Deanie Dudley Fricks, a girl he'd had a secret crush on.
"I will never again say, 'How could the Holocaust have happened --- how could all those Christian people in Poland and Germany have stood by and allowed it to happen?' " she wrote. "I was present with you over a long period of time, and I never once did one thing to comfort you or reach out to you. It was cruelty."
As he sat on the roadside studying her neatly penned apology, Wittkamper started to cry. He didn’t stop for 15 minutes.
Outsiders in Georgia
Greg Wittkamper thinks of himself as a happy man.
At 59, he has a wife, three children and a rambling home on 80 acres overlooking a misty pass in the Greenbrier River Valley of West Virginia. He has the same thick hair he had as a teenager, with a graying beard and cheeks reddened from hours spent outside. He deals in mountain property and has done well enough to more or less retire.
But as he sits at his dining room table talking about school days, he admits that he never completely laid the past to rest. "For years, I couldn't talk about this without a bubble of tears welling up inside, " he says in a soft, calm voice with a hint of Georgia in it.
The table is spread with old photos. One of them, his senior portrait, ran in the yearbook with the caption: "He shows his true nature in what he does."
That nature came from one of the most unlikely chapters in the annals of Southern religion.
Wittkamper grew up on Koinonia Farm, a Christian commune near Americus where whites and blacks lived together at a time when that was a radical notion. Koinonia has become known as the birthplace of Habitat for Humanity, but in the 1950s and ‘60s, it was widely regarded by local whites as a den of Communists and race-mixers. Wittkamper’s father, a pacificist minister who had been a conscientious objector, moved the family there in 1953, when Greg was 6.
It was a hard time to be from Koinonia. Throughout the civil rights era, the farm was the target of a Klan boycott and terror campaign. Its roadside produce stand was dynamited. Nightriders sometimes drove past the property taking potshots. Greg was playing volleyball with some of the kids one evening when they saw gunfire flash from two passing cars and heard bullets rip through the peach trees.
Koinonia's struggle to survive in hostile surroundings moved into the courts in 1960 when three of its families --- including Greg's --- sued the city schools for not allowing their children into Americus High. The children were white; Americus just didn't want Koinonia kids. A federal court ordered them enrolled.
The students were badgered from the start. Wittkamper’s older brother hated the school so much he transferred after a year.
Things were even harder for Greg. By the time he became a senior in 1964, Americus was boiling over with civil rights protests --- some of which he joined --- and the courts were forcing the high school to accept a handful of black students. To make matters worse, he was the only Koinonian left in his class.
"They called me Greg Wittnigger from Koinonigger Farm, " he says. "But the worst part wasn't the name-calling. It was being shunned. I cut my hair like them. I dressed like them. I wanted to be their friend."
No one wanted to be his friend.
Early in his senior year, some boys motioned him over in the cafeteria. As he was setting down his tray, one of them smashed a sloppy joe in his face.
Clarence Jordan, the Baptist minister who founded Koinonia, met the school bus that day. When he saw the stain on Greg's shirt, he guessed what had happened and draped his arm around the youngster.
“You know, this whole nonviolent thing is more an adult idea, " Wittkamper recalls him saying. “I wonder just how much it extends to young people’s lives. Maybe the best thing to do is the next time one of those guys does something to you, just beat him up.”
Wittkamper was stunned to hear such a devoted pacifist give him permission to whip tail. He considered the matter but didn’t want to hurt anyone, even his attackers.
"They are them because of their parents, and I am me because of my parents, " he later told Jordan. "If we had been switched in our cribs, we'd be playing opposite roles."
His convictions would be tested even more severely.
Sermon after school
One of the letters Wittkamper received last spring described the worst confrontation of his senior year. It came from Joseph Logan, a teacher in Enterprise, Ala., who had witnessed the encounter as a student and written a sketch about it called “Greg and T.J.”
T.J. was a football player who accused Greg of tripping him and calling him an obscene name in government class. It hardly mattered that Greg denied both charges; T.J. said he'd see him after school.
That afternoon, Greg was leaving campus when T.J. stepped out from behind the baseball bleachers to confront him. Dozens of other boys emerged from the shadows and formed a ring around them.
"Knock the hell out of him, " someone cried.
"Kick the crap out of him, " another taunted.
Greg said he didn't want to fight. Then someone kicked the books out of his hands, and T.J. hauled off and hit him in the left cheek.
Greg staggered, but he didn't fall. He straightened himself and approached T.J. again, holding his hands behind his back and jutting his chin out to await another blow. He was literally turning the other cheek.
"I saw a sermon that afternoon, " Logan wrote in his sketch.
The lesson took a long time to sink in. Even then, Wittkamper noticed attitudes begin to change ever so slightly.
The first break came after a tragedy during the Christmas holidays. A homely student with Coke-bottle glasses who had been the butt of jokes killed himself with a shotgun.
While a few bullies suggested that Wittkamper do likewise, most students seemed chastened and started leaving him alone.
Then, shockingly, someone at graduation actually said something encouraging.
In most ways, the ceremony was an ugly end to an ugly year. The crowd booed when Wittkamper’s name was announced, and he was chased from campus with rocks in a reprise of the first day of classes.
But Wittkamper never forgot the graduate who shook his hand and told him, “I don’t see how you made it through.”
"That one act showed me there was a glimmer of hope, " he says.
The graduate was David Morgan, the name on the first envelope Wittkamper received last spring. Now a banker in Perry, he organized the 40th class reunion (which was held a year late) and floated the idea of reaching out to the one-time pariah. Everyone agreed they should try.
"That, " Morgan says, "was a very tough letter for me to write."
Only in Americus
In all, 11 classmates wrote Wittkamper to express their regret and invite him to the reunion. When he told others about this remarkable turn of events, some were skeptical. His older brother, Bill, said it was a trick. Another Koinonian who had suffered through Americus High told him he’d better pack a gun.
After Wittkamper phoned the authors, he was convinced of their sincerity. Last June, he set out on the 12-hour drive to Georgia with his wife, Anne Gardner.
Wittkamper left Americus shortly after graduation to attend Friends World College, a Quaker school in New York that sent him around the globe to study in dozens of countries. He had returned to Georgia often over the years to visit his parents, but this trip was different.
As he neared the turn-off on I-75, Wittkamper glanced at his wife and cracked a nervous joke. “We can still turn around.”
His nerves dissolved when he walked through the door at his first stop in Americus. Some of the classmates who had written him were meeting for lunch at the home of Gladys Crabb, an English teacher who had been sympathetic to him and had nudged the others into making amends.
They greeted Wittkamper with hugs and moist eyes. Soon everyone linked hands in prayer and settled down to talk over chicken salad sandwiches, the conversation getting so animated that Mrs. Crabb tried to get everyone’s attention by clapping her hands and barking, “Now, class!”
Seeing Wittkamper for the first time in 41 years, his classmates were relieved to find that he seemed so ... normal. “We were all concerned that we had really done some damage to you, " said Deanie Fricks, who drove up from Naples, Fla.
Wittkamper admitted it had taken a while for him to get over his anger. Oddly, it was a nightmare that lanced the wound.
While he was in Sweden during his college studies, he dreamed that he was in high school fighting back against his tormentors.
"I'm standing there with a Thompson machine gun mowing down the bunch of you, " he related in his usual placid tone. Around the table, his subliminal targets smiled uneasily.
He had the same nightmare six months later in Africa. When he woke that time, he felt his resentment evaporate, and he never dreamed of revenge again.
"If my parents hadn't been pacifists, " he concluded, "we could have had a Columbine on our hands."
On the following night, at the old Carnegie Library in Americus, everyone was unfailingly polite to Wittkamper --- even some of the guys who made his senior year miserable. They looked rather harmless in their khakis and polos.
The other outcasts
In the weeks after the reunion, Wittkamper received a few more letters and calls. The exchange seemed less like exercises in forgiveness and more like budding friendships. One person even suggested a cruise.
"He's really opened up, " his wife said, marveling at how he was able to talk and laugh about things that once left him knotted in silence. "This has saved us a lot of money on counseling."
But one question nagged at Wittkamper. He wondered what had happened to the students who had desegregated Americus High. Three of the four teenagers who rode with him into the hail of rocks grew disgusted with the constant harassment and left the school. Only one stuck it out.
Robertiena Freeman Fletcher was 14 when she started 10th grade in the fall of 1964. Already a movement veteran, she had been arrested during a protest and served a month in jail. She endured the abuse at her new school as if it were another lockup, and earned her diploma in 1967.
Wittkamper tracked her down at the Houston Medical Center in Warner Robins, where she directs the pharmacy.
At first she didn't remember his name. But when he mentioned the first day of school, it all came back.
"I thought we were going to get killed, " she said.
Wittkamper told her about the reunion and what a healing experience it had been. She told him about a redemptive experience of her own.
Years after Fletcher graduated, her sister became principal of Americus High and asked her to speak during Black history month.
In the auditorium, a white teacher approached the stage and told the assembly that she had gone to school with Fletcher and wanted to apologize and welcome her back to her alma mater.
Listening to Fletcher’s story, Wittkamper was struck with how time could soften hearts and reveal truths. He wondered whether others had come to a reckoning.
"Have you ever been to a class reunion?" he asked.
"No, " she replied sadly. "I've never been invited."
In Americus --- as in America --- healing is a work in progress.
