As I get ready to appear at the Decatur Book Festival over Labor Day weekend (3 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 5, at Decatur Presbyterian Church), I was thinking back to perhaps the best moment in the roll-out of "The Class of '65." Here's the video of me introducing my main character, Greg Wittkamper, at last month's Lewisburg Literary Festival in West Virginia, near where he lives. See him dabbing his eyes near the end? Those are tears. There were many reasons I wrote this book; telling this man's story of moral and physical courage was right at the top. If we don't sell another book, this made it all worthwhile. Thanks to Greg's brother-in-law, Gary Godwin, for capturing this moment. (P.S. -- We do want to sell more books! That's why I have a dozen more talks lined up in the coming weeks.)
What about Jimmy?
When I speak about “The Class of ’65,” people often ask about Jimmy Carter and whether he supported Koinonia when it was being terrorized and boycotted. The answer is complicated. Jimmy left the Navy and moved back to Sumter County with Rosalynn after his father died in 1953, a few months after my main character, Greg Wittkamper, settled at Koinonia with his family. The bombings and drive-by shootings targeting the communal farm started not long after that. The Carters were among the most progressive families in the county and resisted pressure to join segregationist groups like the White Citizens Council, which cost them some business at their peanut warehouse. Jimmy did not fall in with the local boycott against Koinonia -- in fact, he shelled some of their peanuts -- but did he do everything he could have to publicly support the embattled community? Well, he didn’t exactly mount a soap box and speak out for a group of people who were widely seen as communists and race-mixers. If he had, he probably never would have been elected dog catcher, much less state senator, governor and president of the United States. Launching a political career from the dying embers of the segregationist South was a delicate matter for a man who believed in the new order and came to embody it. Carter eventually embraced Koinonia and helped turn its most famous offspring, Habitat for Humanity, into one of the most beloved nonprofit organizations in the world. His White House chief of staff was Hamilton Jordan, nephew of Koinonia’s co-founder Clarence Jordan. So when I’m asked about the Carters and Koinonia, I say that they did what they could at the time ... and later did a great deal more. As the former president begins treatment for his melanoma, we can all endorse the sentiment of the latest campaign sign that's popping up in Plains, Americus and beyond: “Jimmy Carter for Cancer Survivor.” God bless and keep you, Mr. President.
How I got to Carnegie Hall
Not the one in New York, but the one in Lewisburg, West Virginia. I was invited to speak at the Lewisburg Literary Festival last weekend because Greg Wittkamper, the hero of “The Class of ’65,” lives nearby. More than 300 people came out to hear me in Carnegie Hall, one of a handful of performing arts centers built more than a century ago with Carnegie money. I have to admit that I was intimidated at first. It’s a theater, essentially, with a full stage and spotlights and a green room full of posters for artists who have played there: Wynton Marsalis, Harry Belafonte, Isaac Stern, Ralph Stanley, etc. After I had spoken for 20 or 25 minutes, I invited Greg on stage for a conversation, and he received a long standing ovation which moved him to tears and pleased me immensely. It was exactly the kind of book debut I had wanted for him in the place he has called home for more than 40 years. The rest of the festival was terrific. Kathryn Stockett was the main speaker and cracked everyone up with her stories about “The Help”; there’s something inherently funny about a woman who looks like a junior leaguer but sometimes has a potty mouth. There was also a Hunter S. Thompson lookalike contest; that’s Gary Godwin in the photo below, one of the contestants, with his wife Sallie, who happen to be Greg’s in-laws. “Why Hunter S. Thompson?” I asked one of the planners. “Hemingway was taken,” he answered. So let me explain that main photo above: Each author was asked to suggest a line from his or her book that captured its essence and could be reproduced in a banner on Lewisburg’s main street. I chose a line from Chapter 8, when Greg is confronted by a menacing group of boys after school who want to see him get his butt kicked. “My God,” he thinks, “am I going to get lynched? Are they going to stone me?” They tell me that they’ll rehang the banner every summer during the literary festival, so I guess I’m part of Lewisburg now -- like the street lamps and the stop signs. I like that.
Local hero
It’s good to see that Greg Wittkamper is finally getting some attention close to home. Greg, the main character in “The Class of ’65,” has spoken at two recent book gatherings near his nest in Sinks Grove, West Virginia. One was a party thrown on his behalf at Salt Sulphur Springs, a historic resort near the Virginia border, and the other was a book club in Lewisburg, a charming town near the famous Greenbrier Resort. (That’s Greg with some of the book club members.) There was a lively discussion about Greg’s plight as a persecuted teenager in Georgia, with one woman suggesting that he would have been better off if he had fought back against the classmates who were bullying him at Americus High for his religious and racial beliefs. Greg respectfully disagreed. As the author of the book, I’m with Greg on this one; it would have been a very different story if he had taken a swing at his tormentors -- less Gandhi than Rocky. The local attention will continue next weekend when Greg and I speak at the Lewisburg Literary Festival in an arts center called Carnegie Hall.
The forgotten Selma
Fifty years ago this week, Americus, Ga., made national news as racial unrest boiled over into violence and death. It was the final battle in the fight for the Voting Rights Act, a closing chapter in the struggle that had begun that spring in Selma, Ala. I devoted a chapter of my book, "The Class of '65," to the long hot summer that year in Americus. See that picture of a column of protesters? The white boy toward the left -- the only one in sight -- is my main character, Greg Wittkamper, who had just graduated from Americus High and was joining the marchers with his friend Collins McGee. The trouble started during a special election for justice of the peace when a candidate, a black woman, was told that she would have to stand in a separate voting line for colored people. For the next few weeks, there were daily demonstrations in Americus involving hundreds of protestors, roving bands of Klansmen, future governor Lester Maddox, future network anchorman Tom Brokaw, and civil rights leaders such as Hosea Williams, John Lewis and comedian Dick Gregory. It got ugly; one young man was killed in a drive-by shooting, and state troopers had to be summoned to keep the peace. How did it all end? You'll just have to read the book. (Thanks to Sam Mahone and the Americus-Sumter County Movement Remembered Committee, which found this photo in an old contact sheet.)