'My Wife and I Lost Our Positions'
Mr.
Lee
Peery,
Richmond,
Virginia
In the 1950s in the District of Columbia, I volunteered with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). We were able to integrate a previously all-white playground in a largely black neighborhood. One night we were attacked by a brick-throwing group because we had accepted the invitation of a nightclub owner who wanted to integrate his club.
From there, I went to Indianapolis, where I lost my volunteer job with a housing rehabilitation project in a slum area. The reason was that a group of us held a sit-in at a restaurant that required people of color to get their food outside at a window.
My wife and I lost our positions as sharecroppers near Greenville, Mississippi, because we asked some fellow cotton-choppers (blacks) over to have lunch with us. An angry group of neighbors showed up one night, eager to do violence to me in their desire to teach me the error of my ways.
We then accepted teaching positions at a black school near Jackson, Mississippi. After one school year, we were dismissed because the administration was afraid that the white community would notice how friendly we were with the black teachers. It didn't help that I was talking to students about nonviolent direct action.
Next, we spent two years at an interracial Christian community, Koinonia, near Americus, Georgia. These good people (for their efforts to live together, black and white) were under siege. There was a boycott, destruction of property, persecution of their 12 children at school, bullets from the highway, and isolation. A store in town that supplied feed for the group's 3,000 hens was dynamited. My efforts to help the community deal with the boycott landed me and a buddy in jail on a phony charge. We were left to plead our cases ourselves (unsuccessfully) because no lawyer would represent us.
Late one night, this time near Atlanta, my wife and I were awakened by a wall of flame just outside the window of our cabin. Somebody had tried to throw a gallon of gasoline, set afire, through a window of our bedroom. The person nearly succeeded. The authorities ruled that we had done this to ourselves to get publicity. What had we done to deserve such an attack? I had sent a letter to the editor on behalf of Martin Luther King and had spoken with CORE about joining its demonstrations in Atlanta. For those offenses, would someone risk killing a couple and their three children, ages six months, two, and four?
Eventually, we moved to Ohio, where I did a lot of volunteer printing work for the civil rights cause.
