WITNESSING HISTORY

Ruth and Sam Neff remember the start of April 4, 1968 as a quiet, beautiful morning at their Atlanta home.

But the afternoon brought morbid tidings, and so came the weather.

“And then we heard the news, and after that there were just clouds, thunder and lightning.”

The news was that Martin Luther King, Jr., the pastor and civil rights leader, had been assassinated in Memphis.

At the time, Sam taught physics at the nearby Morehouse College, where King earned his bachelor’s degree.

“The electricity went out in our area,” he recalls. “I went out on the porch to watch the lightning, and what I saw was this mob of students moving right up Fair Street up to the big Morehouse gym. Morehouse, Spelman, Morris Brown, Clark and Atlanta University were all there, so there were 3,000 to 4,000 students.”

“Around midnight we got a call saying, ‘We’re going out to march in the morning,’” he adds. “It was ironic, I think, this was the same route we had taken when I followed Martin Luther King, Jr. back in 1965.”

Heeding the call

Three years earlier, Ruth and Sam were living almost as far from Atlanta as one could get, unintentionally.

A few years before that they had jumped from Massachusetts to New Zealand, where Sam taught and worked on upper-atmosphere research.

From afar, they heard the news, though.

“We were aware of things going on in the civil rights movement,” Sam says. “Things like the March on Washington and the murders of the three civil rights workers and the church being blown up. All these things just were very shocking, so we decided to come to the United States.”

They landed in Atlanta, Georgia, where Sam got his position as a physics professor at the historically-black Morehouse College.

The couple and their two children, Robert and Kathy, moved into the house across the street from the college on 855 Fair Street.

They’re not sure if it was naiveté or not, but the Neffs remember being told by friends to worry about their neighborhood early on.

From the get go, however, they were welcomed with open arms.

“We didn’t feel like it was segregated when we got there, but it was highly segregated two years before, before the Civil Rights Act in 1964. We never saw black and white water fountains, but they were there two years before,” Sam says.

It didn’t take long for Sam to get his first taste of the area’s political energy.

“I was teaching physics and had a knock on the door. A young student poked his head in and said, ‘We’re marching on the capitol at noon,’ and I said, ‘Alright,’” he recalls with a laugh. “That was significant because it was led by Martin Luther King, Jr.”

“We were very close and mixed into things very quickly,” he adds.

Walking with King

When Sam followed those Morehouse students and faculty in 1965, it was in support of civil rights leader Julian Bond, who was recently elected to the Georgia House of Representatives but was being prevented from joining the legislature due to his opposition to the Vietnam War.

The Neffs knew Bond, and even offered up their home as a hub for stuffing envelopes during his campaign.

King was in the crowd during that march, and delivered remarks at the state capitol building that would stick with Sam — he later learned they were excerpts of the famous “I Have a Dream” speech, which the Neffs had missed two years earlier while in New Zealand.

But on that night three years later, the mood was different.

Thousands of students packed into the Morehouse gym to decide a course of action.

“There was a big argument,” Sam said. “The Black Power people wanted to go out and destroy Atlanta, just like Detroit, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., there were riots in those cities. And the students who were ambivalent started to leave. A faculty member who was a neighbor of ours named Finley Campbell, stood up on a table and said, ‘Is this what Martin would want you to do?’ And that stopped the crowd right there.”

Then at midnight Sam got the call to march following the death of King. Ruth stayed home with the children, while her husband joined a small group of between 50 and 100 marchers on the street.

“It was just us, no one else there. It was really a feeling of despair, I think, that this had happen the night before, and what can you do? It was raining and drizzling,” he says.

“We got up to the corner, and I started to notice people. It turned out that somehow people knew about this march and they were up there on Hunter Street, and as we went by they all joined in the back. So by the time we had gone down Hunter and back to Morehouse, there were 2,000 people back there. It was just this slowly moving group, it wasn’t a march any more.”

“It was a memorial, or a funeral procession.”

Starting school

Years before, when the Neffs moved to their Fair Street home, Ruth remembers noticing a theme every time she inquired about a nursery school in their area.

On their first day in the neighborhood, she remembers a neighbor taking her around to see everything in the area — grocery stores and restaurants.

“I said, ‘Well, what about a nursery school?’ She said, ‘You’ll just have to keep looking,’” Ruth recalls.

Ruth wasn’t satisfied. She kept asking.

Then Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s wife, sang a concert in the ballroom across the street from the Neff home.

“Afterwards I went up and said, ‘I know you have children. Where is a good nursery school or childcare place?’ And she said, ‘Well, you’ll have to really look for that around here.’”

Ruth wasn’t satisfied.

She investigated the daycare at the nearby Spelman College and found 28 students to one strict teacher, and that didn’t satisfy her either.

“I came home and I said, ‘Sam, we’ve got to do something about this nursery school business,’” she recalls.

So they got to work. They found a space in the basement of a building on the Oglethorpe University campus, then set about renovating it into a classroom.

They repainted the room, fixed the ceiling, found a teacher, and even “auctioned everything under the sun,” along with the assistance of Maynard Jackson, who would later become the first black mayor of Atlanta in 1974.

Ruth recalls many long work nights with her and other parents, staying at the soon-to-be school until the wee hours of the morning.

Soon enough, it was set to open for class in 1966, Sam recalls.

“It was all fixed to go, with everything set up for school to start the next morning, and somebody broke in and set it on fire,” he said.

“We had gone off to bed, and in the middle of the night we heard fire engines and I said, ‘Sam, could that be the nursery school?’ And he said, ‘Go back to sleep, of course not,’” Ruth added.

Just like that, the school was gone.

Sam says police concluded the fire was caused by chemicals in the paint used, but Ruth found a large wooden crate, which had sat outside, charred in the middle of the classroom, indicating arson.

“The immediate reaction was to say it must’ve been racially motivated, but it’s not. I’m almost sure it had something to do with insurance,” Sam says.

The dream of a school fought on, and soon there was a classroom again, and students white and black filled the desks as part of the Atlanta Cooperative Preschool.

The school held plays and penny festivals, where admission was set at one cent and students would drag their parents to see their paintings and drawings displayed on the walls.

“This got the white and black communities pulling right to the black part of town, which is unique. Usually you don’t do that,” Ruth said. “They forgot about being black or white, because they were all just meshed, looking for their kids’ pictures up and down the walls.”

Living through history

Eventually the Neffs moved on from Atlanta.

Sam says he remembers when the Black Power ideas started taking hold within his student body, and anger and frustration started being directed at white faculty at Morehouse.

Soon enough the family moved to Richmond, Indiana, where Sam joined the Quaker-based Earlham College faculty. He stayed at Earlham until he retired in 2000 and took the title of emeritus professor.

Then they moved to Whitefish, where they’ve had a home since.

As with now, when impeachment or climate headlines leave the impression that one day these years will be reflected on, Sam says there was no question that they were witnessing history in Atlanta.

“We were well aware that what we were involved in was historic,” he says. “Perhaps the real historic things had happened in the years before, and this was the end of the civil rights movement.”

“We felt there needed to be more people doing this sort of thing,” Ruth adds.

Sam and Ruth Neff will give a presentation on their Atlanta experiences at the Whitefish Community Library at 1 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 18 ahead of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day on Monday.

The event will be held in the library’s community room. There is no charge.