Even now, 51 years later, the memory of that terrifying night in Georgia still brings tears to her eyes.

"Kids were running in my back door, hiding in closets and under beds. To see innocent kids scared to death like that was heartbreaking."

One of those kids was her own son Clifford, then 9.

"We were playing volleyball and when the gunfire started, we hit the ground," said Clifford, reliving that night recently while visiting his mother at Kendal at Longwood, the Quaker retirement community in Kennett Square.

It happened more than once. Always at night. First, the sound of a car in the distance, traveling a country road. As the car came closer, the headlights went dark. Then, the pop of gunfire, a spray of bullets piercing the walls.

"One time, my brother stepped on a bullet that was still hot," recalled Clifford Angry, now 60 and a resident of Coatesville. "If we hadn't ducked under the bed, we wouldn't be here today."

That Clifford and five of his siblings survived those perilous times, as well as other challenges and adventures, is a testament to the courage and tenacity of Sue Angry, 83, a tall woman of regal bearing and gracious manner.

"She kept the family together," Clifford declares simply. "She saved our lives." She also witnessed amazing changes. A half-century ago, she, her husband and children were nearly killed for being black and daring to live among white folks. Now Angry watches and marvels as a black man pursues a feasible bid for the White House.

"It's exciting to see him out there," she says of Barack Obama.

Indeed, so sweeping have been the changes that Angry sometimes fears they may obscure the past, turning the troubles she's seen into something distant and incredible, like a nightmare erased by morning's light.

"People don't know what it was like," Angry says. "It's hard to believe unless someone shows them and says, Yes, I was there."

An only child, Sue Angry was reared by her grandparents in a two-room rustic dwelling with a tin roof and outhouse in rural Georgia. She married a sharecropper, and in 1954, when she was 30, she and her husband, Rufus, and their six children became the first black family to move to Koinonia, an interracial cooperative farm near Americus.

Founded in 1942 by two white couples as a "demonstration plot for the Kingdom of God," Koinonia (pronounced koyna-NEE-ya, after the ancient Greek word for fellowship or community) was based on Christian principles of love, tolerance, peace and understanding. It sought to show that blacks and whites are equals and could live and work together in harmony - a radical and subversive notion at the time, especially in rural and racist Sumter County, Georgia.

Clarence Jordan, one of the founders and the spiritual leader of the community, was a farmer, minister, classics scholar and philosopher. Sue Angry remembers, "He liked to meet and talk and get to know you. He was human."

It was Koinonia's conspicuous humanity, the deliberate respect for the dignity of the individual, that attracted the Angrys.

"It was like a big family," Angry recalls. "You gave what you had and took what you needed. The idea was to help each other."

Koinonia was viewed with suspicion and contempt by county folk from the start, but when, in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision banning segregation, Jordan sought to help two black students enroll at Georgia State College of Business, the simmering hostility boiled over. The farm was boycotted; townsfolk stopped buying its produce and selling supplies. Vandals cut fences, dumped garbage on the land. Koinonia's roadside market was damaged by a bomb. Two members of the community were run off the road. Another was beaten. The local Klan burned crosses and issued threats. Then came the nightly drive-by shootings.

"Things got so bad that nobody felt safe at the farm," Angry recalls, "and even less so on the road."

In 1957, the Angrys and another family reluctantly left Georgia and headed north to Hidden Springs, a cooperative community with ties to Koinonia near the central New Jersey town of Neshanic Station.

"People say to me, 'You must have been scared to death coming to this new place,' " Angry says. "But I didn't have time to be afraid. There was too much to think about, too much to do."

In New Jersey, the Angrys were sustained by "kind and loving friends," but an attempt to establish a permanent Koinonia-style community failed after about a year, largely because of opposition from local officials, Angry says.

Again, the Angrys were looking for a secure, welcoming home. In the fall of 1958, they found one in Chester County, at Thorncroft, the family farm of Saunders Dixon, who invited them to live on the second floor of his house until a cottage became available on his 68-acre estate.

"Although we didn't know them, we were very active in the peace movement and we were aware of Koinonia and they were desperate for a roof over their heads," Dixon says. "They were brothers and sisters and we took them in."

The Angrys lived there for 21 years. Rufus helped Dixon manage the dairy farm and later worked as a custodian at Bishop Shanahan High School. He died in 1984. Clifford Angry came of age at Thorncroft, honing the baseball skills first taught him by Clarence Jordan at Koinonia. Of Saunders Dixon, Clifford says: "He was like a father to me."

The Angrys were "wonderful, just a real nice addition to the place," says Dixon, 79, who today runs a therapeutic equestrian center at Thorncroft for people with physical and mental disabilities.

Of Sue Angry, Dixon says: "She had a very difficult time raising her family, and she still did it with a wonderful spirit. How she maintained such a good spirit was just amazing."

Sue Angry, who had 11 children altogether, six of whom are alive today, was busy as a mother. But she also did much more. She earned money by cleaning the houses of neighbors. She kept the local Friends meetinghouse tidy to earn tuition for three of her children. She applied labels to razor-blade packages and toiled as a nurse's aide at a rehabilitation hospital in Malvern. While working as a visiting homemaker, she went back to school and earned a high school diploma. She also took courses in social work at West Chester University, developing her skills as a welfare case worker.

Angry is an avid reader, relentlessly self-improving. In her apartment at Kendal, the bookshelves have spilled onto the floor, forming knee-high stacks. She is partial to biographies and memoirs and has read the essays of such contemporary black scholars as Harvard's Henry Louis Gates and Princeton's Cornel West.

A few years ago, Angry committed her life story to paper. She made copies for her children, 20 grandchildren, 19 great-grandchildren and three great-great grandchildren. Fittingly, she titled her autobiography My Life: Changing and Growing. Several pages are devoted to those pivotal years in Koinonia, the "backwater of the civil rights movement" that later became the birthplace of Habitat for Humanity.

"The fellowship, the caring, the love, the respect, the honesty were all very powerful tools we needed in life to make us whole," writes Angry. "While learning about others, we learned about ourselves. We were part of a large group working toward a better place here on Earth."

To watch a video interview with Sue Angry, visit http://go.philly.com/race