Reading in the newspapers last week of the death of Rosa Parks, whose refusal to move to the segregated back of a Montgomery, Alabama bus in December 1955 is said to have marked the beginning of the Civil Rights movement, I found myself musing: How many white Americans can say that they met Rosa Parks six months before the bus incident, let alone that they were 16 years old when they did and that they don’t remember her at all?

Actually, I know the answer. It’s eight: me and seven other Jewish teenagers who spent the summer of 1955 at a place in southern Tennessee, near the Alabama state line, named The Highlander Folk School. We were taking part in a summer work camp sponsored by an American Jewish organization, and there was only one non-Jewish youngster with us, a boy from Arizona who said his mother wanted him to spend his vacation with Jews so as to learn from them (these were his words) “how to be careful with my money.”

The Highlander Folk School, where we were supposed to be doing things like baling hay, painting barns, and building fences, was an adult education institution, sitting on a farm in the mountains above Chattanooga, which – uniquely for the deep South of that period – regularly flouted segregation by running racially mixed workshops on a variety of subjects. The reason it could get away with it was that the local inhabitants were hillbillies who, even if they objected to being called by that awful phrase “nigger lovers,” didn’t like nosy white outsiders telling them what to do, either. They got along well with the Highlander crowd and once, so legend had it, back in the 1940s, when the Ku Klux Klan drove up from Chattanooga to burn the place down, they ambushed it and sent it fleeing back down to the valley.

Highlander was an informal place, and although we campers weren’t officially invited to attend any of its workshops, we were free to wander into them if we had the time and inclination. One workshop that summer was about desegregation, still only a dream in the South, and I sat in on one of its sessions. My memories of it are limited to a conference table with blacks and whites seated around it, and it was only from the obituaries last week that I learned that one of those blacks was Rosa Parks. I don’t remember if I was introduced to her; her name wouldn’t have meant anything if I had been. Yet being there meant a great deal to her. “She later spoke of that workshop,” an obituary said, “as being the first time she had lived in ‘an atmosphere of equality with members of the other race.'”

That summer also meant a great deal to me. It was the first time in my life that I, a Jewish boy from New York City, had come in contact with what I came to think of as the “real” America, and it marked the emergence in me of an adolescent American self, Whitmanesque and romantic, that had as though been waiting to be born.

There were indeed many firsts for me that summer. My first really hard physical labor. My first American folk songs. My first jukeboxes in country diners. My first getting drunk – on local moonshine. My first drive-in movie, my first girlfriend – both in the back of a car. The first time I fired a gun.

It was a .30-caliber Winchester rifle. A hillbilly was showing me how to use it one afternoon, letting me shoot at passing birds, when suddenly he said, “Damn, I’m getting hungry. Let’s go get us some squirrels.”

He took me along with him, shot a few squirrels out of some trees, brought them home and skinned them, and had his wife cook them up in a stew that we all washed down with some moonshine. It was my first non-kosher meal.

I felt as though I were living something inside me that no good Jewish boy had ever lived before. Only years later, after I had talked to enough people and read enough books, did I realize how common an experience it was – and not just in America. Jewish boys and girls in Russia in the 1880s who went to the countryside with the Narodna Volya, Jewish boys and girls in Germany in the 1920s, tramping the forests in the Wandervoegel – who but a city-born-and-raised Jew ever falls so in love with his native country for the first time at the age of 16?

What I am thankful for to this day is that it was the America of the Tennessee mountains and Rosa Parks that I fell in love with – an America that went its own way, that wasn’t pasteurized or prepackaged, that headed for the woods to shoot squirrels rather than for the supermarket when it was hungry, and that was stubborn enough about its homegrown principles to drive the Klan back to Chattanooga and make an unheard-of scene on a bus. In terms of our own contemporary politics, those hillbillies would be identified today with the Christian Right and Rosa Parks with the liberal Left, but back then, they understood each other well enough. No one was going to push them around or tell them what to think. They knew very little about ideology and a lot about human fairness. I wonder if that country still exists.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.