Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  But Johns loved Negro spirituals—the music developed during slavery—believing them to contain both a historical and a spiritual authenticity that belonged in the church. Unfortunately, Dexter did not allow spirituals, either. Johns objected that the church mistook the form of dignity for its essence and campaigned to change the Dexter hymnal, which at that time contained no musical scoring for the songs—only the words, like a book of poetry. Johns argued that the hymnal was an affectation that made singing painful to the ear. And certainly the hymnal should include the spirituals. He tried to schedule spirituals at numerous planning meetings, only to be told that it was “not done at Dexter.” Finally, Johns went to the extreme of inviting the congregation to sing a spiritual that was not on the printed order of service. He beckoned Edna King, the church organist, to begin. She, a true Dexter member, failed to follow her pastor’s wishes even under such pressure. Muscles twitched in his jaw and in hers, but she refused to play “Go Down, Moses,” “We’ll Soon Be Free,” “I Got Shoes,” or any other spiritual. In response, Johns would lecture the congregation on the important differences between dignity, pride, and vanity. In time, he would do worse.

  One of his first acts in Montgomery was to replace the tiny bulletin board atop the steps at the church entrance with a much larger one on the sidewalk facing Dexter Avenue. In 1949, all Montgomery read there that Vernon Johns would preach the following Sunday on the topic “Segregation After Death.” No doubt many whites cherished a private hope that the races would be separated in the afterlife, but the public notice also invited suspicion. Local leaders found it mildly unnerving that a Negro minister planned to address so volatile and worldly a topic as segregation in the first place, and the police chief guarded against the possibility of an incendiary trick by inviting the minister to explain himself down at the station.

  Johns told the chief and his men that the sermon would be open to everyone but that he would be happy to give a preview on the spot, in case they were too intimidated to attend a Negro church. Soon Johns was reciting his text from memory, beginning with Luke 16:19, which is Christ’s parable of the beggar Lazarus and the rich man Dives. Having ignored Lazarus all his sumptuous life, Dives was shocked to look up from hell to see him in heaven. He implored father Abraham to send Lazarus down to hell with some cool water to ease his torment, but Abraham replied that a “great gulf” was fixed between them. The great gulf, preached Johns, was segregation. It separated people and blinded them to their common humanity—so much so that Dives, even in the midst of his agony, did not think to speak directly to Lazarus or to recognize his virtues, but instead wanted Abraham to “send” Lazarus with water, still thinking of him as a servant. It was not money that sent Dives to hell, said Johns, since after all Dives was only a millionaire in hell talking to Abraham, a multimillionaire in heaven. Rather Dives was condemned by his insistence on segregation, which he perversely maintained even after death. After he preached on this theme for a few minutes, Johns later boasted, there was “not a dry eye in the station house.” But his sermon that Sunday brought mixed comfort at best to his own congregation, as he made it clear that it was not only whites who sought to segregate themselves. “What preacher wouldn’t love to have a church full of members like Dives?” he asked, going on to describe Dives’s “purple raiment” in graphic terms that made it remarkably like the fine clothes assembled before him. Having said bluntly that the social attitudes of most white churchgoers rendered them no more Christian than “sun worshippers,” he said practically the same thing of the “spinksterinkdum Negroes” who paraded in the “fashion show” at Dexter. “Spinksterinkdum” was a term of his own invention, which he steadfastly refused to define, but most of his listeners discerned that it had to do with a pronounced rigidity among the elite.

  Johns directed harsh pronouncements to both whites and Negroes, but the whites were cushioned initially by post-World War II attitudes. Their superior status was relatively secure then; the notion of drastic change for the benefit of Negroes struck the average American as about on a par with creating a world government, which is to say visionary, slightly dangerous, and extremely remote. The race issue was little more than a human interest story in the mass public consciousness. This was Jackie Robinson’s second season with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Satchel Paige made his Major League debut that summer at an age somewhere between thirty-nine and forty-eight, treating 78,000 Cleveland fans to his famous “hesitation pitch,” the legality of which was hotly debated. In the biggest race story of the year, Southern politicians walked out of the Democratic Convention and ran a presidential ticket of their own, but even that was treated as something of a menacing joke, as evidenced by the fact that the Southerners accepted their “Dixiecrat” nickname, and newspaper editors across the South expressed considerable chagrin over the spectacle.

  In Montgomery, the only racial development that pierced through symbolism was President Truman’s executive order of July 26, 1948, ending segregation in the armed forces. This touched Montgomery in a sore spot. The regional economy was heavily dependent on two Air Force bases, Maxwell and Gunther, which poured nearly $50 million a year into the area. Though most citizens were loath to admit it, this federal money had revived a local economy that had been failing since the glory days before the Civil War. There was even a touch of romance to it. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda had found each other in Montgomery, drawn there by the novel flying machines. During the 1930s, Claire Chennault and Billy McDonald used to fly over the city in two airplanes with the wings tied together by silken cords that never broke—to demonstrate the precision of the aircraft to skeptical military chieftains. After World War II, Air Force spending brought back enough prosperity for old Montgomery families to recall the days when Montgomery County itself stretched through most of central Alabama and when its aristocracy was the envy of the state. Reestablished Montgomery still looked down on a steel town like Birmingham as a crude, belching monster, and on pretentious old cotton towns like Selma (just downstream on the Alabama River) as impostors. (A common graffito in the bathrooms of Montgomery high schools read, “Flush the toilet: Selma needs the water.”)

  Truman’s order reminded everyone that the source of Montgomery’s new identity was the Yankee government itself, which was imposing a regimen of full-fledged race-mixing at the two huge air bases. The city was helpless to stop it, but its council could and did make sure that such practices did not spread into the city. It was against the law in Montgomery for a white person and a Negro to play checkers on public property, nor could they ride together in a taxi. The ordinances governing the public bus system were tougher than those in other Southern cities, where Negroes sat in the back and whites in the front of the bus, coming together as the bus filled up. In Montgomery, the bus drivers were empowered to impose a “floating line” between the races as they considered necessary to keep a Negro man’s legs from coming too close to a white woman’s knees. In practice, this meant that the driver would order Negroes to vacate an entire row on the bus to make room for one white person, or order them to stand up even when there were vacant seats on the bus. Negroes could not walk through the white section of the bus to their own seats, but were instead required to pay their fares at the front and then leave the bus to enter through the rear door. Some drivers were spiteful enough to drive away before the riders could reboard.

  For Vernon Johns, the practical import of the Montgomery atmosphere was that while he could say things to and about the whites that had never been said so publicly, his deeds were strictly circumscribed. His strident denunciations only brought him Negroes seeking redress that he could not provide. Of the Negro women who came to him with stories of being raped and beaten by white men, Johns was especially moved by the stories of two young girls. Each time, he drove the girl to the Tuskegee hospital in the dead of night for a medical examination, and each time he questioned the victim at length to satisfy himself that she was telling the truth. Each time, he went with the victim to
file charges at the police station—in one case against a storekeeper who had broken into a home to rape the babysitter; in the other, against six white policemen. The first case actually went to trial, but the storekeeper was acquitted on the testimony of his wife, who said she was pregnant and had therefore given her husband permission to seek sex outside the home. The second case went nowhere, as the local authorities refused to order policemen to stand in a lineup.

  Johns was no more effective in cases when the victim was himself. Once when he paid his fare on a bus and was told to get off for reboarding at the back, he refused and took a seat in the front. The driver refused to move the bus, whereupon Johns demanded and got his money back. The refund itself was unprecedented, but when Johns invited all the Negroes and whites on the bus to follow him off in protest, no one followed. One Dexter member on the bus remarked that he “should know better” than to try something like that. On another occasion, Johns walked into a white restaurant and ordered a sandwich and a drink to take home with him. His request immediately produced a tense silence in the entire restaurant, but there was something about his size and his fearless manner that caused the attendant to make the sandwich. Then he fixed the drink and, perhaps under pressure from the onlookers, poured it slowly onto the counter in front of the minister. Johns ordered another drink, saying, “There is something in me that doesn’t like being pushed around, and it’s starting to work.” With that, a gang of customers ran to their cars for guns and chased him out of the restaurant. “I pronounced the shortest blessing of my life over that sandwich,” he said later. “I said, ‘Goddam it.’”

  No pliable façade stretched over Johns’s brooding, irascible nature. Sometimes people wondered whether the inner Johns was vexed more by the human nature of the whites than the cosmic nature of the universe, but they never had to guess about the content of his criticism. He was unsparing in his disdain for politeness, flattery, and other forms of ordinary protection for the fragile personality, believing them to be invitations to unreality. Humor was the only salve he allowed. One day on the streets of Montgomery, he ran into a prominent Dexter member named Rufus Lewis—a strapping man with a clear eye and the voice of authority, a funeral director known among Negroes as a football coach and pioneer in voter registration. Johns called to him and drew a crowd as he quizzed Lewis about the registration campaign. From Johns, this very attention was the supreme compliment. When he finished, he said, “Lewis, this is fine, but you don’t come to church. You better hope you don’t die while I’m here, because if you do you’ll have a hell of a funeral.” On a Sunday, all heads in the Dexter congregation turned as Dr. H. Councill Trenholm—president of Alabama State College, the largest employer of Montgomery Negroes generally and of Dexter members in particular—eased himself into a pew. “I want to pause here in the service,” Johns intoned from the pulpit, “until Dr. Trenholm can get himself seated here on his semi-annual visit to the church.” Trenholm never returned to Dexter while Johns was in Montgomery. Rufus Lewis did, but not very often.

  Johns shocked his congregation more profoundly on other occasions. When Dr. R. T. Adair shot his wife to death on the front porch of their home, on suspicion of adultery, no Negro in town was surprised to hear that the eminent physician did not spend a night in jail. But when Adair next took his customary seat at Dexter, Johns sprang quickly to the pulpit. “There is a murderer in the house,” he announced to a stunned congregation. “God said, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Dr. Adair, you have committed a sin, and may God have mercy on your soul.” Johns stared down at Adair in solemn judgment, with one eye in a menacing twitch caused by a childhood kick from a mule. Then he sat down. Although his public rebuke carried no further sanction, it was a shockingly bold fulfillment of another special role of the Negro preacher: substitute judge and jury in place of disinterested white authorities.

  His most consistent pulpit campaign concerned the image and economic status of Montgomery Negroes. Johns excoriated Dexter members for their attachment to status and prestige above work. The Negro professional class in Montgomery was pitifully small: one dentist and three doctors for 50,000 people, as opposed to 43 dentists and 144 doctors for a roughly equivalent number of whites. More than half the employed Negroes were laborers and domestic workers. Even salesclerk was considered too good a job for Negroes, as whites outnumbered them 30 to 1 behind the counters. The backbone of the Negro middle class was its educators—the faculty at Alabama State and the public school teachers—but they were utterly dependent on the goodwill of the white politicians who paid their salaries. Under these oppressive conditions, Johns thundered from the pulpit, it was almost criminally shortsighted for educated Negroes to cling to titles and symbolic niches instead of building an economic base from which to deal more equally with whites as well as among themselves. He named the Alabama State business professors and challenged the congregation to name an actual business to which any of them had ever applied himself. Business was beneath them, Johns said derisively. And farming was too dirty. “If every Negro in the U.S.A. dropped dead today,” he declared, “it would not affect significantly any important business activity.” In order to make something worthwhile, they would have to take risks and immerse themselves among the common people, and this, he said, was the step they were least willing to take. He scolded his listeners for being eager to sell off their few productive assets in exchange for articles of prestige. “You say you want a definition of perpetual motion?” he asked. “Give the average Negro a Cadillac and tell him to park it on some land he owns.”

  Combined with his political views, these doctrines made Johns a kind of hybrid of the schools of thought that had been contending among Negroes since the Civil War. Like Booker T. Washington, he espoused hard, humbling work in basic trades, as opposed to W. E. B. Du Bois’s “talented tenth” strategy, which called first for an assault on the leadership classes by an educated Negro elite. Like Du Bois and Frederick Douglass, Johns advocated a simultaneous campaign for full political rights. He rejected as demeaning and foolhardy Washington’s accommodations strategy of offering to trade political rights for economic ones. Like Du Bois, he believed fiercely in the highest standards of scholarship and never suffered fools at all, much less gladly. But like Washington, he believed that the dignity and security of a people derived from its masses, and that without stability and character in the masses an elite could live above them only in fantasy.

  These were words—words to argue and fill books with, words to deliver from pulpits, but words nevertheless—and the most acidic of lectures alone could never have brought Johns and R. D. Nesbitt to grief at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. After all, churchgoers were accustomed to being called sinners of one sort or another. Although Johns prided himself on sermons that created an anger the members had to take out the door, rather than guilt that resolved itself in soggy contrition right there in the service, he knew that even anger dissipated in time. The members could have remembered what they wanted to remember, his poetry and eloquence, had it not been for the minister’s shocking business enterprises. He did something that esteemed preachers like Mordecai Johnson and Howard Thurman would never do, any more than they would preach a sermon like Johns’s classic “Mud Is Basic.” Du Bois would never have dreamed of doing it—not in his Vandyke beard and his spats, with his gold-topped cane. And even Booker T. Washington, with his chauffeurs and secretaries and attendants, never gave the slightest indication that he himself intended to cast his bucket down into industrial work. But Vernon Johns would preach and scold and cajole about the importance of practical work, and then he would go right outside the church and sell farm produce on the street there, under the brow of the state capitol, with Dexter men milling about in their best suits and the women in their best hats, and with the white Methodists spilling out of the church down the street. Johns peddled hams and onions, potatoes and watermelons, cabbages and sausage. Many Dexter members were mortified by the sight of their learned pastor wearing his suit on th
e back of a pickup. Among the milder reactions was that it “cheapened” the church.

  All this spurred Johns to sharper criticism. The congregation liked to eat good food and buy consumer goods, so why should they dislike associating with those who provided them? He accused them of persisting in the white man’s view of slavery—that labor was demeaning—when Negroes should know that it was oppression, not labor, that demeaned them. On the contrary, the desire to avoid labor had enticed whites into the corruption of slavery.

  Johns’s three daughters soon noticed that the Montgomery atmosphere and the congregation’s resistance had put a harder edge on his arguments and soliloquies, and he seemed to lose himself less often in the sheer pleasure of his musings. This pushed his temper closer to the surface, even within the family, as was frightfully demonstrated one night at home when he kept calling on his wife to support him in one of his observations. Mrs. Johns, who took delight in her husband’s crusades but was as serene as he was volatile, was playing the piano. She decided to let him know that he was being repetitious by ignoring the third or fourth invitation to discuss the same point. This annoyed Johns, who began to shout, and Mrs. Johns showed her displeasure over the shouting by continuing to ignore him. Johns went berserk, shouting louder and louder, and finally, to the horror of his niece and daughters, ripping the sleeve off his wife’s dress in a rage. The children would never forget how Mrs. Johns kept playing the Bach, never missing a note, saying nothing. Vernon Johns held the torn piece of dress in his hand for a few seconds, then dropped it and walked silently out the door. He returned a few minutes later with some steaks and a bubbly new mood, as though the fit had never occurred.