Johns cultivated a garden in the yard behind the parsonage on South Jackson Street and set many worshippers’ teeth on edge with a running description of the cultivation process. Then one Sunday, “just to show you what can be done on a tiny patch of land,” he pulled a huge cabbage and a plump onion from behind the pulpit and held them up for the congregation to inspect. “I left the roots on them just to prove they weren’t bought in the store,” he announced mischievously. Another Sunday he arrived for the service without shoelaces, probably because he had misplaced them, but when he noticed the stares of the congregation, Johns casually told them, “I’ll wear shoestrings when Negroes start making them.”
But it was the fish that first got him hauled before the board of deacons. One Sunday he had a load of fish iced down on the back of a truck, and the odor, together with the traditionally low estate of the fishmonger, created a rebellion within the church. Johns complied with a formal letter requesting his presence before the deacons. When he learned the nature of their complaint, he intimidated them with a fully annotated lecture on the importance of fish and fishermen to the Christian religion, world history, and nutrition. He paid them a backhanded compliment by remarking on the summons as a sign that he was finally getting the church’s attention. And he defended himself. “Gentlemen, I have a duty to provide you with the Gospel,” he said, “and I have a right to provide you with food. As far as I’m concerned, I will sell anything except whiskey and contraceptives. Besides, I get forty calls about fish for every one about religion.” When the deacons failed to endorse this license, Johns abruptly resigned and walked out the door. Nesbitt was detailed to seek him out and arrange a truce.
He succeeded, but the net result was to worsen positions all around. Nesbitt himself was further compromised. As a deacon known to be personally sympathetic to Johns, and as a member of the minority “non-teacher clique” that was less hostile toward the preacher, Nesbitt found himself under attack for failing to control Johns, who went on selling produce. Some members wanted to get rid of the pastor and had been heartened by his resignation. This stiffened their resistance to his wishes, which in turn made Johns pound on the big Bible in the pulpit. He never opened the pulpit Bibles during his tenure at Dexter, but he wore out at least three of them with his fists. On several occasions, the organist’s continued refusal to play anything but the most conservative hymns made Johns walk out of the church in anger. Nesbitt was obliged to chase him several blocks down Dexter Avenue, begging him to return to the service.
Had it not been for the fact that visitors were still coming to Montgomery from great distances to listen to Johns and to praise him afterward, church opinion might have solidified against him sooner. As it was, the membership was divided over an exasperating problem: Johns was both the highest and lowest, the most learned and most common, the most glorious reflection of their intellectual tastes and most obnoxious challenge to their dignity. He enjoyed reminding them that the same Moses who talked to God on Mount Sinai also rejected his status as the adopted grandson of Pharaoh to lead the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt. Like Moses, Johns received from his people a tumultuous vacillation between the extremes of veneration and rebellion. Unlike Moses, he worked no political miracles to sustain his leadership. Another resignation was tendered and refused in 1950.
Johns often loaded the milk and cheese into his car and disappeared, driving up to the family farm in Virginia to spend a few days behind the plow. The animals or the equipment frequently dealt him some minor injury—he was nearing sixty now, and had not been a real farmer for thirty years.
In the spring of 1951, he drove to Virginia again. This time it was a crisis: the Ku Klux Klan had burned a cross in his brother’s yard to intimidate the Johns family over a school strike. The trouble had begun on the morning of April 23, 1951, at Farmville’s R. R. Moton High School (named for Booker T. Washington’s aide and successor), when the school’s principal was informed by telephone that the police were about to arrest two of his students down at the bus station. Failing to recognize the call as a ruse, he had dashed off for town. Shortly thereafter, a note from the principal was delivered to each classroom, summoning the whole school to a general assembly. All 450 students and twenty-five teachers filed into the auditorium, and the buzz of gossip gave way to shocked silence the instant the stage curtain opened to reveal not the principal but a sixteen-year-old junior named Barbara Johns. She announced that this was a special student meeting to discuss the wretched conditions at the school. Then she invited the teachers to leave. By now it had dawned on the teachers that this was a dangerous, unauthorized situation running in the direction of what was known as juvenile delinquency. Some of them moved to take over the stage, whereupon Barbara Johns took her shoe off and rapped it sharply on a school bench. “I want you all out of here!” she shouted at the teachers, beckoning a small cadre of her supporters to remove them from the room.
This was Vernon Johns’s niece, the daughter of his brother Robert. She had lived with her uncle from time to time—taking piano lessons from Aunt Altona, coping with Uncle Vernon’s strict winter regimen in which all the children were required to play chess or read a book and to answer questions he might fire at them at any time on any subject. Barbara had rebelled by hiding a comic book between her knees; of all the Johns clan she was regarded as the one with a fiery temperament most like her uncle’s. Now she reminded her fellow students of the sorry history since 1947, when the county had built three temporary tar-paper shacks to house the overflow at the school—how the students had to sit in the shacks with coats on through the winter; how her history teacher, who doubled as the bus driver, was obliged to gather wood and start fires in the shacks in the mornings after driving a bus that was a hand-me-down from the white school and didn’t have much heat either, when it was running; how the county had been promising the Negro principal a new school for a long time but had discarded those promises like old New Year’s resolutions; and how, because the adult Negroes had been rebuffed in trying to correct these and a host of related injustices, it was time for the students to protest. Even if improvement came too late to benefit them, she said, it would benefit their little brothers and sisters. With that, she called for a “strike,” and the entire student body marched out of the school behind her.
Before the Negro adults had decided what to do, and before most of the local white people had noticed the controversy at all, Barbara Johns and her little band sent out appeals to NAACP lawyers, who, completely misreading the source of the initiative, agreed to come to Farmville for a meeting provided it was not with “the children.” When the lawyers told a mass gathering of one thousand Negroes that any battle would be dangerous and that the strike was illegal, it was the students who shouted that there were too many of them to fit in the jails. When the skeptical lawyers said that the NAACP could not sue for better Negro schools—only for completely integrated ones—the students paused but briefly over this dizzying prospect before shouting their approval. A few more days into the strike, an almost surreal tide swept through the entire Negro community, overwhelming the solid conservative leadership that had always held sway. A young preacher, who called himself a lifelong “disciple” of Vernon Johns, delivered a thunderous oration at a mass meeting. “Anybody who would not back these children after they stepped out on a limb is not a man,” he declared, and the assembly voted to proceed with an attack on segregation itself. The NAACP lawyers filed suit on May 23, 1951, one month after the students had walked out of school. Consolidated with four similar suits, it was destined to reach the U.S. Supreme Court as part of the historic Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.
Had the student strike begun ten or fifteen years later, Barbara Johns would have become something of a phenomenon in the public media. In that era, however, the case remained muffled in white consciousness, and the schoolchild origins of the lawsuit were lost as well on nearly all Negroes outside Prince Edward County. This was 1951. In Montgomery, Vernon Johns lear
ned of the controversy by letter, as the Johns households in Farmville still had no telephones. Television was an infant, and the very word “teenager” had only recently entered common use. The idea that non-adults of any race might play a leading role in political events had simply failed to register on anyone—except perhaps the Klansmen who burned a cross in the Johns yard one night, and even then people thought their target might not have been Barbara but her notorious firebrand uncle.
There was a tense scene in the kitchen when Vernon Johns arrived from Montgomery. His brother Robert, a farmer twenty years younger than he, who had always been meeker and more practical, made no secret of his fear. Nor did his wife. Both of them were consumed with worry over the safety of their headstrong daughter—now banished to her room during the summit conference—and with all the violence and risk, they did not welcome the fact that Uncle Vernon was so plainly “tickled” by the trouble in his native county. They asked him to take Barbara home with him to Montgomery until tempers calmed. Vernon agreed, and Robert begged him to be careful on the long trip. He had always believed that his older brother was a terrible driver, especially when he was quoting all that poetry.
Barbara Johns changed from student leader to student exile the very next morning, as her parents piled her into Uncle Vernon’s green Buick with the cheese and the milk and a very large watermelon, but without a word of explanation. It embarrassed her that her legendary uncle stopped on the side of the road to eat the watermelon, like the stereotypical Negro, and her resentment grew as he failed to say anything or ask a single question about her astonishing achievement. She speculated furiously about his silence. Perhaps he exhorted Negroes to stand up for themselves but really wanted to take all the risk himself. Perhaps he wanted to protect her as a family member, or as a young girl—though either would violate her image of him. She listened to the poetry and wondered whether she could ever comprehend what a person of such age and presence was really like. Finally, she decided that the most likely explanation for his silence was that he was proud of her but simply refused to compliment her, as he had refused to compliment people all his life, for fear of implying that he had ever expected less. This theory caused her pride to overtake her resentment, and she resolved never to mention her feats in Farmville to anyone in Montgomery.
The first thing Barbara Johns noticed was that pressures on her uncle were building. Rumors of plots and defections within the Dexter Avenue congregation arrived almost daily, and it was considered a bad sign that ever fewer churchwomen favored the pastor’s house with cooked dishes from their kitchens. Johns, still selling produce on the street, escalated his criticism of his members for being insulated in their own individual worlds. “You don’t even know each other’s names!” he would exclaim from the pulpit, and he called on the congregation to repeat the names of new members out loud. If they were so separated from each other even among their own class, he argued, how could they ever hope to pull together as a race? He became obsessed with this insulation because he believed Negroes went so far as to follow the lead of the white newspapers, objectifying Negroes—especially the victims of police violence—as a faceless category apart from them. This was a violent time in Alabama—an era when a judge and jury sentenced a Negro man to death for stealing $1.95 from a white woman (commuted later by Governor Folsom) and when police officers often meted out harsher justice informally, beyond the meager restraints of a court. One Montgomery case stuck in Johns’s mind: officers stopped a man for speeding and beat him half to death with a tire iron, while Negroes watched silently nearby.
Not long after this incident, Johns summoned his oldest daughter, Altona, and said gravely, “Come with me, Baby Dee. I’m going to preach a sermon.” His manner so frightened her that she said nothing as they walked out of the parsonage, across the capitol grounds, and down the hill to Dexter Avenue. Johns opened the glass case of the church bulletin board and handed the box of metal letters to his daughter. She spread the letters on the sidewalk. As was his habit, Johns thought for a moment and then directed her to post a new sermon title for the following Sunday: “It’s Safe to Murder Negroes in Montgomery.” She fumbled with the letters in the bright sunshine, and when it was done she followed her father back up the hill as wordlessly as she had come.
The phone began to ring that night. Hostile white callers threatened to burn the church down unless Johns removed the sign, and anxious Dexter members passed along tips about whites who were angry and church members who were upset. A police officer came to the church with a summons for Johns. He answered it, and was escorted to the circuit courthouse by a handful of policemen, including the chief. Charges of inciting to riot, slander of the police department, and disturbing the peace were mentioned, but nothing so formal came of the hearing, which amounted to an examination of Johns by the judge, the police chief, and a few influential citizens who had gathered there to take the measure of this bizarre Negro. Having asked why such a sign had been placed outside the church, the judge nodded slowly when Johns replied that he had placed it there to attract attention to his forthcoming sermon. When the judge suggested that he might do well to take it down, Johns replied with a brief lecture on the meaning of signs in history—how civil authorities had pressured men to take down their signs in ancient Greece and Egypt, in Rome, and in Europe during the Reformation. Then the judge asked why anyone would want to preach on so inflammatory a subject as murder between the races. “Because everywhere I go in the South the Negro is forced to choose between his hide and his soul,” Johns replied. “Mostly, he chooses his hide. I’m going to tell him that his hide is not worth it.” The judge soon dismissed Johns with a warning that he would bring trouble on himself if he persisted.
The Klan burned a cross on the church lawn that Saturday night, but it did not prevent a large crowd from assembling to hear what Johns would say. He went on at some length contrasting the murder of Negroes with the “lynching of Jesus,” making points at the expense of each set of killers and victims, and he concluded with a prediction that violence against Negroes would continue as long as Negroes “let it happen.” When he finished, the crowd that spilled into the street fairly hummed with mixed dissension and determination.
Unexpectedly, the white judge called Johns at home the next week to express his regret over the cross-burning. He wanted to discuss certain of the references in classical history that Johns had cited in his courtroom. Then he asked if there was anything he could do for Johns personally. Perhaps there was, said Johns: he had heard that the judge owned a copy of the memoirs of Union general William T. Sherman, which, if true, was a rare possession for a white Southerner, inasmuch as Sherman had burned much of Georgia and South Carolina, but in any case Johns would like to borrow the book. The judge laughed and said he would be happy to send it over. Then he asked to speak frankly, and confided that he had insisted the police allow Johns to deliver his sermon, arguing that it would cause less trouble to the community to let the man talk than to stop him. This remark incensed Johns, who invited the judge to attend his sermon the next Sunday. The judge sent Sherman’s memoirs but did not show up. Johns preached on the topic “When the Rapist Is White” and heard no more from the judge, but he returned the book.
These and other sermons further complicated the internal politics of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Some members who were upset by Johns’s pronouncements on race pretended to like them but worried out loud that his “antics” with the fish would undermine his endeavors. Some reconsidered the fish and would have happily bought some if only Johns would quit preaching such dangerous sermons, while others were proud of his courage in the race sermons and blamed the political timidity of other members for driving the preacher into odd pursuits like the fish. Johns, of course, saw his two campaigns as part of the same larger truth, but few others did. He resigned two more times early in 1952.
Both resignations related not to politics but to minor changes in marketing techniques. One came when Johns began storing his
Sunday wares in the church itself, for the convenience of his Dexter customers. From the pulpit, he would append to a tour de force sermon some remarks on his bargain prices and the quality of the produce in the basement. Sales increased, but a number of the members believed that Johns had crossed the threshold of defilement. In particular, some of the leading women of the church were incensed. This put Johns in serious trouble, as women made up the majority of church membership. They also provided nearly all the initiative for regular church functions, from music and meals to flowers, and the matriarchal tendencies in Negro society magnified their actual power far beyond their auxiliary listings in the church roster.
The second, decisive incident occurred when Johns and Rufus Lewis actually drove onto the campus of Alabama State College with a truckload of watermelons. In so doing, they violated the home territory of leading church members, opening them and their church to ridicule from colleagues who were riveted by the sight of the learned Vernon Johns selling watermelons on a campus that was the spearhead of Negro advancement and prestige in the area. The deacons told him so in a stormy meeting. Johns walked out again. Nesbitt later carried out his duty by informing him that the board of deacons had recommended that the church accept this latest resignation, his fifth. In a tense meeting, the Dexter congregation agreed by majority vote.
Vernon Johns left Montgomery in advance of his family, working his way north on a lecture tour of churches and Negro colleges. He was back home in Farmville, Virginia, by December 1952, when Thurgood Marshall and Spottswood Robinson, among other NAACP lawyers, rose in the Supreme Court to tell the Justices of school conditions in Johns’s native county. Barbara Johns and her uncle followed reports of the landmark Brown case, but neither they nor anyone else dreamed that as a result of it the white authorities in Farmville would close the entire public school system for five years, rather than compromise the practice of racial segregation. Long before it was over, Barbara Johns would begin carrying a permanent sense of guilt for stirring up the trouble on principle but then leaving others to bear the consequences of the movement. She thought it was a fault she shared with her uncle.
Parting the Waters Page 4