Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Just before the new year, Tuskegee Institute announced that it was ceasing publication of its annual Lynching Letter, which the college had issued every year since 1912. There had been no reported lynchings in the United States for the past two years, said the announcement, and only six since 1949. Henceforth, Tuskegee would report each year on Negro jobs and income figures instead of lynchings. When the news came out, King was in Atlanta, preparing to preach his trial sermon in Chattanooga on January 3. One of his father’s insurance friends called to make sure he would be at the house for a while, to meet someone about a church matter. King agreed, and was sitting over an afternoon plate of pork chops when Reverend King escorted R. D. Nesbitt into the kitchen. Nesbitt knew none of the Kings, nor they him. He was wearing an expensive business suit with wide dress suspenders and carrying a briefcase. Making his introductions, he advised King that he had been recommended as a possible new pastor for the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, of whose pulpit selection committee Nesbitt was chairman.

  Although King knew that Dexter was vacant because of the troubled departure of Vernon Johns, he had made no scouting effort toward the church—probably because he considered it too small. He thanked Nesbitt but put him off, saying that he had already promised to give his answer to First Baptist of Chattanooga when he visited there the next Sunday, which was long before he could possibly have a trial at Dexter.

  “Well, Brother King, I’m an old Baptist man,” said Nesbitt. “I’ve been in this before. If they want you, they will wait for you. You do not have to give them an answer Sunday when you go there, and I would love for you not to until you have preached to Dexter.”

  Reverend King’s unhappiness over the recruitment attempt moved him to interrupt. “You don’t want to go to Dexter, M.L.,” he said. “That’s a big nigger’s church.” He called off the names of several influential Dexter members who had reputations for making a preacher’s life miserable.

  Nesbitt, eyeing the senior King warily, replied that several of the members he mentioned were already dead, and that the church had a reputation for attracting some of the finest preachers in the country.

  King looked up from his pork chops, making his calculations. He was already committed to preach in Montgomery on the afternoon of January 17. To preach at Dexter that morning could do no harm. If he decided to take the job in Chattanooga before then, he could simply say so. He told Nesbitt that he could preach a trial sermon at Dexter on the morning of the seventeenth, if that was convenient.

  By Saturday, January sixteenth, all that had changed was King’s assessment of his prospects in Chattanooga. He had received fulsome praise but no concrete offer. He was waiting to hear further from the church, but his instincts told him his chances had already expired. His mind was on other possibilities, and on Tillich and Wieman.

  A phone call came to him at the house. “Young King,” rasped a scratchy voice, “this is Vernon Johns. I hear you’re going to preach at my former church in Montgomery tomorrow. I’m supposed to preach myself at First Baptist, but I’m sort of stranded here in Atlanta. You think I could hitch a ride over to Montgomery with you?”

  “It would be an honor, Dr. Johns,” King replied. “Where are you?”

  “I’m downtown at the bus station.”

  “Well, you wait right there, Dr. Johns. I’m leaving in a few minutes, and I’ll pick you up on the way out of town.”

  FOUR

  FIRST TROMBONE

  Take him, Lord—this morning—

  Wash him with hyssop inside and out,

  Hang him up and drain him dry of sin.

  Pin his ear to the wisdom post,

  And make his words sledge hammers of truth—

  Beating on the iron heart of sin.

  Lord God, this morning—

  Put his eye to the telescope of eternity,

  And let him look upon the paper walls of time.

  Lord, turpentine his imagination,

  Put perpetual motion in his arms,

  Fill him full of the dynamite of thy power,

  Anoint him all over with the oil of thy salvation,

  And set his tongue on fire.

  JAMES WELDON JOHNSON, GOD’S TROMBONES

  King collected the legendary old man and set out on the four-hour drive to Montgomery. It was a cold day, but the farmland of central Georgia and Alabama looked beautiful to both of them, especially to Johns the farmer. King tuned the radio to a Metropolitan Opera performance of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, one of his favorite operas. Arriving in Montgomery late in the afternoon, King dropped Johns off at the parsonage of the First Baptist Church, where he would be staying with the family of the pastor, Ralph Abernathy. King knew Abernathy only vaguely from Baptist conventions and from student gatherings in Atlanta, but he perceived immediately that Johns was no stranger to the Abernathys, who embraced and fussed over him like their long-lost uncle. Johns sniffed the air and drew himself up in delight. “Juanita, bless you,” he said to Abernathy’s wife. “I believe you are making the prophet’s dinner for me. Is it ready?”

  “Yes, Dr. Johns. I have it,” she replied.

  “Well then, young King, I thank you,” said Johns, bowing hastily to King. “I have something very important to do.” He proceeded directly to his customary seat at the dining table.

  The Abernathys pressed King to join them for the meal. “Well, thank you, but Dr. Brooks has prepared a meal for me at his house,” said King. Then he hesitated. The prophet’s dinner, having baked and simmered most of the day, had saturated the parsonage with the aroma of steak and onions, turnip greens and cornbread, and a dozen kindred delights. “I believe Mrs. Brooks has prepared something,” said King, less sure. “But, Lord, that food is smelling so good. Well, I believe I will join you, if you don’t mind.” Laughing, he was shown to a seat next to Johns.

  The two preachers praised Juanita Abernathy’s handiwork lavishly as they consumed it, and the gregarious Abernathy played host. “Brother King, I want to assure you of something,” he said. “Everybody at Dexter had been mad at me this week, because they think I invited Dr. Johns here just to conflict with your trial sermon. They’re all talking about how the promising young Ph.D. from Boston is coming to Dexter, and now Abernathy is trying to cut into his audience by putting Johns into First Baptist on the same Sunday. Well, it’s not true. In the first place, I didn’t know you were coming. In the second place, I didn’t invite Dr. Johns to preach. He sent me a letter saying he was coming through here on his way to New Orleans, and he would be pleased to preach for me. And I said I would be honored to have him in my pulpit, which I always am. Isn’t that right, Dr. Johns?”

  Johns said it was. He told King not to worry about the Johns loyalists who would worship at First Baptist instead of Dexter in the morning, because the “important” Dexter members, who he said were also the “mean” ones, would be in King’s audience, not Johns’s, and they were the ones King would have to win over. Johns said that he did not envy King. “If you take my church and a nigra named Randall is still there on the Board, you’d better be very careful,” he advised.

  This prompted Abernathy to introduce one of his favorite subjects—the differences between the Dexter and First Baptist congregations. “I describe it like this, Brother King,” he said grandly. “And I know Dr. Johns agrees, because I heard him say it first. At my church, you may talk about Jesus. You may preach about Jesus from the pulpit. But at Dexter, they would prefer that you not mention his name.”

  The preachers began to laugh. “They would prefer that you talk about Plato or Socrates or somebody like that,” Abernathy continued. “And if you just have to mention Jesus, they would like you to do it just as quietly and briefly as possible. Isn’t that right, Dr. Johns?”

  “That’s true,” said Johns, “but it doesn’t mean they know the first thing about Plato.”

  “That’s right,” said Abernathy. “Now in my pulpit, you can talk all you want to about Jesus, but you wil
l be the only one preaching. The congregation is not going to help you out. Very rarely will anyone say anything at First Baptist, any more than at Dexter. Ever since old Reverend Stokes ran the church, the preacher preaches and the congregation listens. If one of his guest preachers started whooping or hacking or zoning, Stokes would jump up and interrupt him: ‘Don’t take my people backward.’ That’s what he’d say. The same as Dexter. Isn’t that right, Dr. Johns?”

  Johns agreed, although he probably thought Abernathy, in his eagerness to portray the two churches as twin sisters of the aristocracy, exaggerated the refinement of his own congregation. Most Dexter members thought of First Baptist as a “shouting” congregation, pure and simple.

  Abernathy launched into a series of stories whose purpose was to flatter Johns and to provoke him to recitation. He told, for instance, of the ghosts at the two churches—of Dr. Adair’s murder of his wife and of the murder inside First Baptist during a power struggle after old D. V. Jemison had defeated the home pastor, Reverend Stokes, in elections of the National Baptist Convention. He told how Johns had scandalized Dexter by interrupting the wedding service of the daughter of Montgomery’s most prominent Negro physician to announce that he and Abernathy would be selling watermelons during the reception. He told the full story of Johns’s “It Is Safe to Murder Negroes” sermon, and recalled first hearing Johns about six years earlier, when he was a student at Alabama State College and Johns was the new pastor at Dexter. Even as a loyal member of First Baptist, and later as its pastor, Abernathy had made himself something of a protégé of Johns’s. They conducted revivals together. Among Johns’s cadre of street salesmen, Abernathy was the champion peddler of women’s lingerie, a distinction that regularly sparked merry yarns among the preachers.

  “Brother King,” said Abernathy, “I remember the first time I met you, too. And I bet you don’t remember. It was in the summer of 1950, when I was a student at Atlanta University. And your father had turned the pulpit over to you for the summer. So I went over to Ebenezer one Sunday to see if you could preach. You preached a fine sermon on the nature of faith. And when I went through the line after the service, you shook my hand and said, ‘Were you pleased with the sermon?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I want to thank you. You blessed my soul.’ Do you remember that?”

  King made some noncommittal remarks, and Abernathy rescued him quickly from his discomfort. “And do you know what?” he continued with a grin. “The very next day, the young lady I was going to escort to a play at Sisters Chapel called me on the phone to say that she was not feeling well and wouldn’t be able to go. Well, I didn’t know what to do. I already had the tickets, but I couldn’t find anybody else to go with me. So I went to the play by myself, and do you know what I saw? I saw that same young lady who told me she was sick walking into the play on the arm of the young preacher who had just blessed my soul. That was you, Brother King.”

  This story pleased King as much as it embarrassed him. “Well, those days are over, Brother Abernathy,” he said. He told them of Coretta, congratulated Abernathy on his marriage to Juanita, added further praise of the fine dinner he had just hastily consumed, and took his leave. It was still early in the evening. King made his way into what passed for the Negro business district in Montgomery: a gas station and a few carry-out stores on the fringe of the Alabama State campus. As he called the Brooks home from a pay phone in the Regal Café, he saw one of his old Morehouse friends walk through the door. It was Robert Williams, the tenor soloist, who had gone on to Juilliard and the Union Seminary School of Sacred Music before postponing his career indefinitely for lack of support funds. Now he was teaching at Alabama State. While catching up on the eight years since they had seen each other, Williams teased King about becoming a preacher. King replied that he really was not one yet, and asked whether he should consider coming to Dexter.

  Williams shook his head over the prospect. “I don’t know, Mike,” he replied with a grin. “They’ve got a lot of tough old buzzards in that church. But if anybody can pastor them, you can.” King thanked Williams for the confidence and then teased him for not joining Dexter or going to church regularly.

  After an evening at the Brooks home, King rose in the Dexter pulpit the next morning to deliver “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life,” his most polished composition. The setting fitted him well—a small, handsome, wooden church on the only remaining piece of Negro-owned real estate along the central thoroughfare of Montgomery, just down from the whitewashed state capitol—and it appeared that Vernon Johns drained off very little of his crowd. Dexter members turned out in good number to hear King, partly because his reputation had already fed rumors that he might be the one to fill the pulpit at last. They received his demeanor and his message enthusiastically, so much so that Robert Nesbitt led a small group of Dexter officials to call on King that very afternoon at the Brooks home for what amounted to preliminary negotiations.

  King told them that he was very impressed with Dexter but that he had a number of options and was taking things slowly. Nesbitt said pretty much the same thing to King. Among Dexter’s options, they all knew, was King’s best friend and old schoolmate Walter McCall, who had preached a highly successful trial sermon at Dexter some weeks earlier. The board of deacons had already favored McCall with a rare invitation to preach a second trial sermon. If successful again, McCall would be in line for the job. McCall wanted Dexter badly, as he had narrowly lost several other prestigious pulpits and was painfully bored as dean of men at a small college in Georgia. It was most awkward for King to enter the prolonged Dexter screening process in the midst of his friend’s promising effort, but he and Nesbitt smothered the tension with mannerliness and propriety.

  That evening, King returned to Abernathy’s for another supper. Johns had left for New Orleans on the afternoon train, and his absence freed Abernathy to speak more candidly about the painful controversy at Dexter. Johns, he said, had never dreamed that Dexter would accept any of his resignations, including the fifth one, and the sudden firing had confronted him with the unpleasant reality that he had nowhere to go. His wife had taken a teaching job in Virginia, but Johns simply refused to vacate the Dexter parsonage. He had holed up there for the better part of a year, blithely ignoring the orders of the Dexter board members who had engineered his dismissal. The dispute had grown nasty when the deacons disconnected the gas, electricity, and finally the water at the parsonage. Gamely holding out, Johns read by candlelight, carried his water, and kept warm by burning his huge inventory of old newspapers. All along, the public reality was that the esteemed Vernon Johns was residing at the parsonage until Dexter selected a new pastor, but the private reality was that Johns, cornered by old age and his own temperament, desperately resisted the board’s campaign to starve him out.

  “That Johns is a mess,” Abernathy concluded, laughing. Still, he knew enough of Johns and Dexter to offer King two bits of practical advice. First, it was better in the long run to be a pastor than a prophet. Brilliant, lonely, romantic, and impractical, the prophet was the highest form of the preacher without a church, but, according to preacher folklore, he inevitably wound up a tragic and rather ridiculous creature, like a king without a kingdom. Second, King should be mindful of the fact that Dexter never expected to keep preachers long, and should avoid the trap of trying to be the kind of preacher Dexter wanted—an intellectual in the pulpit who gave little attention to the organization of the church itself. To survive at Dexter, a preacher needed to pitch himself headlong into the committees, finances, and personalities—in short, into the guts of church control. Otherwise, the most eloquent preacher would be no match for the entrenched powers.

  Back in Boston, King put his career options up for discussion at the Dialectical Society. He was still considering Benjamin Mays’s offer to teach at Morehouse, but the little church in Montgomery grew larger in his mind. Dexter’s elite reputation appealed to the King whose graduate studies were bringing his enthusiasm for gilded pedantry to it
s youthful crest. (In a letter thanking the chaplain of Alabama State for allowing him to preach there, King wrote that he had enjoyed the “ontologically real” fellowship. The chaplain’s reply teased King for his rhetorical flourish.) Also, King was drawn to the challenge of succeeding a prophet like Vernon Johns. Primarily, this meant conquering the notorious baronies at Dexter. King was still very much his father’s son, and Reverend King made no attempt to hide his ideas of pastoral authority—once telling a conference of Baptist ministers how, when an Ebenezer member dared to stand up in church and ask to see a report of expenditures, he had silenced the member’s disloyalty by threatening to hit him over the head with a chair if he pursued such a question.

  Within a few weeks, events pushed King toward Dexter. Walter McCall went back to Montgomery for his second trial sermon, which he called “The Four Dimensions of a Complete Life.” This transparent embellishment of King’s own sermon reflected McCall’s keen competitive desire to top his friend, and perhaps that very focus injured his performance. In any case, his second trial was as much a failure as the first had been a success. Meeting afterward with Nesbitt, McCall was deeply distressed. “I can’t touch King,” he said with resignation. It was an uncomfortable day for everyone. Nesbitt and practically everyone else at Dexter liked McCall personally, but the church was clearly moving toward King because of his class and originality. McCall did not need to be told. He and King talked on the phone to reassure each other that they were still friends.

  About that time, King himself tasted rejection when the First Baptist Church of Chattanooga passed him over to call another minister. This fulfilled King’s premonition that his tryout had not gone well, but he could not figure out whether he had been too young, too intellectual, too political, or perhaps tainted by some obscure grudge traceable to his father or even his grandfather. Almost nothing was too paranoid or petty to influence pulpit selection committees, which preachers regarded as dangerous, fascinating mistresses. After consultations with his adviser, Melvin Watson, King moved cautiously toward Dexter, advising Nesbitt by phone that he was willing to preach a second trial sermon and to meet with the full board of deacons, if the church so desired, but that he was still considering other alternatives. In the ensuing negotiations by phone, Nesbitt made a bold move to pressure King for an early decision: he would break with church precedent by dispensing with further trials, and he offered a salary of $4,200 a year. In church parlance, this worked out to $100 for each first (or communion) Sunday of the month and about $75 for all other Sundays, and it would make King—straight out of school—the highest-paid Negro minister in Montgomery.