Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63

by Taylor Branch

truth requires a maximum effort to see through the eyes of strangers, foreigners, and enemies.

hope to sustain my thesis that King’s life is the best and most important metaphor for American history in the watershed postwar years.

On another matter of housekeeping, I regret having to leave the record on Stanley Levison slightly ajar. Since 1984, I have sought the original FBI documents pertaining to the Bureau’s steadfast contention that King’s closest white friend was a top-level Communist agent. On this charge rested the FBI’s King wiretaps and many collateral harassments against the civil rights movement. In opposing my request, the U.S. Department of Justice has argued in federal court that the release of thirty- to thirty-five-year-old informant reports on Levison would damage the national security even now. Almost certainly there is bureaucratic defensiveness at work here—and also, I suspect, some petty spy rivalry with the CIA—but so far the logic of secrecy has been allowed to reach levels of royalist absurdity.

This stubborn wisp of mystery allowed President Reagan, even while honoring King with a national holiday, to state publicly that a charge of fundamental disloyalty hangs over him.

Nathan Ashby became the first minister of an independent Negro Baptist church in Montgomery, Alabama.

based on Andrew Johnson’s friendliness toward prominent ex-Confederates, openly repudiated the Fourteenth Amendment’s recognition of Negro citizenship rights, only to have a Union brigadier walk into the Montgomery capitol to declare that he was superseding the state government again until its officials saw fit to reconsider. White spirits fell; Negro spirits soared.

The Negro church, legal in some respects before the Negro family, became more solvent than the local undertaker.

The Baptists had no such hierarchy at all, nor any educational requirements for the pulpit, and this fact had contributed mightily to the spread of the denomination among unlettered whites and Negroes alike.

ministry was the only white-collar trade open to Negroes during slavery—when it was a crime in all the Southern states to teach Negroes to read or allow them to engage in any business requiring the slightest literacy—preachers

Religious oratory became the only safe marketable skill, and a reputation for oratory substituted for dipl...

These and a hundred extra functions further enhanced the importance of the minister, creating opportunities and pressures that forged what amounted to a new creature and caused the learned skeptic W. E. B. Du Bois to declare at the turn of the twentieth century that “the preacher is the most unique personality developed by the Negro on American soil.”

Nearly a dozen preachers came and went in the first decade. By contrast, the First Baptist Church (Colored) remained a “preacher’s church,” with only three pastors during its first fifty-seven years of existence.

Stokes made First Baptist the largest Negro church in the United States until the great migration of 1917 created larger congregations in Chicago.

wife of one of the most brilliant scholar-preachers of the modern age, Vernon Johns.

For Nesbitt, the responsible deacon, Johns became the most exquisite agony he had ever known in the church.

Vernon Johns was merely another invisible man to nearly all whites, but to the invisible people themselves he was the stuff of legend.

The Negro children handed down stories about how Price became one of the first inmates at the new Virginia State Penitentiary for killing another white man he caught

trying to rape his slave mistress.

Vernon Johns finished his youth as the stepson of his uncle, and grandson of a slave who killed his master and of a master who killed for his slave. Only

in the Bible did he find open discussion of such a tangle of sex, family, slavery, and violence.

Like most Negro parents, Sallie Johns and her husbands invested what meager educational funds they had in their eldest daughter, keeping Vernon on the farm.

Hutchins, a liberal Midwesterner in the abolitionist tradition, found himself pushed beyond the limits of tolerance, and he remarked that no country Negro could make the grades Johns was making without cheating. When Johns got word of the insult, he promptly sought out Hutchins on the campus, called him a son of a bitch, and punched him in the mouth. (The two later became good friends and remained so throughout Hutchins’ long tenure as president of the University of Chicago.)

Whereas Johnson and Thurman were polished men who hailed from the Negro aristocracy and did the things respected scholars are supposed to do—publish regularly in the leading journals, retire into positions of responsible administration, and leave behind an orderly correspondence with other luminaries in the field—Johns was a maverick who seldom wrote anything down and who thought nothing of walking into distinguished assemblies wearing mismatched socks, with farm mud on his shoes.

Montgomery were to find, however, that there was a biting side to Johns’s iconoclasm.

even any responsive “Amens” during the sermon. At their most demonstrative. the members might allow a quiet murmur of approval to run through them. This restraint pleased Johns.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

“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.

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.

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.

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.

One Dexter member on the bus remarked that he “should know better” than to try something like that.

“I pronounced the shortest blessing of my life over that sandwich,” he said later. “I said, ‘Goddam it.’”

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.

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.

it was a shockingly bold fulfillment of another special role of the Negro preacher: substitute judge and jury in place of disinterested white authorities.

one dentist and three doctors for 50,000 people, as opposed to 43 dentists and 144 doctors for a roughly equivalent number of whites.

Even salesclerk was considered too good a job for Negroes, as whites outnumbered them 30 to 1 behind the counters.

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.

eloquence, had it not been for the minister’s shocking business enterprises.

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.

Many Dexter members were mortified by the sight of their learned pastor wearing his suit on the back of a pickup. Among the milder reactions was that it “cheapened” the church.

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.

Johns casually told them, “I’ll wear shoestrings when Negroes start making them.”