Parting the Waters (6 page)

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.

R. D. Nesbitt's problems were more immediate. He needed to find a new pastor for Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, and to rescue himself from heavy criticism over his two previous choices, Arbouin and Johns. Some members held him responsible for seven consecutive years of pastoral controversy. Nesbitt could not help feeling jealous of William Beasley, his long-standing counterpart over at First Baptist Church, to which their common ancestors had migrated after the Civil War. Beasley had just gone through another smooth transition, installing Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy as the seventh pastor of “Brick-a-Day Church” in its history—since the exodus from the white church in 1867.

It was never so easy at Dexter. The deacons and members had always been fastidious about new preachers—letting weak candidates suffer humiliation, keeping the strong ones guessing—and now they were more determined than ever to be careful. They rejected preachers young and old for more than a year. From the standpoint of church image, they reestablished themselves as a congregation that was hardly desperate for a new preacher, and then, as usual, they delayed still longer, until Nesbitt and others feared the church seemed faction-ridden and indecisive. After all, no church was really a church without a preacher. So Nesbitt stepped up his scouting efforts.

One day in December 1953, about a year and a half after Johns's departure, Nesbitt had finished auditing the books of the Pilgrim Life Insurance Company's Atlanta district office and was talking with W. C. Peden, the local manager. Peden knew about the Vernon Johns ordeal, and was a good enough friend that Nesbitt began confiding in him about his troubled search for a new pastor, about how difficult it was to satisfy the Dexter members. What he needed, he said, was a more traditional pastor—an educated and trained one, to be sure, in the Dexter tradition, but someone more conventional than Johns in dress, manner, and behavior, someone less controversial, perhaps a younger and less established man who could not give the deacons such a battle.

Peden bolted upright with an idea. “Nesbitt, I think I have your man,” he said. He was thinking of a young man of impeccable habits, just coming out of the finest schools, the son of a wealthy, established pastor. Peden knew the family well enough to be aware that the young man was in Atlanta on vacation. So he arranged for Nesbitt to meet Martin Luther King, Jr.

The King whom Nesbitt sought out had been born into a most unusual family, which had risen from the anonymity of slavery to the top of Atlanta's Negro elite within the short span of three generations, attached to a church named Ebenezer. Their story was one of determination and romance, inspiring though not always pretty. One odd white thread ran through the whole of it: insofar as the Kings encountered anything better than obstruction in the white world, it could be traced more often than not to the influence of a most unlikely source, John D. Rockefeller.

Rockefeller's impact upon Negro Atlanta can be dated from a Sunday service in June 1882 at the Erie Baptist Church in Cleveland, Ohio, which he attended with his wife and in-laws. The church allowed two visiting women to make a plea from the pulpit in behalf of the Atlanta Female Baptist Seminary, a school for Negro girls they had started the year before. It was a pitiful tale. Nearly a hundred unschooled, poorly clothed girls were crammed into the basement of an Atlanta church, on a floor of dirt and mud, the only private classroom being the coal storage area. There were four strong-willed teachers, all of them white, college-educated spinsters from the North. As it turned out, the two who came to Cleveland had taught Rockefeller's wife back before the Civil War, when women were first pushing their way into schools and the abolitionist societies. Mrs. Rockefeller was fiercely proud of her former teachers. At the close of the service, the Atlanta visitors took up a collection for their school, netting $90.72. Rockefeller quietly came forward to pledge another $250. It was his first gift to Negro education.

Son of an itinerant salesman of quack medicines, Rockefeller had already come a long way from the fruit and vegetable merchant who had married Laura Spelman. He was rich, but he was not yet the colossus of the robber barons. Only he and a few partners knew that he had invented that very year the secret network of interlocking stock pledges—called a trust—through which he would levy a monopoly fee on the industrial development of the entire country. Rockefeller himself would scarcely change. He would always be reticent and quiet, yet ferocious—an Old Testament man so secure in his purpose that he could, like Jehovah, crush his rivals and their women and children without the slightest qualm. He would always teach Sunday school in the Baptist faith he had sought out on his own when a penniless boy. The Baptists were descended from the Anabaptists of sixteenth-century Germany, who had rebelled against Martin Luther for not going far enough in his break with the Catholic Church. They were the extreme democrats, hostile to complex theological doctrines and to any church practice that fostered the authority of the clergy. For this, Catholic and Protestant clergymen alike had considered them dangerous enough to burn. Rockefeller himself always loathed the weakness of the poor and the messy obstructions of democracy, but he would cling to the church of the common people.

He would cling also to the Spelmans. When he married Laura, he took her sister Lucy into his home, where she would live as a spinster for almost sixty years. When the sisters' father died in 1881, he took in their mother as well. From what little is known of their private life, it appears that the Spelmans as a group exercised considerable influence on Rockefeller outside the office. They were better educated than he, enthusiastic about far-flung causes, and independent of spirit. Laura Spelman's senior essay in high school was titled “I Can Paddle My Own Canoe.” John D. Rockefeller's classroom recitation at the same school was called “I'm Pleased Although I'm Sad.”

Two years after Rockefeller's gift to the Female Seminary, the mighty clan took the train all the way to Atlanta and walked in on the ceremonies celebrating the third anniversary of the humble school for Negro women. All the surprise guests, including young John junior, were called upon to speak, but only Mrs. Spelman offered an address of any length, recalling the days when her Cleveland home was a stop for Sojourner Truth and her runaway slaves on the Underground Railroad. The only meals she ever remembered cooking herself had been those served to young Negro runaways, she said proudly. Before the end of the ceremony, the trustees announced that henceforth the college would be called Spelman, after the Rockefeller in-laws. The news made the students burst into cheers, and the proper headmistress—always distressed by emotional displays of any kind, especially those common to Negro religious gatherings—rose to hush them. She called on the students to pledge solemnly that they would remain loyal to the school and never bring reproach upon its new name.

On his own and through Dr. Henry Morehouse of the Baptist Home Mission Society in New York, Rockefeller began buying up large tracts of land on Atlanta's West Side. He housed the Spelman students in an old Union Army barracks pending the completion in 1886 of Rockefeller Hall, the first brick building on the new Spelman campus. He gave adjacent lands to two Baptist colleges for Negro men, including a college named after Dr. Morehouse, who became president of the Spelman board. Soon there were a Packard Hall and a Giles Hall at Spelman, named for the two women who had come to Cleveland in search of funds, followed in 1900 by a Morehouse Hall. That same year, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., announced that his family would donate enough money to build four more structures along the tree-lined quad at Spelman. Still, it was only a beginning. The three schools remained land-rich, owning scores of undeveloped acres for future growth. At the time, no one realized that this strategic acquisition would make the twentieth-century demographics of Atlanta unique among American cities. As the town grew, these holdings caused white developers to avoid most of the southwest quadrant of the city, and the Negro educational complex provided a pool of professional people to expand outward into that territory along stratified class lines. As a result, Atlanta would not develop along the usual pattern of a Negro inner city surrounded by whites. The two races would move outward into their own suburbs.

Through all the early years, the three Spelman women visited the college frequently and kept up a steady correspondence with its officials. Their interest made Spelman the prettiest and richest of the Negro colleges in Atlanta, which nettled some officials at the schools for men. New presidents—always single women from New England—were known progressively less for their educational skills and more for their ties to the Rockefellers. All the headmistresses were strict disciplinarians who pushed their charges toward the twin extremities of Victorian refinement and Booker T. Washington—style practicality. Until the 1920s, Spelman required its students to rise at four thirty in the morning to wash and iron their clothes. The school always demanded proficiency in both homemaking and the classics. As late as the 1940s, students could not leave the campus without special permission, and they had to wear gloves and a hat even in the summer.

Male students crowded into ramshackle buildings at the two Baptist colleges next to the elegant Spelman campus. Although Atlanta University counted among its faculty one of the nation's finest sociologists, in W. E. B. Du Bois, it was Morehouse College that acquired a special aura of prestige. The “Morehouse man” became a social and civic model, and was conceded the advantage in courtship battles for the highly prized Spelman women. By the mid-1890s, each school had elevated its curriculum above the grade-school equivalencies of Reconstruction and was awarding full-fledged college degrees. Morehouse awarded its first three in 1897. Among its graduates the next year was a Rev. A. D. Williams, who married Jennie C. Parks of Spelman on October 29, 1899. Alberta, their only child who survived infancy, became Martin Luther King's mother.

 

Williams was a slave preacher's son who ran away from a country home to Atlanta as a small boy, became a preacher himself, and in 1894 had no better prospects than the pastorate of the eight-year-old Ebenezer Baptist Church, which had only thirteen members and a tiny, incomplete, heavily mortgaged building, against which the bank was threatening foreclosure.
*
Accepting the challenge, Reverend Williams mounted a series of revivals and other fund-raisers that paid off the mortgage. His recruits quickly pushed the membership above one hundred, so that the church began looking for a larger property. He attended college in his spare time, married Jennie Parks, and otherwise acquitted himself as a worthy Morehouse man. By 1900, Ebenezer was prosperous enough to swallow up a larger church by buying its building, which was threatened with foreclosure. A few years later, Reverend Williams himself was able to give his only child, Alberta, then a toddler of three, a Ricca & Son “upright grand piano” for her lessons.

His successes over the next dozen years went against the larger tides of the early progressive era, when Social Darwinism was rising to full strength in American politics. For race relations, this meant a rush backward, as whites in the South and North generally agreed that there were more important things to do in the world than to contend with each other over the status of the Negro, which was then fixed by science as lowly. By concerted agitation and widespread violence, Southern whites had revolted against the political structure of Reconstruction, first establishing that Negroes would not be allowed to dominate any legislative body by numerical majority. From there, a march by degrees eliminated Negroes from governing coalitions, then from the leverage of swing votes on issues that divided the whites (such as populism and the recurring proposals to ban the sale of alcohol), and finally from any significant exercise of the vote.

Northerners acquiesced in the renewed hegemony of Southern whites. The reigning idea was that racial quarrels, while accomplishing nothing since the Civil War, had interfered with business, diverted reform campaigns from more productive fields, and hindered America's new efforts to win a commanding position in the battle for global influence. Indeed, some liberals spoke of racism as the linchpin of the progressive movement, meaning that progress could be made only when white supremacy mooted the race question in politics. Old pro-abolitionist journals like the
Atlantic Monthly
published articles on “the universal supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon.” Best-selling books of the time included Charles Carroll's
The Negro, A Beast
, published in 1900 by the American Book and Bible House in St. Louis, and Robert W. Shufeldt's
The Negro, A Menace to American Civilization
, published in 1906. Thomas Dixon's
The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan
was published in 1905, and ten years later became
The Birth of a Nation
, the feature film whose stunning success established Hollywood and motion pictures as fixtures of American culture.

In Washington, the last Negro congressman was sent home to North Carolina in the spring of 1901. When President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House later that year, Democrats denounced the President on the front pages for nearly a week. Political professionals, reported
The New York Times
, faulted the President because he “did not reflect” before making the move. Even Roosevelt's defenders tended to see the controversy in the light of the new era. “The sun shines on the American citizen, down to the heathen Chinese,” a New Yorker wrote to the
Times
, “and God's glories cannot be hid from a poor outcast negro, whom God sent into the world for the wise and just to civilize.” That same year, manager John McGraw tried to circumvent the ban on Negro players in professional baseball by passing off his second baseman Charlie Grant as an Indian, but it didn't work.

The ugliest side of this mood visited the Williams neighborhood in 1906, in the form of the Atlanta race riot. With that year's gubernatorial primary coming up, and with the candidates pledging to complete the disfranchisement of Negro voters, newspapers accompanied the political stories with accounts of rapes and insults against white women. The relatively liberal Atlanta
Constitution
often had several of these on a single front page, culminating in one story headed “Negro Menaced Miss Orrie Bryan.” There was a formal portrait of Miss Bryan beneath a four-column photograph of her father calling on a large crowd to help him lynch one Luther Frazier, who allegedly had accosted, but not touched, Miss Bryan. White mobs killed nearly fifty Negroes over the next three days. The
Constitution
's banner headlines included “Governor Calls All Troops Out,” “Chased Negroes All the Night,” “Too Much Talk Was His Doom,” “Riot's End All Depends on Negroes,” “He Used a Dead Body to Ward Off Bullets,” and a sidebar from Delaware called “Whip with Nine Thongs Avenges White Women Assaulted by Negro.”

The 1906 riot, along with a similar one two years later in Abraham Lincoln's hometown of Springfield, Illinois, provoked Atlanta University's Du Bois to join with white Northern philanthropists to create the NAACP in 1909. Young Reverend Williams, whose accomplishments at the Ebenezer church were making him a community leader, became the first president of the Atlanta chapter. For him, the riot's aftermath brought an unexpected blessing in the flight of prominent white families from Victorian homes near the downtown riot area. He bought one of them at a bargain price. Its location on Auburn Avenue, only a few blocks from Atlanta's first cluster of Negro businesses, was a great advantage to him in church recruitment. Even better, there were sites available along that same street, between the house and the businesses, that would make an ideal permanent home for a new church. These considerations of price and location outweighed the fact that the two-story Queen Anne-style house—with its five bedrooms, wraparound porch, twelve-foot ceilings, and modern coal furnace in the basement—was far too big for the Williams family of three. By taking in boarders, they earned money toward the payments.