Read Parting the Waters for Free Online

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 the 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