Parting the Waters Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 he preached on this theme for a few minutes, Johns later boasted, there was “not a dry eye in the station house.” But his sermon that Sunday brought mixed comfort at best to his own congregation, as he made it clear that it was not only whites who sought to segregate themselves. “What preacher wouldn’t love to have a church full of members like Dives?” he asked, going on to describe Dives’s “purple raiment” in graphic terms that made it remarkably like the fine clothes assembled before him. Having said bluntly that the social attitudes of most white churchgoers rendered them no more Christian than “sun worshippers,” he said practically the same thing of the “spinksterinkdum Negroes” who paraded in the “fashion show” at Dexter. “Spinksterinkdum” was a term of his own invention, which he steadfastly refused to define, but most of his listeners discerned that it had to do with a pronounced rigidity among the elite.
    Johns directed harsh pronouncements to both whites and Negroes, but the whites were cushioned initially by post-World War II attitudes. Their superior status was relatively secure then; the notion of drastic change for the benefit of Negroes struck the average American as about on a par with creating a world government, which is to say visionary, slightly dangerous, and extremely remote. The race issue was little more than a human interest story in the mass public consciousness. This was Jackie Robinson’s second season with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Satchel Paige made his Major League debut that summer at an age somewhere between thirty-nine and forty-eight, treating 78,000 Cleveland fans to his famous “hesitation pitch,” the legality of which was hotly debated. 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.
    In Montgomery, the only racial development that pierced through symbolism was President Truman’s executive order of July 26, 1948, ending segregation in the armed forces. This touched Montgomery in a sore spot. The regional economy was heavily dependent on two Air Force bases, Maxwell and Gunther, which poured nearly $50 million a year into the area. 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 was even a touch of romance to it. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda had found each other in Montgomery, drawn there by the novel flying machines. During the 1930s, Claire Chennault and Billy McDonald used to fly over the city in two airplanes with the wings tied together by silken cords that never broke—to demonstrate the precision of the aircraft to skeptical military chieftains. After World War II, Air Force spending brought back enough prosperity for old Montgomery families to recall the days when Montgomery County itself stretched through most of central Alabama and when its aristocracy was the envy of the state. Reestablished Montgomery still looked down on a steel town like Birmingham as a crude, belching monster, and on pretentious old cotton towns like Selma (just downstream on the Alabama River) as impostors. (A common graffito in the bathrooms of Montgomery high schools read, “Flush the toilet: Selma needs the water.”)
    Truman’s order reminded everyone that the source of Montgomery’s new identity was