Parting the Waters Read Online Free PDF

the Yankee government itself, which was imposing a regimen of full-fledged race-mixing at the two huge air bases. The city was helpless to stop it, but its council could and did make sure that such practices did not spread into the city. 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. The ordinances governing the public bus system were tougher than those in other Southern cities, where Negroes sat in the back and whites in the front of the bus, coming together as the bus filled up. In Montgomery, the bus drivers were empowered to impose a “floating line” between the races as they considered necessary to keep a Negro man’s legs from coming too close to a white woman’s knees. 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. Some drivers were spiteful enough to drive away before the riders could reboard.
    For Vernon Johns, the practical import of the Montgomery atmosphere was that while he could say things to and about the whites that had never been said so publicly, his deeds were strictly circumscribed. His strident denunciations only brought him Negroes seeking redress that he could not provide. Of the Negro women who came to him with stories of being raped and beaten by white men, Johns was especially moved by the stories of two young girls. Each time, he drove the girl to the Tuskegee hospital in the dead of night for a medical examination, and each time he questioned the victim at length to satisfy himself that she was telling the truth. Each time, he went with the victim to file charges at the police station—in one case against a storekeeper who had broken into a home to rape the babysitter; in the other, against six white policemen. The first case actually went to trial, but 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. The second case went nowhere, as the local authorities refused to order policemen to stand in a lineup.
    Johns was no more effective in cases when the victim was himself. Once when he paid his fare on a bus and was told to get off for reboarding at the back, he refused and took a seat in the front. The driver refused to move the bus, whereupon Johns demanded and got his money back. The refund itself was unprecedented, but when Johns invited all the Negroes and whites on the bus to follow him off in protest, no one followed. One Dexter member on the bus remarked that he “should know better” than to try something like that. On another occasion, Johns walked into a white restaurant and ordered a sandwich and a drink to take home with him. His request immediately produced a tense silence in the entire restaurant, but there was something about his size and his fearless manner that caused the attendant to make the sandwich. Then he fixed the drink and, perhaps under pressure from the onlookers, poured it slowly onto the counter in front of the minister. Johns ordered another drink, saying, “There is something in me that doesn’t like being pushed around, and it’s starting to work.” With that, a gang of customers ran to their cars for guns and chased him out of the restaurant. “I pronounced the shortest blessing of my life over that sandwich,” he said later. “I said, ‘Goddam it.’”
    No pliable façade stretched over Johns’s brooding, irascible nature. Sometimes people wondered whether the inner Johns was vexed more by the human nature of the whites than the cosmic nature of