Parting the Waters Read Online Free PDF Page B

the universe, but they never had to guess about the content of his criticism. He was unsparing in his disdain for politeness, flattery, and other forms of ordinary protection for the fragile personality, believing them to be invitations to unreality. Humor was the only salve he allowed. One day on the streets of Montgomery, he ran into a prominent Dexter member named Rufus Lewis—a strapping man with a clear eye and the voice of authority, a funeral director known among Negroes as a football coach and pioneer in voter registration. Johns called to him and drew a crowd as he quizzed Lewis about the registration campaign. From Johns, this very attention was the supreme compliment. When he finished, he said, “Lewis, this is fine, but you don’t come to church. You better hope you don’t die while I’m here, because if you do you’ll have a hell of a funeral.” On a Sunday, all heads in the Dexter congregation turned as 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.
    Johns shocked his congregation more profoundly on other occasions. When Dr. R. T. Adair shot his wife to death on the front porch of their home, on suspicion of adultery, no Negro in town was surprised to hear that the eminent physician did not spend a night in jail. But when Adair next took his customary seat at Dexter, Johns sprang quickly to the pulpit. “There is a murderer in the house,” he announced to a stunned congregation. “God said, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Dr. Adair, you have committed a sin, and may God have mercy on your soul.” Johns stared down at Adair in solemn judgment, with one eye in a menacing twitch caused by a childhood kick from a mule. Then he sat down. Although his public rebuke carried no further sanction, it was a shockingly bold fulfillment of another special role of the Negro preacher: substitute judge and jury in place of disinterested white authorities.
    His most consistent pulpit campaign concerned the image and economic status of Montgomery Negroes. Johns excoriated Dexter members for their attachment to status and prestige above work. The Negro professional class in Montgomery was pitifully small: one dentist and three doctors for 50,000 people, as opposed to 43 dentists and 144 doctors for a roughly equivalent number of whites. More than half the employed Negroes were laborers and domestic workers. Even salesclerk was considered too good a job for Negroes, as whites outnumbered them 30 to 1 behind the counters. The backbone of the Negro middle class was its educators—the faculty at Alabama State and the public school teachers—but they were utterly dependent on the goodwill of the white politicians who paid their salaries. Under these oppressive conditions, Johns thundered from the pulpit, it was almost criminally shortsighted for educated Negroes to cling to titles and symbolic niches instead of building an economic base from which to deal more equally with whites as well as among themselves. He named the Alabama State business professors and challenged the congregation to name an actual business to which any of them had ever applied himself. Business was beneath them, Johns said derisively. And farming was too dirty. “If every Negro in the U.S.A. dropped dead today,” he declared, “it would not affect significantly any important business activity.” In order to make something worthwhile, they would have to take risks and immerse themselves among the common people, and this, he said, was the step they were least willing to take. He scolded