Becoming King (7 page)

The class distinctions between First Baptist and Dexter Avenue persisted. While First Baptist remained a largely working-class congregation, many black professionals filled the pews at Dexter. Ralph David Abernathy, a graduate of Alabama State College, became the pastor of First Baptist in 1951. Abernathy regularly delineated the distinctions between the two congregations, noting that, at First Baptist, “you may preach about Jesus from the pulpit. But at Dexter, they would prefer that you not mention his name. They would prefer you talk about Plato or Socrates or somebody like that. And if you just have to mention Jesus, they would like you to do it just as quietly and briefly as possible.” Abernathy’s comments refer to the refined, educated nature of Dexter, leading outsiders to view her congregants as more concerned with projecting an educated and refined image than with striving to assist poor African Americans in Montgomery.
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Dexter had a history of community involvement, however. Under the leadership of Robert Chapman Judkins, who served as pastor from 1905 to 1916, the congregation embraced the activism common during the Progressive Era. He founded a weekly newspaper for blacks in the area and established an annual lecture series that featured many high-profile speakers, including Booker T. Washington and Nannie Helen Burroughs. Under Judkins’s leadership, the congregation spoke out on issues of racial violence and lynching, suffrage for blacks and women, and Prohibition. During his tenure, women in the congregation were particularly active through the women’s missionary society, which urged women to pursue racial uplift through accommodationist strategies while also addressing significant health, education, and suffrage issues that affected all of Montgomery’s African American citizens. Challenged by two world wars, the Great Depression, a financial crunch, and some poor choices of pastors,
Dexter struggled for over thirty years after the end of Judkins’s ministry. They had high hopes, however, when they named Vernon Johns to fill their pulpit in 1948.
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Considered one of the most skilled black preachers in the nation, Johns impressed the people of Dexter immediately. His legendary reputation and renowned preaching ability thrilled the status-conscious congregation. Dexter deacon Robert D. Nesbitt Sr. called Johns “one of the greatest orators I have ever heard.” Johns was also known for his intelligence, evidenced by his ability to quote the great poets and Scripture from memory. Nesbitt, who had led the committee to hire Johns, claimed he “never once saw Dr. Johns read from the bible. He never needed to open a bible. He knew it from cover to cover. He could quote scripture unendingly.” When Dexter members traveled beyond Montgomery, they could proudly claim to have Vernon Johns as their pastor.
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Johns was more than a brilliant man or an accomplished orator. His pursuit of justice and his courageous acts of defiance in the face of the white elite helped unearth a passion for social action and protest in Montgomery. He was unafraid to couple tough rhetoric with confrontation. One day Johns decided to take a trip on a city bus. He paid his fare at the front of the bus and prepared to find a seat. The unwritten rule on Montgomery buses was that while blacks could board in front to pay their fare, they had to get back off and reenter through the rear door to find a seat. When the driver ordered Johns to follow this practice, the pastor balked. He demanded his money back and prepared to exit, preferring to walk instead. Before leaving, he called for everybody to exit the bus in protest of such dehumanizing treatment. The rest of the riders remained silent in their seats as Johns departed alone. This lack of action frustrated Johns, but it did not cause him to shrink from confrontations with white authorities.
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Johns shocked the entire city with his response to a report that police had nearly beaten a black man to death for a speeding violation. On the Dexter church billboard, located just a block from the State Capitol, Johns posted the title of his next sermon: “It’s Safe to Murder Negroes in Alabama.” Johns never shied away from proclaiming the obvious but unspoken truth regarding racial mores in Montgomery, and though many of Dexter’s black professionals feared repercussions, some also took pride in their pastor’s bold stands.
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Years later, many remembered the significant role Johns’s activism played in preparing the community for the coming civil rights movement. Although the recollections of Dexter members give Johns too much credit for the community’s later activism, they accurately emphasize his boldness. According to J. E. Pierce, a professor of political science at ASC and member of Dexter, Johns was “a very militant person, and he did not stand back.” Prior to Johns’s ministry, Pierce contended that the African American community was paralyzed by fear. While not all African Americans in Montgomery were afraid, those with the courage of Johns were few and far between. Pierce believed Johns planted seeds of resistance that bore fruit years later through the courageous days of the bus boycott. Dexter member Rufus Lewis concurred, noting that Johns “was a militant man in that anything that happened in the community, he would talk about it in the church in regards to denying Negroes their rights. He would preach about it.” Eugene Ligon, who was the owner and operator of a Montgomery diner called the Regal Café, claimed that Johns “was the focal point of things that concerned the black community. He had the power of speaking and persuasion to get people to listen to him; and they did.” A published history of Dexter described Johns’s tenure in glowing terms: “His dramatic teachings aroused not only the Dexter family, but thousands of citizens of Montgomery to the social transition which was taking place in the Southern way of life. Of him it was said ‘he kindled the flame of thought in the citizens of Montgomery.’ His sermons were relevant to social and contemporary problems but were highlighted by a spiritual base.” Although in retrospect the people of Dexter admired Johns, his willingness to rock the boat both within the church and in the broader community frightened many. A growing number of Dexter members began to view Johns as a threat to their dignity and even their livelihood.
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Dexter’s reputation was well established throughout the community. Fred Gray, who attended ASC from 1947 to 1951 and returned to Montgomery in 1954 as the city’s second black attorney, developed some strong impressions of the congregation. He believed Dexter “was not known as a church that would get involved in real community projects. It was more or less a church of the black middle class and had not been very active in any community activities that I can recall, and certainly
nothing that could be interpreted as being controversial because you had a lot of persons there who were in the education field.” Gray’s reflections correctly identified at least one of the factors influencing many in the congregation to evade controversy: their employment as educators. Not only were the city’s primary and secondary public schools under the authority of white officials, but Alabama State was largely funded through the State of Alabama, making its teachers vulnerable to white reprisals. Simply put, if they wanted to remain secure in their positions, teachers and professors knew to steer clear of controversial actions in the community.
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Though some feared possible repercussions under Johns’s leadership, he inspired others with his boldness. Among those influenced by Johns’s challenges was Dexter member Mary Fair Burks. In the early 1950s, Burks founded the most significant African American group working for social change in Montgomery during that time: the Women’s Political Council (WPC). Burks later claimed the WPC was “the outgrowth of scars I suffered as a result of racism as well as my desire to arouse black middle-class women to do something about the things they could change in segregated Montgomery.” One day while driving through Montgomery, Burks narrowly missed a white woman who darted into a crosswalk after the light had turned green. A police officer witnessed the close call and promptly arrested Burks. Following a brief time in jail, she “resolved to do something more about segregation besides waging my own personal war. My arrest convinced me that defiance alone would do little or nothing to remedy such situations. Only organized effort could do that.” The following Sunday, Johns’s sermon included one of his usual attacks on the complacency of the congregation’s members. Burks heeded the reproach by directly challenging black women in Montgomery to get involved, noting that their “outward indifference was a mask to protect their psyche and their sanity.”
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Burks immediately got to work developing the new organization. She personally contacted fifty women for an initial meeting, with the hope that a new group could address some of Montgomery’s most pressing racial problems. The WPC was not Montgomery’s first significant gathering of African American women seeking change in the city. In addition to very active women’s ministries at Dexter, the city had various black women’s clubs, including the Ten Times One Is Ten Club, an organization
founded in 1888 to support racial uplift and philanthropy. Anna Duncan established another prominent black women’s club in 1897. The Twentieth Century Club, which was later renamed the Anna M. Duncan Club, focused on supporting African American culture and engaging in philanthropic efforts. Soon after its founding, the group became a significant organizing force for the National Association of Colored Women. The organization’s club song includes the following lyrics: “Our race must be enlightened, we must earn our daily bread, we must give our time and talent and the hungry must be fed.” The song’s closing solidifies the uplift ideology that fueled the club in its early years: “Lifting others is our motto, We’re lifting as we climb.” The Women’s Political Council hoped to build on the rich history of the more established black women’s clubs in the community by adopting a more politically engaged approach.
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Burks’s vision for a new women’s organization struck a chord in the community, particularly given the refusal of Montgomery’s League of Women Voters to accept African American members. Forty women attended the inaugural meeting and most backed the idea with great enthusiasm. The newly formed organization settled on a three-pronged approach. First, they would pursue political action, including voter registration and evaluating candidates. Second, they would seek to remedy abuses on city buses and segregation in the city park system. Third, they would set their sights on education, including helping high school students better understand democracy and teaching literacy to adults so their language would be proficient enough to be able to register to vote.
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The formation of the WPC reveals that not all ASC professors cowered in fear. The organization’s most influential base was near the Alabama State campus, which served as the location for the group’s original chapter. The charter member Thelma Glass confirmed that it was “made up of persons like me who were in at the University and school teachers and others in the city and what not—and some outstanding religious leaders—women who had always shown interest in making things better.” Another early member was Mrs. Irene West, who was a graduate of Alabama State Normal School and the widow of a dentist. One of the older women involved in the organization, West brought them instant credibility with many in the city’s African American community. Local pastor Solomon Seay described West as “a fearless woman who was involved
in every movement that had as its goal the freedom of her race.” With the support of many of the city’s most prominent black women, the WPC was primed to play a critical role in local politics.
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No member of the WPC was more active than Jo Ann Robinson. She came to Montgomery to teach English at ASC, and her willingness to seek justice for blacks in the segregated South crystallized soon after. Following her first semester at ASC, Robinson prepared to visit her family in Ohio for Christmas. Although she owned a car, she elected to take a bus to the airport to avoid the hassle of long-term parking. Not used to riding public transportation, Robinson boarded the bus, paid her fare, and took an available seat near the front. The driver began instructing her to move almost at once, but she was so surprised by his words that she froze. Soon the driver was standing above her shouting, “Get up from there.” Unaware of the Jim Crow laws governing buses in the city and humiliated by the treatment she received from the driver, Robinson quickly exited and found other transportation to the airport. As she reflected on this dehumanizing episode, Robinson’s resolve to get involved in changing the climate in Montgomery grew. Her most significant role in the local struggle was as president of the WPC.
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When Robinson replaced Burks as head of the WPC, she brought a more activist and confrontational spirit to the organization. Although Robinson did not completely overhaul the WPC when she assumed the presidency, she did lead the organization into addressing the mistreatment of African American passengers on city buses and to confront the city commission. Robinson herself admits that by the early 1950s the WPC had become the “go-to” organization for Montgomery blacks who had issues or grievances they wanted the city to address. In 1953 alone, they received well over thirty citizen complaints against the bus company.
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As early as 1952, the WPC began raising concerns about the treatment of black passengers on city buses to the city commission. Their complaints included a seating arrangement that reserved the front ten seats for whites, whether the bus had any white riders or not. If whites boarded the bus and there were no available seats in the first ten rows, the black passengers in the seats closest to the front were frequently ordered by the driver to relinquish their seats. Adding to the frustration was the lack of
courtesy displayed by drivers, who were granted police powers while on duty. In a public hearing held by the city commission on the possibility of raising fares on the city bus lines, the WPC made their concerns known. Led by Mrs. Zolena J. Pierce (wife of the political science professor J. E. Pierce) and Mrs. Sadie Brooks (wife of Joseph Brooks, Trenholm’s assistant), they pleaded for the city to make immediate changes, but the only response they received was an agreement by the commission to take the WPC proposal under advisement. Leaders of the WPC met directly with city commissioners in November and December 1953. Again they raised concerns shared by many in the African American community, including frustrations with the buses, but to no avail. Despite a lack of early success, the WPC demonstrated a tireless commitment to challenge the racial status quo that would become more evident in the coming years. They were not alone.
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