Black History in the Church · Vernon Johns
Vernon Napoleon Johns, minister, and civil rights activist, is considered the father of The Civil Rights Movement having laid the foundation upon which Martin Luther King Jr. and others would build. He was Dr. King's predecessor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama from 1947-1952 and a mentor of Ralph Abernathy, Wyatt Walker, and many others in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Johns was born on April 22, 1892, to Willie Johns, a farmer, and Baptist preacher, and Sallie Branch Price Johns. In addition to working on the family farm, Vernon Johns had a thirst for learning from a young age and was a voracious reader of western classical thought. He graduated from the Boydton Academic and Bible Institute before graduating from Virginia Theological Seminary and College in 1915. Johns attended the Oberlin Seminary, where he was highly respected by both his classmates and the faculty and was chosen to give the annual student oration. After graduating from Oberlin in 1918 he attended the University of Chicago's graduate school of theology.
After studying at the University of Chicago, Johns was called as a preacher to various congregations in Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. In 1926, he was the first African American to have his work published in the annual book Best Sermons. In 1947 Johns became the nineteenth pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He was an early proponent of civil rights in Montgomery and a community activist who urged his congregation to challenge the racial status quo. In response to the discrimination that African Americans faced on city buses, Johns once paid his bus fare and was directed to sit on the back of the bus, but refused to sit there and demanded his money back. This protest, according to some, helped set the stage for the December 1, 1955 protest by Rosa Parks.
In 1956, Johns succeeded John Tilley, executive director of Martin Luther King’s young Southern Christian Leadership Conference, as director of the Maryland Baptist Center in Baltimore. Just four years later in 1960, however, he was forced to resign from this position after publicly rebuking white Baptist preachers in Baltimore for their failure to speak out about race relations.
Vernon Johns died of a heart attack in Washington, D.C., on June 11, 1965, at age 73.
He has been called one of the greatest African-American preachers alongside other greats such as Mordecai Johnson and Howard Thurman. In his memoir of the Montgomery bus boycott, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., John's successor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, described Johns as “a brilliant preacher with a creative mind” and “a fearless man, [who] never allowed an injustice to come to his attention without speaking out against it.”
Submitted by: Brendan & Tedi Oberkircher