Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch Read Free Book Online

decided what to do, and before most of the local white people had noticed the controversy at all, Barbara Johns and her little band sent out appeals to NAACP lawyers, who, completely misreading the source of the initiative, agreed to come to Farmville for a meeting provided it was not with “the children.” When the lawyers told a mass gathering of one thousand Negroes that any battle would be dangerous and that the strike was illegal, it was the students who shouted that there were too many of them to fit in the jails. When the skeptical lawyers said that the NAACP could not sue for better Negro schools—only for completely integrated ones—the students paused but briefly over this dizzying prospect before shouting their approval. A few more days into the strike, an almost surreal tide swept through the entire Negro community, overwhelming the solid conservative leadership that had always held sway. A young preacher, who called himself a lifelong “disciple” of Vernon Johns, delivered a thunderous oration at a mass meeting. “Anybody who would not back these children after they stepped out on a limb is not a man,” he declared, and the assembly voted to proceed with an attack on segregation itself. The NAACP lawyers filed suit on May 23, 1951, one month after the students had walked out of school. Consolidated with four similar suits, it was destined to reach the U.S. Supreme Court as part of the historic Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka .
    Had the student strike begun ten or fifteen years later, Barbara Johns would have become something of a phenomenon in the public media. In that era, however, the case remained muffled in white consciousness, and the schoolchild origins of the lawsuit were lost as well on nearly all Negroes outside Prince Edward County. This was 1951. In Montgomery, Vernon Johns learned of the controversy by letter, as the Johns households in Farmville still had no telephones. Television was an infant, and the very word “teenager” had only recently entered common use. The idea that non-adults of any race might play a leading role in political events had simply failed to register on anyone—except perhaps the Klansmen who burned a cross in the Johns yard one night, and even then people thought their target might not have been Barbara but her notorious firebrand uncle.
    There was a tense scene in the kitchen when Vernon Johns arrived from Montgomery. His brother Robert, a farmer twenty years younger than he, who had always been meeker and more practical, made no secret of his fear. Nor did his wife. Both of them were consumed with worry over the safety of their headstrong daughter—now banished to her room during the summit conference—and with all the violence and risk, they did not welcome the fact that Uncle Vernon was so plainly “tickled” by the trouble in his native county. They asked him to take Barbara home with him to Montgomery until tempers calmed. Vernon agreed, and Robert begged him to be careful on the long trip. He had always believed that his older brother was a terrible driver, especially when he was quoting all that poetry.
    Barbara Johns changed from student leader to student exile the very next morning, as her parents piled her into Uncle Vernon’s green Buick with the cheese and the milk and a very large watermelon, but without a word of explanation. It embarrassed her that her legendary uncle stopped on the side of the road to eat the watermelon, like the stereotypical Negro, and her resentment grew as he failed to say anything or ask a single question about her astonishing achievement. She speculated furiously about his silence. Perhaps he exhorted Negroes to stand up for themselves but really wanted to take all the risk himself. Perhaps he wanted to protect her as a family member, or as a young girl—though either would violate her image of him. She listened to the poetry and wondered whether she could ever