Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch Read Free Book Online Page A

comprehend what a person of such age and presence was really like. Finally, she decided that the most likely explanation for his silence was that he was proud of her but simply refused to compliment her, as he had refused to compliment people all his life, for fear of implying that he had ever expected less. This theory caused her pride to overtake her resentment, and she resolved never to mention her feats in Farmville to anyone in Montgomery.
    The first thing Barbara Johns noticed was that pressures on her uncle were building. Rumors of plots and defections within the Dexter Avenue congregation arrived almost daily, and it was considered a bad sign that ever fewer churchwomen favored the pastor’s house with cooked dishes from their kitchens. Johns, still selling produce on the street, escalated his criticism of his members for being insulated in their own individual worlds. “You don’t even know each other’s names!” he would exclaim from the pulpit, and he called on the congregation to repeat the names of new members out loud. If they were so separated from each other even among their own class, he argued, how could they ever hope to pull together as a race? He became obsessed with this insulation because he believed Negroes went so far as to follow the lead of the white newspapers, objectifying Negroes—especially the victims of police violence—as a faceless category apart from them. This was a violent time in Alabama—an era when a judge and jury sentenced a Negro man to death for stealing $1.95 from a white woman (commuted later by Governor Folsom) and when police officers often meted out harsher justice informally, beyond the meager restraints of a court. One Montgomery case stuck in Johns’s mind: officers stopped a man for speeding and beat him half to death with a tire iron, while Negroes watched silently nearby.
    Not long after this incident, Johns summoned his oldest daughter, Altona, and said gravely, “Come with me, Baby Dee. I’m going to preach a sermon.” His manner so frightened her that she said nothing as they walked out of the parsonage, across the capitol grounds, and down the hill to Dexter Avenue. Johns opened the glass case of the church bulletin board and handed the box of metal letters to his daughter. She spread the letters on the sidewalk. As was his habit, Johns thought for a moment and then directed her to post a new sermon title for the following Sunday: “It’s Safe to Murder Negroes in Montgomery.” She fumbled with the letters in the bright sunshine, and when it was done she followed her father back up the hill as wordlessly as she had come.
    The phone began to ring that night. Hostile white callers threatened to burn the church down unless Johns removed the sign, and anxious Dexter members passed along tips about whites who were angry and church members who were upset. A police officer came to the church with a summons for Johns. He answered it, and was escorted to the circuit courthouse by a handful of policemen, including the chief. Charges of inciting to riot, slander of the police department, and disturbing the peace were mentioned, but nothing so formal came of the hearing, which amounted to an examination of Johns by the judge, the police chief, and a few influential citizens who had gathered there to take the measure of this bizarre Negro. Having asked why such a sign had been placed outside the church, the judge nodded slowly when Johns replied that he had placed it there to attract attention to his forthcoming sermon. When the judge suggested that he might do well to take it down, Johns replied with a brief lecture on the meaning of signs in history—how civil authorities had pressured men to take down their signs in ancient Greece and Egypt, in Rome, and in Europe during the Reformation. Then the judge asked why anyone would want to preach on so inflammatory a subject as murder between the races. “Because