Vernon Johns

Vernon Napoleon Johns was born on the twenty-second of April 1892 at the Whitehead-Johns family farm at Darlington Heights, in Prince Edward County, Virginia, the son of Willie Johns — a former Civil War United States Coloured Troops infantryman of the Twenty-Eighth Regiment and a tenant farmer — and Sallie Branch Price Johns, a former enslaved woman of the Branch plantation at the same Prince Edward County. He was raised at the farm and at the small Baptist congregation his father pastored at the same community.

He was placed at six at the principal Prince Edward County Coloured Schools and at the Boydton Institute at Mecklenburg County, Virginia for the closing portion of the secondary education. He completed the bachelor of arts at the Virginia Theological Seminary and College at Lynchburg, Virginia in 1915 and the bachelor of divinity at the Oberlin Graduate School of Theology at Oberlin, Ohio in 1918 — the first African American to take the bachelor of divinity at Oberlin. He took additional graduate study at the University of Chicago Divinity School in 1923.

He was ordained a Baptist minister in 1918 and pastored a succession of senior Black Baptist pulpits across the inter-war and post-war American South — at the Court Street Baptist Church at Lynchburg, Virginia (1920–1926), the First Baptist Church at Charleston, West Virginia (1927–1933), the Court Street Baptist Church again (1937–1941), and at last the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church at Montgomery, Alabama from October 1947 to August 1952.

He delivered at the Dexter Avenue pulpit across the five-year Montgomery tenure the principal proto-civil-rights sermons of the late-1940s American South — among them the eight-of-March-1949 sermon ‘It is Safe to Murder Negroes in Montgomery,’ preached the Sunday after the Montgomery murder of the Black tractor driver Henry Tabor by a Montgomery police officer with no prosecution to follow. The Johns Montgomery sermons of 1949 to 1952 were widely understood as the principal pulpit prefiguration of the Montgomery bus boycott and the principal pastoral preparation of the Dexter Avenue congregation for the eventual arrival of Martin Luther King Jr. (placed in this archive) in October 1954 — twenty-six months after Johns’s August 1952 resignation under the pressure of the Dexter Avenue deacons.

He returned to the Prince Edward County farm in 1952 and lectured at the Virginia Theological Seminary and the Howard University Divinity School across the closing thirteen years of his life. He served additionally as the principal Black Baptist senior pulpit-supply preacher of the late-1950s American South.

He died at Washington, D.C. on the eleventh of June 1965 of complications of pulmonary disease, at seventy-three.

He is honored here as the predecessor of Martin Luther King Jr. at Dexter Avenue.