For eight years, I've thought I could see light at the end of the tunnel on my Vernon Johns Papers Project. Launching it was a gamble in the first place because there is no existing collection of his papers. Eventually, I learned that they were twice destroyed: once in a house fire and, after his death, by a tenant's careless destruction. Initially, I thought the Project might involve correcting the many typesetting errors and annotating the documents that appeared in: Samuel Lucius Gandy, ed., Human Possibilities: A Vernon Johns Reader, Including an Unfinished MS., sermons, essays, addresses, and a doggerel (Washington, DC: Hoffman Press, 1977). A search of WorldCat finds only six copies known to exist in libraries. Because my Project has the support of Vernon Johns' surviving children, I do not have serious copyright issues to worry about.

But I'm a pretty aggressive researcher and, eventually, I found that I could both correct and annotate the documents that Gandy had published and add to them from collections of material that had otherwise survived: essays published within Vernon Johns' lifetime; transcriptions of taped sermons and speeches; and manuscript sermons and notes. After an extensive search, I more than doubled the volume of material that Sam Gandy had published. Here's the Project's current table of contents.

The most fruitful source of additional material by or about Vernon Johns turned out to be newspapers. I did a massive search, sometimes in printed text and, otherwise, microfilm editions of these newspapers and periodicals:

Alabama Tribune, 1948-53.
Atlanta Constitution, [1946-60].
Atlanta Daily World, [1946-63].
Atlanta Journal, [1946-1960].
Baltimore Afro-American, [1931-34], 1955-1963.
Baptist Leader, 1948-53.
Birmingham World, 1948-53.
Charlottesville Daily Progress, [1945].
Chicago Defender, 1919.
Congregational Year-Book, 1915.
The Expected, [1941-1965].
Farmville Herald, 1898-99, [1951].
Lynchburg Daily Advance, 1929-34, 1941-43, 1961.
Lynchburg News, 1912-15, 1919-26, 1929-33, 1941-43.
Minneapolis Morning Tribune, [1953].
Montgomery Advertiser, 1948-53.
Montgomery Examiner, 1948-53.
Negro Yearbook: An Annual Encyclopedia of the Negro, [1912-1938].
New York Age, [1931].
New York Amsterdam News, 1926-33.
Norfolk Journal and Guide, 1919-65.
Oberlin Review, 1915-18.
Painesville Telegraph, [1882], [1922].
Philadelphia Tribune, 1933-34.
Richmond Afro-American, [1939-1951].
Richmond Planet, 1911-15, 1919-27, 1929-31, 1934-38.
Richmond Times, [1899].
Second Century, 1961-62.
Spelman Messenger, [1952-53].
Washington Afro-American, [1962-1963].
West Virginia Digest, 1939-41.

Those newspapers and periodicals yielded some very interesting documents: two series of newspaper columns that Vernon Johns had published between 1930 and 1945 and his letters to the editor scattered over a period of 50 years. At Cliopatria, I published a sample newspaper column here and a sample letter to the editor here. There was another set of things from these newspapers – articles about Vernon Johns that included significant excerpts of his words. My series editor, Michael O'Brien, persuaded me to include them in an appendix to the volume of essays, sermons, and speeches. You'll find them so listed in the table of contents. They include examples of the early reporting by Joe Azbell, a white reporter in Montgomery, who would become well known for breaking the story of the Montgomery bus boycott, and prominent African American journalists like Lerone Bennett, Jr., and Carl Rowan.

There's something about the alphabetical listing of periodicals in vertical text that manifests itself as pride. Theologically, I suppose, we Protestants would call it"works righteousness" and pride, especially in one's works, goeth before a fall. As I said, I'm an aggressive researcher, but I'm also a technologically retarded one. My colleagues, Manan Ahmed and Miriam Burstein, recently directed my attention to Google News Archive, NewspaperArchive.com, and paperofrecord.com. Gad, after all that needle-in-a-haystack newspaper research I'd already done and eliminating the citations that refer to some other Vernon Johns, they turn up 350 more newspaper articles about the man that I've never seen before. Gad zooks! Will my project never finish or do I do this in order that it never finish?