It's Vernon Johns in New York City in 1927

While I was in Washington for the OAH convention, I stopped by the Library of Congress to have copies made of correspondence between Vernon Johns and his wife, Altona, and Nannie Helen Burroughs, the long-time president of the Women's Convention of the National Baptist Convention. I've just finished foldering the documents, marking their source, and entering clues gleaned from them into a massive chronology of the life of Vernon Johns. He is the Afro-Baptist preacher whose biography I am writing and essays, sermons, and speeches I'm preparing for publication. As I've said, the job is a remarkably challenging one because his papers were twice destroyed, so I've had to locate things as they survived in other ways. For historians, developing a chronology is a pretty mundane form of organizing material, but in Vernon Johns' case, it taught me something quite surprising. You may have played Clue, at some point, and guessed that it was Professor Plum in the Library with a Rope. Well, I would have guessed that it was Vernon Johns in New York City in 1927, except that he defied the laws of physics and it turned out to be far more complicated. Only a detailed chronology told me so.

In 1926, Vernon Johns was rounding out a half dozen years as the pastor of Court Street Baptist Church, the largest and most prestigious African American congregation in Lynchburg, Virginia. While there, he'd also taught at his alma mater, Virginia Theological Seminary and College. There, he'd gotten to know Anne Spencer and Sterling Brown, both noted poets of the Harlem Renaissance. He'd launched a series of occasional sermonic pamphlets, Negro Pulpit Opinion and, most importantly, his sermon,"Transfigured Moments," was published in Joseph Fort Newton's Best Sermons, 1926, alongside those of Charles R. Brown, Henry Sloane Coffin, Harry Emerson Fosdick, J. Gresham Machen, Reinhold Niebuhr, and other princes of the American pulpit.

At the end of 1926, Vernon Johns was clearly on the verge of a remarkably distinguished career. Early in 1927, however, Johns made choices that he would subsequently obscure in his entries in Who's Who in America and, thus, befuddle his biographer. In January 1927, he became the Director of Harlem's Baptist Education Center of New York City, a center for educating Afro-Baptist ministers and lay people. There, he would become a significant presence in both the Harlem Renaissance and the renaissance of New York's Protestant pulpit, that featured men like Fosdick, Ralph Sockman, Adam Clayton Powell, and others. At the end of the month, he preached his"last sermon" as pastor of Lynchburg's Court Street Church, but on 1 February, he accepted an appointment to the pulpit of Charleston West Virginia's First Baptist Church. This, too, was a very prestigious appointment. Its congregation was probably the single most important African American church in the state. Its pulpit was made even more prestigious by his immediate predecessor there, Mordecai Johnson, who had resigned to become the first African American president of Howard University in Washington, DC, the country's premier African American institution of higher education.

What Vernon Johns obscured in Who's Who in America and befuddled his internet biographer is that, throughout 1927, Johns thus held full-time positions both in New York City and Charleston, West Virginia, and held them concurrently, not sequentially. That picture is further complicated by two other facts. First, although he had given notice to his congregation in Lynchburg that he was leaving it, there is some evidence that he was still convening meetings of Court Street Baptist Church officials after January 1927. More importantly, throughout 1927, Vernon Johns was courting his bride-to-be, Altona Trent, who was then on the faculty at Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina. He pursued her from there to Salisbury, where her father was the longtime president of Livingstone College, and her birthplace in Ashville. This remarkably complicated picture began to clear up in October 1927, when New York's Baptist Education Center moved from temporary quarters at Mt. Olivet and Metropolitan Baptist churches into a permanent home in a storefront on 129th Street. Two months later, Vernon Johns and Altona Trent were married at her father's home in Salisbury. On their honeymoon, they drove up through Lynchburg, where they said a final farewell to Court Street Baptist Church, and on to Charleston, where Johns preached a farewell sermon and resigned as pastor of First Baptist Church. From there, they drove on to Cleveland, Ohio, where they attended the national convention of Johns' fraternal order, Alpha Phi Alpha, and probably visited another of his alma maters, Oberlin College. Finally, Vernon Johns took his new bride home to New York City.

I don't know how he managed it. It nearly exhausts me just recapitulating it and I certainly couldn't have done so without a reliable chronology. The exciting part for me, however, will be creating the narrative and the analysis of where he fit in – where he fits into the Harlem Renaissance and where he fits into the 1920's renaissance of the Protestant pulpit in New York City. If I place him among his peers in the Afro-Baptist pulpit of his generation – the Powells, Mordecai Johnson, Benjamin Mays, Howard Thurman and others -- I wonder if I should write about a"Harlem Reformation" or if that is just too cute. It's clear that, like Fosdick, they were theological liberals, largely untouched by a Niebuhrian neo-orthodoxy. So, that leaves me arguing with Ann Douglas' otherwise wonderful book, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s, because she rushes past liberalism to neo-orthodox complexities. Yet, I'm also writing about African American theological liberals and there's just no way that they can be charged with an insufficient appreciation of human depravities. They'd been on the receiving end of them for too long.

There's also the question of where it leads Vernon Johns. Superficially, I know the answer to that question. In 1929, he returned to Lynchburg as the president of his alma mater, Virginia Seminary, when it was on the verge of financial collapse. It wasn't an obvious move, either for the institution or for him. He had, apparently, been expelled from the school in 1917 for some insubordination, just as he was about to graduate, and he had been fired from its faculty in 1923 for a public attack on its administration. Not only had he been fired from its faculty, but its sponsoring state Baptist convention had"withdrawn the right hand of fellowship" from this most promising young Afro-Baptist preacher in the Commonwealth for his offense. The ban was so complete that, from 1923 to 1926, his name simply disappeared from the state's leading African American newspapers, which were closely allied to the convention. That made tracking his movements for those three years very difficult.

Yet, they called him back to be Virginia Seminary's president in 1929 to save it from financial collapse. Neither they nor he could foresee the lean years of depression that lay ahead. They were so lean at Virginia Seminary that, by the end of 1933, students and faculty alike went on strike to demand Vernon Johns's resignation. And so, he resigned. It wasn't his first professional disaster. Nor would it be his last: he'd yet again serve the pulpits at First Baptist Church in Charleston and Court Street Baptist Church in Lynchburg before going to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1948 as the pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He'd eventually have an ignominious departure from its prestige, as well, in 1953. And he'd forever live in the shadow of his successor there, Martin Luther King.