Vernon Johns and the Laws of Physics; or, If It's 1927, He Must be in New York, West Virginia, Virginia, and North Carolina
It took me a while to figure out one of the sociologist's major errors. The mistake was understandable enough, on one level, because we assume that a historical character can only be in one place at a time. He had also been led to that mistake because my favorite African American preacher, Vernon Johns, lied – er, let's just say that he under-reported -- in what he told Who's Who in America.
Johns made his first major public impression in 1926. As the pastor of Lynchburg, Virginia's most important African American congregation, Court Street Baptist Church, he published a sermon,"Transfigured Moments," in Joseph Fort Newton, ed., Best Sermons, 1926. There he was welcomed as"the first colored preacher to appear in Best Sermons" and his homily appeared among others by Henry Sloane Coffin, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the most prominent American Protestant pulpiteers of his generation.
What happened next gets a little confusing, though it is tidy enough in the entry about Vernon Johns in Who's Who. There, Vernon Johns leaves Lynchburg early in 1927 and goes to New York City, where he directs a Baptist Education Center in the high years of the Harlem Renaissance. Then, in 1929, he resigns to return to Lynchburg to become the President of his small alma mater, Virginia Theological Seminary and College. The school was on the verge of financial collapse, even then, before the depression set in. Within four years, he'd be driven from office by a student strike. Between 1933 and 1937, he had a brief, interim stint at a Baptist church in Philadelphia and spent the rest of the time farming and doing itinerant preaching around the country. In 1937, he accepted a pastorate at Charleston, West Virginia's First Baptist Church, the state's most important African American congregation.
That's what you believe, if you believe Vernon Johns' reports to Who's Who in America. The sociologist/biographer has the problem of knowing a little bit more than that. He knows that when Vernon Johns became the pastor of Charleston, West Virginia's First Baptist Church in 1937, it wasn't the first time he'd been its pastor. When he left Lynchburg early in 1927, Johns accepted an appointment as pastor of Charleston's First Baptist Church. It was a particularly prestigious because it made him the immediate successor to Mordecai Johnson, who had just left Charleston to become the first African American president of Howard University in Washington, DC.
My sociologist/biographer friend makes the mistake of thinking normally: sequentially and chronologically. He fits in a brief stint for Johns as pastor in Charleston and, then, has him move to New York to direct the Baptist Education Center. What Johns didn't tell Who's Who and his biographer didn't figure out is that Johns actually accepted two full time positions – one in Charleston, West Virginia, and one in New York City – in the same month: February 1927. For the next eleven months, he kept authorities in both places convinced that he was doing the job.
If holding two full-time jobs, 550 miles from each other, concurrently isn't complicated enough, there are two other problems. The first is that there's no document indicating when he had definitely resigned as pastor of Court Street Baptist Church in Lynchburg. On a key document, where he is consulting with its local authorities, there is actually an overstrike on the date, so he may have been exercising pastoral authority in Lynchburg well into 1927. Beyond that, Johns spent much of 1927 chasing the love of his life from the mountains to the Piedmont of North Carolina in a successful quest to persuade her to marry him.
It exhausts me just to think about it. The picture is finally clarified late in 1927, when Vernon Johns and Altona Trent are married at her father's home in Salisbury, NC. They drive or take the train up to Charleston, maybe with a stop in Lynchburg. In Charleston, Johns preaches his farewell sermon to the congregation at First Baptist Church and persuades the church to hire the Best Man in his wedding as its new preacher. Then they go to Cleveland, where Johns revisits Oberlin, his other alma mater; and, then, they go to New York City, where finally, early in 1928, Johns actually is the full-time director of Harlem's Baptist Education Center. ... until he resigns the next year.
So, there you have it. Throughout most of 1927, Vernon Johns defied the laws of physics by being in four places at once. It took me a while to figure all that out.