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I was born in 1951, and while I lived through much of the civil rights movement, I have to admit that I did not understand or appreciate its full significance at the time. I knew of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Council, but I did not associate their struggles with my own life. Only in my adulthood have I begun to realize the beauty of their gifts to our society, and the scale of their courage and sacrifice. At least for me, their stories form a living scripture, a poignant story of the call to freedom and the struggle to live that call, a modern Book of Exodus.

Bayard Rustin[1] and Vernon Johns[2] were very different people, but both played a meaningful role in that modern Exodus. Each was, in a significant sense, a predecessor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Had fate’s hand (or the random chance of human experience, if you prefer) moved only slightly differently, it would have been quite possible that either Bayard Rustin or Vernon Johns might today be the name that symbolizes the sacrifice and the accomplishments of our nation’s civil rights movement. As things have come to be, however, neither of these is as well known today as each deserves to be.

· Bayard Rustin’s suburban, middle-class upbringing gave him an urbane, polished appearance, while Vernon John’s rural childhood generated a blunt, even uncouth, manner.

· Rustin was, for many years, an ardent pacifist, and a disciple of Gandhi, not only in his social justice work but also in his personal interactions, while Johns’ fierce temper often led to his use of physical intimidation and the threat of violence[3].

· Bayard Rustin was a writer as much as a speaker, so many of his words are available to us today, while Vernon Johns was so gifted an orator – considered one of the nation’s three premier African-American preachers in the 1930s – and blessed with so powerful a memory that he didn’t need to write down his sermons, with the unfortunate result that few of them have survived in direct form (what we have, in most cases, are the recollections of those who heard him preach).

· And while Bayard Rustin was often willing to work behind the scenes of the civil rights movement, making his greatest contributions within the context of large organizational efforts, Vernon Johns’ greatest gift was his willingness to step out and speak the truth, even – perhaps especially – when that truth set him apart.

But, for all these differences, there were also some striking similarities between them. Both were passionate and articulate orators, and both devoted their lives to the cause of justice, equality, and human rights. Both have been described as “prophets” of the civil rights movements. And both had roles – though very different roles – in shaping the particular context within which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was called into leadership of the civil rights movement.

As you may be aware, it was during Dr. King’s time as pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, sparking the bus boycott that propelled Dr. King into a leadership role in the civil rights movement. The previous pastor at Dexter Avenue was Vernon Johns, and his work there had paved the way for the congregation’s willingness to act in support of Rosa Parks and the boycott. And shortly after the boycott began, Bayard Rustin was sent to Montgomery to assist in the planning and organization of the effort, as well as its transformation from a “boycott” into a “nonviolent protest.”

Let me begin with the story of Vernon Johns, who was born in rural Virginia in 1892. His father was a farmer, a peddler, and a self-taught Baptist preacher, and Vernon would follow his father in each of these professions. At age three, Vernon would preach from the doorstep or a tree stump. His education began in a one-room schoolhouse, followed by a Presbyterian mission school, and some time at Virginia Seminary, an unaccredited college. He then transferred to Oberlin University[4], where he was for a time a classmate and academic rival of Robert Maynard Hutchins (later President of the University of Chicago). In 1918 he received his Bachelor of Divinity degree from Oberlin, and was ordained into the Baptist ministry. After some further study at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, he embarked on a kaleidoscopic life trajectory:

1920: Lynchburg, VA, Pastor at Court Street Baptist Church and teacher at Virginia Theological Seminary

1941: Lynchburg, VA, Pastor at Court Street Baptist Church (ousted by church leadership shortly after his installation ceremony)

1948: Altona Trent Johns (Vernon’s wife) takes a music faculty position at Alabama State College in Montgomery, Alabama, and Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, then in search for a pastor, invites her husband, the renowned preacher Vernon Johns, as guest speaker one Sunday.

Vernon Johns preached movingly and powerfully that morning. Deeply impressed by his forceful preaching and personal mastery of the Scriptures, the Dexter Avenue congregation – composed of the elite of Montgomery’s African-American society – dispensed with their usual ministerial search process, which included reference-checking and a second trial sermon, and voted to call him as their pastor that same day[5]. Thus, Vernon Johns began a ministry which included sermons on the following topics: “Segregation After Death,” “It’s Safe to Murder Negroes in Montgomery,” “When the Rapist Is White,” “Mud Is Basic,” and “Constructive (or Creative) Homicide.”

The Dexter Avenue congregation was wealthy, well-educated, and professional. It was, to a significant degree, invested in the segregated status quo, rather than interested in changing it. While Vernon Johns’ eloquence and erudition made him a good match for the congregation, in almost every other way he was a rather dubious fit.

He was deeply committed to social change, while the congregation was at best wary of it, and in some cases, even opposed to it. He retained a deep and abiding sense of the fundamental value of productive manual labor (hence his ongoing identity as a farmer), while Dexter Avenue was composed almost exclusively of professionals, who distanced themselves from manual labor. In appearance and manners, Vernon Johns was often “uncouth,” while the congregation considered itself refined. This meant that he might preach in disheveled apparel. It meant that he was capable of interrupting a high-society wedding – just before pronouncing the couple “man and wife” – with the announcement that he’d be serving watermelon in the social hall after the ceremony for only 25 cents a slice (or $1.50 for a half watermelon, for those more economically-minded).[6] Another story, which expresses well the tension between Johns and the congregation, concerns an interaction on the street in front of the church, when Vernon Johns, selling fish from a truck, encountered Dexter Avenue’s Senior Deacon and asked “Deacon, can I sell you a fish?” The deacon’s response was “Dr. Johns, don’t you think fish mongering is an undignified undertaking for a minister of the gospel?” To which Vernon Johns responded “Deacon, do you think carpentry was an undignified undertaking for the Savior?”[7]

And during his four years at Dexter Avenue, Vernon Johns was a true prophet, expressing his dissent publicly and without reservation, ardent in his conviction, sensitive to the concerns of justice, and insensitive to the proprieties that the community wished to observe. He spoke and acted out of his sense that Montgomery’s systems of racial injustice were intolerable, and had to change. For instance, because his sermons were considered so “inflammatory,” he was hauled into Montgomery police stations for questioning about them, but that never seemed to extinguish the flame of justice that burned within him. And several years prior to Rosa Parks’ refusal to surrender her seat on the bus, Vernon Johns boarded a public bus in Montgomery, sat down in the front seat, and refused to move when ordered to do so by the bus driver. However, rather than sitting there until he was arrested and taken to jail, he demanded the return of his bus fare, and when he received it, got off the bus. As he left, he called upon all the other blacks on the bus to follow him. None of them did.[8]

During his roughly four years at Dexter Avenue, Vernon Johns apparently tendered his resignation at least five times. In one case, he stormed out of the building when the organist refused to accompany the Negro spirituals that he wished the congregation to sing, but which the congregation felt were not appropriate religious music for a community which had moved so far from the enslaved and impoverished origins of those spirituals.[9] In 1952, when they received complaints from members of the Dexter Avenue congregation that Dr. Johns was selling a truckload of watermelons on the Alabama State College campus (where many of them were on the faculty), the Board of Deacons recommended that the congregation accept his latest resignation, and the congregation voted to do so.[10] These actions began another ministerial search process at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church – the one which would bring the young Martin Luther King, Jr. to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1954.

The story of Bayard Rustin[11] begins in 1912, with his birth in West Chester, PA, a middle-class suburb of Philadelphia, to an unmarried 16-year-old girl. He was raised by his middle-class grandparents, members of an AME congregation. His grandmother, in particular, was active in social causes, a charter member of the NAACP and influenced by Quaker theology. At age 14, Bayard became aware that he was gay, and his family accepted his self-understanding of his orientation. He excelled in sports, academics, and music, and stories about him include a stirring solo rendition of “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” One wonders whether his relationship with his mother might not have added poignancy to that spiritual for him.

At age 25, in 1937, he moved to New York City to attend the City College of New York, but appears to have been more involved in the Harlem Renaissance and the gay scene there. In 1938, he joined the Young Communist League, convinced that the communists were most sincerely committed to working for racial equality. He resigned his membership in 1941 when the YCL abandoned racial causes after Germany invaded the USSR.

At that point he began assisting A. Philip Randolph, the nation’s pre-eminent African-American labor leader, who was organizing a march on Washington, DC, by American Negroes to protest segregation practices in the nation’s defense industry and military. When President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order banning segregation in the defense industries (but leaving the military segregated), Randolph called off the march. Rustin and others regarded this compromise as a betrayal, but Randolph would remain an important mentor and sponsor for Rustin for the rest of his life.

Rustin then began working as Youth Secretary of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, learning about and promoting Gandhi’s techniques of non-violent protest, and opposing U. S. entry into World War II. In 1943, after his request for Conscientious Objector status was refused, and he refused to observe an induction notice, Rustin was sentenced to three years in prison, where he organized protests for desegregation of prison dining halls and chapels.

After his release from prison in 1947, he was active in the Journey of Reconciliation, a series of freedom bus rides testing whether desegregation of interstate bus travel – as recently ordered by the U. S. Supreme Court – was actually being observed in Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina. In 1949, he traveled to India as an invited participant in a conference on nonviolent protest, and in 1952 he traveled to Africa and met with leaders of national freedom movements in several countries. He was, at this time, one of the most pre-eminent spokespeople for nonviolent protest on behalf of racial justice in the United States.

But that was soon to change. In January, 1953, after speaking to a meeting of the American Association of University Women in Pasadena, CA, he and two other men were arrested for lewd conduct and he was sentenced to 60 days in the Los Angeles County Jail. The ensuing scandal forced his resignation from the Fellowship of Reconciliation and damaged both his standing in the civil rights movement and his own self-confidence.

For several years, he remained on the sidelines of the movement, but in December, 1955, shortly after the Montgomery bus boycott began, Rustin’s “patron saint,” A. Philip Randolph, asked him to go to Montgomery and share his expertise in nonviolent protest. There, Rustin worked behind the scenes, assisting in the planning of the protest and training the participants in nonviolent techniques. He helped Martin Luther King develop his understanding of satyagraha as a practice as well as a philosophy. For instance, he pointed out to King that the leader of a nonviolent protest does not station armed guards outside his residence, nor does he keep loaded guns in his living room.

While in Montgomery, Rustin disclosed his past (including his sexual orientation and his Pasadena arrest) to King. While King was of the opinion that Rustin’s organizing experience, political acumen, and networks of influence outweighed the potential liabilities of his past political associations and his arrest in Pasadena, other leaders of the Montgomery protest did not agree. They feared that Rustin – a former Communist, a homosexual, and a New Yorker, to boot! – was the archetypal “outside agitator.” Rustin was smuggled out of Montgomery in the trunk of a car.

Returning to New York, he organized a major fundraiser for the Montgomery protest, featuring Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Belafonte, and others. Later, he helped to organize both the Southern Christian Leadership Council and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, in both cases working closely with Ella Baker, another renowned civil rights leader. In 1963, although still considered controversial by the leaders of organizations like the NAACP and the Urban League, Rustin was selected to serve as the lead organizer for the March on Washington. When A. Philip Randolph was nominated to serve as chair of the March, he stated in no uncertain terms that if elected, he would appoint Bayard Rustin to serve as Deputy Chair, and that all who voted for him were committing themselves to support Rustin in that role. The unprecedented success of the March was further evidence of Rustin’s organizational skills. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave the “I Have a Dream” speech, but Bayard Rustin created the context within which Dr. King spoke.

Thinking back to Rustin’s criticism of A. Philip Randolph in 1941, when Randolph compromised on his desegregation demands, it is ironic to realize that Rustin himself, in the mid-1960s, found himself in a position where he, too, appears to have compromised. An ardent advocate of the Johnson administration’s proposed “Freedom Budget” (a part of the “Great Society” program), Rustin counseled his colleagues, including Dr. King, to moderate their criticism of the Viet Nam war, at least in part out of a sense that such criticism would reduce administration support for the Freedom Budget. This, with his growing ties to organized labor, his opposition to the black power movement, and his strong support for the Jewish state of Israel, led to his marginalization within the racial justice movement as a relative political conservative.

In the 1970s, Rustin traveled abroad as a spokesperson for democracy and human rights, visiting South Africa several times. In the 1980s, he began to speak out on behalf of gay rights. And while no life is easy to sum up in a single sentence, perhaps the great lesson that Bayard Rustin’s life teaches is that the best way to end injustice for any particular group is to work for the end of all injustice.

The lives of these three men – Vernon Johns, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King, Jr. – are intertwined within the larger community of those whose lives can be described as filled with a “hunger and thirst for righteousness.” Concerning one of them, it has been written . . .

[He] was inspirational to the countless thousands who knew him. He wished, more than anything else, to remake the world around him. He wanted to shift the balance between white supremacy and racial justice, between violence and cooperation in the conduct of nations, between the wealth and power of the few and the poverty and powerlessness of the many. He believed that the most antagonistic human relationships . . . could be transformed. He believed that ordinary individuals could make a vast difference in the world, and he communicated this conviction widely.

This description comes from Lost Prophet: the Life and Times of Bayard Rustin, written by John D’Emilio (p. 2), but it could just as well have been written of Martin Luther King, Jr. With deletion of the comments on international relations, it could just as easily describe Vernon Johns. Each of these three men dedicated his life to the cause of justice. Each of these lives speaks to us today.

As we confront the continued presence of prejudice, discrimination, and injustice in our nation and our world today, as we see evidence from this past week that our nation’s President remains convinced that violence can end violence, let us step forward in the spirit of these three leaders.

May our voices and our actions speak out for the values that we share with Vernon Johns, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King. Jr. May we never forget that the efforts of “. . . ordinary individuals could make a vast difference in the world . . .” May we not only remember, but may we accept the challenge to make that difference.

[1] My main sources for Bayard Rustin are Time on Two Crosses: the Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin, edited by Devon W. Carbado and Donald Weise (Cleis Press, San Francisco: 2003, cited as “CJ”) and John D’Emilio’s Lost Prophet: the Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (Free Press, New York: 2003, cited as “D’Emilio”).

[2] My main sources for Vernon Johns include [1] Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63. Simon and Schuster, New York: 1988 (particularly Chapter 1: “Forerunner: Vernon Johns”); [2] Cooney, Patrick L., and Henry W. Powell. The Life and Times of the Prophet Vernon Johns: Father of the Civil Rights Movement. Published on-line by the Vernon Johns Society: 1998 (cited as “CP,” and citations will include chapter and page to be consistent with the online version’s numbering); [3] Luker, Ralph, E. “Johns the Baptist” (online source); and [4] Turner, Maelinda. “Vernon Johns: Farmer, Preacher, Civil-rights Pioneer” (online source).

[3] See CP, chapter 25, p. 6, for example.

[4] For a more extended description of Johns’ time at Oberlin, see Turner.

[5] Branch, pp. 6-7, and CP, ch. 23, p. 12.

[6] CP, ch. 25, p. 4.

[7] CP, ch.25, p. 3.

[8] Branch, p. 14, and CP, ch. 23, p. 7.

[9] Branch, p. 19, and CP, ch. 25, p. 4.

[10] Branch, p. 24.

[11] A concise biography of Bayard Rustin’s life is presented in the Carbado and Wiese’s Introduction (pp. x-xli). Most of what follows is drawn from that source.