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240 Vernon Johns Rock Foundations By all accounts, the Reverend Vernon Johns was a brilliant, iconoclastic preacher who regularly spoke to church and college audiences with great eloquence. Frequently an itinerant preacher and scholar, many of Johns’s lectures and sermons were never recorded and many of those that were written down were destroyed in a house fire, although a collection of undated sermons has been reprinted in Samuel Gandy’s Human Possibilities.1 Johns’s 1926 sermon “Transfigured Moments” was the first by an African American to be included in the highly regarded Best Sermons collection, an annual volume that published sermons by influential theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr and noted ministers such Harry Emerson Fosdick. Like many African American intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century—such as Mordecai Johnson or the Grimke brothers—Vernon Johns was well known throughout the African American community but largely ignored and then forgotten by white Americans. His public speeches and sermons, although individually styled to reflect his particular messages, resembled those of many African American leaders of the first half of the twentieth century. Grounded in the Social Gospel, his oratorical canon was staunchly supportive of civil rights but also distinctively demanded that African Americans work diligently to improve their circumstances in America. Vernon Johns was born in 1892 in Farmville, Virginia, to Willie and Sallie Price Johns. His paternal grandfather was famous in that part of Virginia for having reputedly cut his white master in two with a scythe, an act for which he had been promptly hanged. His maternal grandfather, David Price, was a white man who maintained two families—one with his white wife Rock Foundations 241 and one with his African American mistress. In Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch concludes that Price was a “mean, violent complicated man.”2 Price served time in prison for killing a white man who tried to rape Sallie Price’s mother, and when Sallie’s mother passed away, Price moved his African American children into his home to be reared by his childless white wife. Following the customs of the time, the Prices pretended that it was an act of charity and that they were simply caring for orphaned African American children. The matter of being biologically related to each other was never spoken of, publicly or privately. Vernon, the oldest child of Willie and Sallie, grew up on the family farm, where he educated himself. His father, Willie, was a full-time farmer and part-time preacher, a formula that Vernon would reverse in his life.3 Early on, Vernon Johns displayed a prodigious intellect. He recited long biblical passages and poetry, and as a teenager talked his way into several schools in Virginia, including Virginia Seminary in Lynchburg. Due either to rebelliousness or just his contrary nature, he was either dismissed or voluntarily left them all. He applied to Oberlin College in Ohio and, when he was turned down, went to argue his case in person. As the story goes, when the associate dean pointed out that Johns had been denied admission due to invalid educational credits, the erstwhile student replied “I got your letter, Dean Fiske, but I want to know whether you want students with credits or students with brains.”4 Dean Fiske then set him to the task of translating a book written in German. When he did so immediately, Fiske sent him along to Edward Increase Bosworth, the dean of Oberlin Seminary. Bosworth also asked Johns to translate a text, but this time in Greek. When Johns promptly completed this second task, Bosworth took him on as a “provisional” student , and in 1918, Vernon Johns graduated from Oberlin Seminary first in his class. When Robert Maynard Hutchins, the student who had previously occupied the top rank and later became president of University of Chicago, heard Johns had replaced him in academic standing, he remarked that the “country Negro” could only have done so by cheating. Characteristically, Johns confronted Hutchins, punching him in the mouth and demanding an apology. Subsequently, the two became lifelong friends.5 After graduation, Vernon attended the University of Chicago graduate school of theology, the intellectual home of the Social Gospel movement. This group of theologians argued that the teachings of Christ required his followers to work vigorously for the care and well-being of everyone, particularly at the societal level. From the University of Chicago, Johns accepted [3.141.31.209] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 00:49 GMT...

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