Rev. Dr. Vernon Johns • April 22, 1892 - June 11, 1965 • Prophet, Father of the American civil rights movement, Mentor of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Reverend Vernon Johns, as the leader of a black congregation in Montgomery in the early 1950s, was one of the earliest voices in the Civil Rights Movement. When his congregation found him too outspoken, they ironically replaced him with Martin Luther King, Jr., who lived by Johns's credo: "You should be ashamed to die until you've made some contribution to mankind."

The three great pushes for civil rights in the United States were the Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. campaign against Jim Crow in the North, the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. attack on segregation in the South. Few people realize this, but the one man who influenced all three events was Vernon Johns.

And yet, this man is virtually unknown. Vernon Johns was a man who never really got his due. And that is still true today. Vernon Johns did not help much in the task of rescuing his reputation. And that is because he did not save many of his own writings. His daughter, Jeanne Johns Adkins (1993), said that "Let me tell you something about my father. He was the world's most disorganized person. He would just print these, pitch them into the trunk of his car and if he just happened to have one left when he got back home, we would see it. So, in terms of keeping things, we have very few sermons on paper."

Vernon Johns himself was a victim of a politically correct code. After all, he was constantly violating the code. He was a man who said what others were afraid to say. While inspiring the few, his words made most of his listeners uncomfortable, and this in turn would anger them. After all, people don't like to feel uncomfortable. But it was Vernon Johns's mission to break this sense of comfortableness.

"Freedom" is the inspirational saga of the man who preceded Martin Luther King Jr. as pastor of a Montgomery, Alabama Baptist Church. Described as one of God's most brilliant preachers, Reverend Doctor Vernon Johns campaigned tirelessly for Civil Rights long before the cudgel was taken up by the mainstream. Before leaving his post, Johns passed the torch to young Reverend King and remained his mentor.



Here is a dramatic re-enactment of a sermon by Vernon Johns, a prophetic preacher in the black tradition from the early 1950s. Here he is trying to rouse a fearful congregation to stand up to lynching and police brutality that was taking place in Birmingham at that time. He paved the way for Dr. Martin Luther King who succeeded him as Pastor. Note in this clip how the spoken word gives way to the sung word. Preaching in the Black Church is always a shared effort.