Montgomery, Alabama
Fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat on a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama to allow newly-boarded white riders to sit down. The driver called the police, Colvin was handcuffed, and dragged from the bus. It was Wednesday, March 2, 1955. When leaders of the local NAACP chapter first heard of Colvin’s arrest, they discussed whether it could be used as a test case to challenge Jim Crow laws in the courts. They decided against it for two reasons. First, Colvin had fought back against the arresting officers, which resulted in her being charged with assault and battery. Second, they discovered that she was several months pregnant out of wedlock. They concluded that the appropriate symbol in a case challenging an immoral system would have to be morally beyond reproach.
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Vernon Johns had been pastor at Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church for five years when he was dismissed in 1952. He had earned himself a reputation as one of the preeminent preachers of his day. Brilliant, barrel-chested, highly principled, able to read Hebrew, Ancient Greek, and Latin, Johns had also been variously described as “fearless,” “eccentric,” “aggressive,” “irascible,” a man with “strange ways” who employed “dangerous” methods to get his comfortable middle-class congregation to fight the evils of segregation.
As Dexter’s pastor, Johns was among the first prominent civil rights activists in Montgomery. But he was no organizer. Once, after he entered a bus and paid his fare, the driver asked him to get off and reboard from the back. He refused and instead took a seat in the front. When the driver refused to drive on, Johns demanded his money back. He got it. But when he called on his fellow black and white passengers to join him in protest, not a soul followed him.
While more poetic, his exhortations from the pulpit were no more successful. In one brutal 1948 sermon, Johns denounced his congregation for not doing more to help stop the lynching of African Americans. He told them that their passivity in the face of such violence made them no different than those who stood by while Jesus was being crucified.
Just as irking to the congregation, however, was Johns fervent belief in black economic self-sufficiency. Much to the embarrassment of his urbane congregants, Johns would hawk meat and produce on the street after services. This was no way for the pastor of Montgomery’s elite Baptist church to behave.
More than one historian has credited Johns’ presence at Dexter Avenue for preparing his congregation for the arrival of Martin Luther King, Jr. King would later thank Johns for “keeping the problem [of racial discrimination] before the conscience” of middle-class blacks who had been indifferent to the push for civil rights. But the decision to hire King wasn’t driven by any desire to build on Johns’ legacy. If anything, when the deacons hired the presentable, well-mannered, 25-year-old scion from an elite Atlanta family, they were trying to move their church as far away from John’s off-putting eccentricity as they could.
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Much has been said and written about the burdens and perils of black excellence. The drive to work harder and better in the face of white advantage and condescension can come at a personal cost, and can even threaten those whites who’ve never felt the same obligation to work that hard.
The phenomenon, of course, is not exclusive to African Americans. My own dad, who was not the least bit racially militant, made my burden as a Mexican American clear when Dan Quayle became Vice President of the United States. “We don’t have the privilege to be that mediocre,” he said, referring to the decidedly unimpressive former congressman from Indiana. “We have to work harder and prove more.”
There’s been considerably less commentary about the burden of minorities to prove their moral righteousness in the face of white fears. Yes, we’re all familiar with the so-called Sidney Poitier Syndrome. In the 1950s and ‘60s, Poitier was the showcase, non-threatening, one-dimensional leading black man who, in the words of the late New York Times film critic Clifford Mason, was “given a clean suit and a complete purity of motivation so that, like a mistreated puppy, he has all the sympathy on his side and all those mean whites are just so many Simon Legrees.”
Post-war black civil rights activists felt obliged to perform these theatrics of moral righteousness in real life. They knew it wasn’t enough to be on the right side of the issue. Because they sought to leverage guilt to move white opinion, they had to always maintain the moral high ground. But that, too, had its personal costs.
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Tracey Scott Wilson said she felt guilty writing her 2009 play, The Good Negro. Having grown up a preacher’s child idolizing black civil rights leaders, she struggled to create fictional characters that were more morally complex than the plaster saints we’ve come to memorialize. Based on the heady events in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1962, the play features three flawed black activists who are struggling with the movement’s burden of righteousness.
Painfully aware of the dangers of using morality as both a weapon and a shield, a charismatic preacher named James Lawrence, who is clearly modeled on Martin Luther King, Jr., frets that whites are “waiting for us to fuck it up. They’re waiting for us to talk wrong, walk wrong, be wrong and then they can say, ‘See? Look at them n******. No better than animals. I told you so.’”
Indeed, just as they did to King in real life, the FBI is recording Lawrence’s illicit sexual escapades and holding the audio tapes over his head. When another character reminds Lawrence that white people don’t talk or walk any better than blacks, Lawrence agrees but suggests that the burden of their sins doesn’t weigh on them as much, because “they got their rights already.”
In one of the more poignant moments of the play, Lawrence, the King figure, confesses to a fellow preacher that it’s only during his escapades, when he’s not being responsibly righteous, that he feels “free.” “Not a Negro then,” he continues. “Just like everybody else. Feels good to be like everybody else.”
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James Lawrence, of course, was a fictional character just like those Poitier played. But the struggles of his imperfect character ring truer than the quiet stoicism and preternatural self-control of Mr. Tibbs. Particularly for black males—or Latinos for that matter, another group that has been cast as savages–assuaging white fear takes a lot of energy. But so does having to feed their fetish for the ideal “good Negro” who just wants to get into “good trouble.” After all, fear and fetish are the flip sides of the same coin. Both sides, however, make it impossible for any complex human being to feel free and just be themselves in the world.
