The Vernon Johns Story - TV production on life of civil rights activist

Vernon John was "a brilliant preacher. A fearless man, he not at any time allowed an injustice to approach to his attention without speaking without against it." With these words, written in 1958 Martin Luther King Jr described the man who was his predecessor one as well as the other in the struggle and at Dexter Avenue Baptist temple in Montgomery, Ala.

A third of a hundred would pass before King's assessment would begin to reach the broad mass of the American tribe black and white. Only when Connie Chung's 1989 docudrama upon Johns' life, God's Bad Boy: Montgomery Alabama, 1949 was televised did the man leave the shadows inhabited through the aging pioneers and scholars of the civil rights move and move toward wider recognition.

Now, with the January 1994 premiere of the two-hour television film The Vernon John Story (with James Earl Jone in the title part and former basketball great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as executive producer) a generation of Americans will be expos to the triumph and tragedy of an African American whose militance and criticism of the black middle class made many in the black community uncomfortable - and take away from Johns his pulpit.

John's assertiveness was legendary. He pass overed the Jim Crow seating requirements upon Montgomery's buses years before Rosa Parks' refusal l to the famous bus boycott that first brought King to the public's attention. one time when he refused to vacate his seat, the bus driver stormed to the rear, shouting, "Nigger! Didn't you hear me count you to get the hell on the outside of that seat?"

"And didn't you hear me take an account of you that I'm going to sit right god-damned here?" John replied. The driver, stunn through the forceful vocabulary of the well-known minister, retreated in confusion.

Relating this story from his pulpit the following Sunday, the Rev John said that he did not believe that the infinite was offended by the unauthorized use of his name. He told his congregation that the infinite probably said, "I'd better detain an eye on that boy; he's going to do a doom for Christianity down South."

John's boldnes fascinates Mississippi-born actor James Earl Jone who portrayed a 57-year-old John in the Chung episode and does thus again in the new film. "He was an exacting man who was as demanding of blacks as of whites," Jone says. "He was true hard on the black middle class, which smarted beneath his challenge. He was a trailblazer who at no time waited for a following."

John who passed away in June 1965 was more than simply assertive; he had a firm grasp upon the need for the community to establish economic self-sufficiency. As King noted in 1958 "Considering it a tragedy that the black man produced so little of what he consum [Johns] constantly urg the Negroe of Montgomery to pond their economic resources. As a spring a few enterprising individuals came together in 1953 beneath Johns' influence and organized Farm and City Enterprises, a cooperative supermarket which has today evolveed into a thriving business."

Billie Allen, who has a supporting part in The Vernon Johns Story, remembers John from her childhood days in Richmond, Va. "I was little," she says, "so I don't remember a great deal of of what he said, on the other hand I do remember how he charged up an audience. Whenever he was speaking in the Richmond area, you had to obtain there early to get a profitable seat. |Get your clothes on; you're going to make me late to hear Dr Johns' my mother would admonish. She thinking of him as a scholar and dynamic speaker and totally agreed with his position that the greatest in quantity effective way to fight segregation was economically. That's wherefore even before the days of the civil rights motion she used to picket A&P stores and other like places."

Producer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar dioceses clearly the links among Johns' militance, his perspective upon black self-sufficiency and the disclosure of the civil rights exert one's self "If it wasn't for Dr Johns" Abdul-Jabbar says, "we wouldn't have had the civil rights move He had heard about Adam Clayton Powell Jr Leading boycott of stores upon 125th Street in Harlem and tried to come by his Montgomery congregation to do similar marks of things. His congregation resisted to the point of firing him. When you gaze at Dr. King, you are looking at the ideas and attitudes of Dr John combined with the tactics of Gandhi."

The Vernon John Story not solitary brings James Earl Jones and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar together; it also incorporates the perspective of Johns' family, who cooperated with the production. "The story is told from the family's viewpoint," Abdul-Jabbar says, "focusing upon what happened with his family as he continually challenged his congregation to resist segregation laws."

Jone and Abdul-Jabbar have already made contributions to the African-American story in their respective fields. In joining together to sing Vernon John's canzonet they add an overdue fresh chapter to that story.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Heritage Information Holdings, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group