Jr., and the like. Vernon Johns, who had preceded King as
pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery,
Alabama, preached one Sunday on the subject, “The Vindi-
cation of the Human Experience.” He began with a discus-
sion of the graveyard poets, those eighteenth-century English
poets whose work was suffused with a preoccupation with
death, and ended with an interpretation of Melville’s Moby
Dick

. When Vernon Johns preached, you could almost see

the tumult of the scene—the roiling of the ocean, Ahab, har-
poon in hand in the rowboat, ready to strike at the great
white whale, Moby Dick’s malevolent eye. Such verbal por-
traiture made the sermon all the more memorable because it
was an emotional as well as an intellectual experience. Over
the last ten years, I have been privileged to speak at Rankin
Chapel, where laywomen and laymen are often invited as
guest speakers.

When I returned home to practice law, I was invited to be

“Youth Day” speaker and “Men’s Day” speaker at various
churches in Atlanta—great experience for a lawyer in the
embryonic stages of his career, and it helped in the law prac-
tice. Giving those speeches was like an internship, a re-
hearsal for what was to come. Each time I spoke, it was a
learning experience.

One of the most memorable was when, as field secretary

for the NAACP in Georgia, I attended the convention of the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in the
fall of  in Richmond, Virginia. Martin Luther King had

INTRODUCTION

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