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Two miracles happened.

The first was that he taught himself the equivalent of a college education as a farmhand in early twentieth century Virginia.

The second miracle was hard.

Without permission or invitation, one day in 1915, this young man burst into the office of the junior dean at Oberlin College school of theology, in Oberlin, Ohio. The school had already rejected the young man. He therefore came in person to announce his readiness to begin classes.

The junior dean, probably after consulting the appropriate records, was not impressed. The college didn’t recognize his prior schooling, the junior dean explained to the young man. His credits weren’t any good.

“I got your letter, Dean Fiske,” the young man replied. “But I want to know whether you want students with credits or students with brains.”

Imagine the appalled look on the junior dean’s face. On that day in 1915, the Victorian era lay still within living memory. The dean, a white man, occupied a lofty position at a racially segregated college, with black students arbitrarily confined to their own dining, housing, and student organizations.

A young Negro man (as blacks were then called) had nevertheless busted into his office to demand admission.

The junior dean handed the interloper a book written in German. Here, said the junior dean. Read this.

The interloper did.

Astonished, the junior dean sent the young man to see the senior dean. The senior dean handed the youth a copy of the Bible, written in ancient Greek. Here, said his eminence the senior dean of the theology school. Read this.

The young farmhand did so. The senior dean enrolled him that day.

That was the second miracle.

The time came for a third, more than thirty years later. From1949 to 1953, the once-upon-a-time youth who graduated from Oberlin’s theology school went on to lead a Negro church in Montgomery, Alabama. Shepherd of the flock.

The pastor’s antics left the congregation worried. They were leaders of the city’s respectable Negro establishment: doctors and lawyers and businessmen in perfectly coifed suits, their wives impeccably attired as well. They did things a certain way. Decorum was everything. To their regret, they discovered that the preacher they’d hired didn’t much care for decorum. He demanded they sing Negro spirituals from the age of slavery. The parishioners refused. That kind of emotionalism had no place in the church, they believed.

That wasn’t the worst of it. To the horror of the congregation, and the suspicion of Montgomery’s white-controlled police department, this Negro pastor preached from the pulpit about the evils of racial segregation.

And he did more than preach.

At some point during his tenure as minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, Vernon Johns got on a city bus. City law required Negroes to sit in the back. History remembers that much, thanks to Rosa Parks. The law also specified that, when moving to the back of the bus, blacks do so by exiting the front of the bus, where they paid the fare, and enter through the rear entrance, from which they were to locate a seat. The law further gave bus drivers authority to order blacks to move to any seat necessary to avoid a black man’s legs coming near the knees of a white woman.

On this day, minister Vernon Johns, when ordered by the white bus driver to exit the front of the bus and board at the back, refused. Johns sat down in the front.

In the doubtless tense atmosphere that followed, the driver refused to move the bus. Everyone just sat there, waiting.

Johns broke the standoff. I want my money back, he said. Vernon Johns was a large, intimidating man with a booming voice and a personality like an earthquake waiting to happen.

The bus driver gave him a refund. This was unprecedented in the annals of Montgomery’s public transportation, as far as anyone knew.

Maybe this should have been enough to count as the third miracle of Vernon Johns. Johns didn’t think so.

He stood up and addressed all the people on the bus, black or white. Come with me now, he bellowed (or so I imagine the scene), let’s get off this bus and show we will not tolerate so grave a wrong.

No one responded. It’s easy to hear the uncomfortable silence, see the shifting glances.

Vernon Johns got off the bus alone. The bus went on its way. Johns could have sought revenge, but vengeance wasn’t his.

By 1953, Johns had left the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. His congregation said they’d had enough of his stunts. They needed someone respectable.

They hired Martin Luther King, Jr.

Not long after, Rosa Parks sat down at the front of a Montgomery bus.

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.

-Casey v. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania, 1992.

Is that what Vernon Johns did? Define his own concept? Like picking from a buffet? Just a matter of taste? Or is that what the authors of the racialized bus laws did?

The account of Vernon Johns and his failed, forgotten bus boycott comes from the book Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963, published in 1988 by journalist Taylor Branch. Branch’s volume became the first in an epic trilogy, covering the years from Supreme Court desegregation of schools in 1954 to Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968.

Branch filled his books with vivid, compelling stories like that of Vernon Johns. He strove to be true to historical evidence in the telling. That striving distinguishes his stories, those of a historian, from tales in novels, movies, or television. Both forms of storytelling must strike an observer as connected to reality, but they connect in different ways. Fiction never happened. History did.

This distinction can be complicated. But it exists, even though we can’t demonstrate it by formal logical proof. According to modern knowledge, formal logic itself can’t demonstrate its own veracity by logical proof. Our sense that reality exists, and is subject to logic, is a form of faith.

It doesn’t follow, of course, that any statement about reality is true.

The reality that Vernon Johns experienced is one subject of the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of African American History. The Trump administration recently issued an executive order to purge the museum’s conception of reality and replace it with a different one. Critics say the replacement will be “political propaganda” that erases ugly truths of American history.

Below, from the Smithsonian web site, we find the museum’s concept of what African Americans like Vernon Johns experienced.

The museum views its storytelling as a tool to teach anti-racist therapy, which the museum believes can counteract the racial privilege of white people in society.

The therapeutic process taught by the Smithsonian is painful for white people, the museum acknowledges. But it is vital for a decent, equitable society.

The museum scrubbed these passages from its website, according to The WayBack Machine internet archive, around a month or so before the inauguration of Donald Trump. Two examples of the museum’s deleted web pages appear here and here.

The Smithsonian web pages read like a manual of requirements. They read like an institution of the US government presenting information to Americans on what and how to think.

Taylor Branch’s epic trilogy of the civil rights era, by contrast, reads much like a novel, even though it isn’t. His prose lives to take root, not to compel. His approach contrasts starkly with that of the federally funded and administered Smithsonian Institution.

The Smithsonian purged its thought manual before Donald Trump took office. That hasn’t saved the museum from the tender mercies of the White House and its king.

The man in the Oval Office is eviscerating the government, education, economy, and alliances of the United States, in disregard of law, apparently to purge political enemies and reconstruct institutions according to a new ideological blueprint. The Smithsonian Museum of African American history found itself caught up in this vast purge.

At the same time, the museum itself has existed to advance racial enlightenment theory, as shown on its deleted web pages. This theory forms an ideology – a rigidly constructed mental architecture for interpreting reality in service of a political program. The ideology has a function: the museum seeks to build an equitable society through racialized psychotherapy.

Similar politicized therapy spread throughout US institutions over the last three decades (since Casey v. Planned Parenthood, in fact), promoting personal transformation not just on race but for social equity more generally. This therapeutic social methodology manifests as a variety of jargon and slogans, from the same family tree as Smithsonian race theory. Toxic masculinity. Silence is violence. Children know who they are.

Prior to January 20, 2025, this social justice language emerged from advertisements, class curricula, workplace training, entertainment, social media, organizational web content. It blended with the already-existing principles of American individualism, which celebrates personal autonomy. The new dispensation said: do as you will, but do no harm, especially to history’s victims. Bureaucracy will determine the victims and their prerogatives. You, meanwhile, have absolute freedom to choose your identity and lifestyle, so long as you choose correctly.

This mixed message, it turns out, is a recipe for madness. In practice, it’s analogous to a spouse saying, “I love you, don’t touch me.” Every choice involves guessing a hidden formula of right and wrong, plus and minus, good and harm. The administrators get to decide whether you decided correctly.

This setup became the essence of choice-based, secular, rationalistic society, in the upper ranks of twenty first century American society. Defenders of those ranks call their belief system liberalism or modernity. Do what you want, as long as you don’t hurt others. Or else. The identity politics of the Smithsonian simply took this logic to its logical end.

Over the last three decades, we’ve seen this “guess correctly or else” dogma on matters of race (black lives matter, or else), gender (trans women are women, or else), sexuality (#MeToo, or else), parenting (gentle parenting, or child protective services), emotions (be anti-dysregulated, or else), spirituality (reject shame and judgment, or else), bioethics (banish sexual repression, or else), health (question medical authority, or else), immigration (let everyone in, or else), tech (keep up with the latest technology, or go to the scrap heap), climate (go green, or else), and foreign policy (support the victims in Ukraine, or else), among other things. In practice, this kind of liberation demands structuring your existence day in and day out for the merciless avoidance of harm (or punishment), so that you can be free, left alone instead of punished, and others will be safe.

That doctrine came to define the bureaucracies of the private and public sector. As US military forces evacuated Afghanistan in 2021, they left behind PowerPoint slides teaching Western theories of gender fluidity to village followers of Abraham’s fearsome God. This wasn’t colonialism, the PowerPoint keepers insisted, as they waved goodbye from a C-17 transport plane. Neither was paving over farmland in the Midwest with solar panels, for extraction of profits to benefit remote power centers, in the face of local opposition. Neither was showing white privilege videos at a factory or school in rural America surrounded by fentanyl. Neither was keeping families from saying goodbye to elders asphyxiated by Covid, lest CDC guidelines be transgressed. Those who objected were ignorant flyover rubes.

Now their vengeance is at hand, in the form of DOGE, ICE, tariffs, and cataclysm – mindless, unbridled backlash, wrecking for the sake of wrecking, to own the elites at long, long last.

But the retaliation against the MAGA onslaught is gathering. Mutual Assured Polarization will have its way. To match the spewing sulfur volcano of rage and vengeance from the White House, according to its enemies, we must obey the digitized professional contempt and unrelenting fear from AOC and Chris Murphy, MSNBC and NPR, commanding a backlash to the backlash. Purge the makers of the purge, give hate for hate, mobilize the righteous, make the rube afraid, strike hard and fast to break him at long, long last, and this time all will be well. The old order of PowerPoint justice, expert approved, will be restored. We never knew we had it so good.

Except “had it so good” gave them Trump.

Elsewhere, the world takes its course. Blood pumps in hospitals, sweat breaks in warehouses, kids yell in the fields and backyards, a heart hammers with emotion born across 13 billion years, forgiveness holds promise, living things that were dead blossom and resurface, touched by the sun out of forever, on the way.

None of this happens only by the choice, or definition, or autonomy, or making, or theories, or meaning of human beings. The choice beyond self, tribe, reason, language, concept, or control is simply whether to get on board the world and take a seat, which is having faith, taking a leap — how to live in the Real, whether to trust it, into the deep.

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