Dexter Avenue Baptist Church's sanctuary predates the bus boycott by more than sixty years, and the pastor who occupied its pulpit immediately before Martin Luther King Jr. did far more to prepare the ground than the church's own most famous story usually credits. The red brick, Late Victorian building standing today was designed by Pelham J. Anderson and built largely by William Watkins, a member of the congregation, completed in 1889 after several years of construction, giving the congregation a permanent home decades before Montgomery's civil rights history reached it.
Vernon Johns held the pulpit from 1947 to 1952, and his tenure was combative by design. Johns preached openly against Montgomery's segregation laws from a Black pulpit at a time when doing so carried real professional and physical risk, publicly challenging the city's segregated buses years before Rosa Parks's arrest and pressing his own congregation, some of whom found his confrontational style exhausting, to treat civil rights as a matter the church could not stay silent on. His combative relationship with parts of the congregation eventually cost him the position, and the search committee that followed him deliberately sought a less controversial successor.
That search produced King, twenty five years old and untested, hired in 1954 in part because he seemed unlikely to repeat Johns's confrontations. Within two years King was leading exactly the kind of campaign Johns had spent five years agitating for, inheriting a congregation Johns had already primed to see civil rights activism as consistent with its faith, whatever discomfort his own methods had caused along the way.