The Reverend Dr.William John Faulkner collected, preserved, and shared a significant repertoire of folktales and stories of slavery learned directly from a former slave. William J. Faulkner was born in Society Hill, South Carolina, in 1891. His father, Lawrence Faulkner, a successful schoolteacher, merchant, postmaster, and superintendent of Union Baptist Church, died in 1898 when William was a child. Needing help to run the family farm, William’s widowed mother, Hannah Doby Faulkner, hired Simon Brown, a formerly enslaved man from Virginia, to assist her with the property. It was directly from Simon Brown, a master storyteller, that William learned Bre’r Rabbit tales and stories of slave life.

Faulkner completed his education by earning a degree in tailoring at Maysville Institute in Darlington County, South Carolina, then went to Springfield College in Massachusetts, where he earned a Bachelor of Humanities degree cum laude (1914). After serving as an Army chaplain in 1918, he was hired in several positions for the YMCA including as Director of Physical Education. To make ends meet, he also worked briefly as a tailor and real estate contractor. 

In 1925, he became the pastor for the First Congregational Church of Atlanta. While in Atlanta in the 1920s, he worked with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s grandfather, Rev. A.D. Williams, to pass a school bond issue that built four Black elementary schools and Atlanta’s first Black high school. In 1933, he moved to Chicago to attend Chicago Theological Seminary and the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. From 1934-1953, he served as Dean of Men and Dean of Religion at Fisk University, as president of the NAACP in Nashville, Tennessee, and the first African American president of the National Association of College and University Chaplains. While at Fisk and as an active member of the Nashville NAACP, he also taught mainly white youth about race relations and religious experiences at Methodist Mission Camps. In 1946, he became the first African American to receive an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from the Chicago Theological Seminary. From 1953 to 1962, he pastored Park Manor Congregational Church in Chicago, and during that time, raised funds to support Dr. King’s work with the Montgomery bus boycott.

Rev. Faulkner was not only an internationally recognized preacher but also a renowned and masterful storyteller of the folktales and personal narratives he learned from Simon Brown. He recorded these tales in 1967 for a Howard University lecture series on African American folk literature designed to raise the consciousness of Black students and introduce white students to an understanding of Black culture. Faulkner later compiled these stories into books.  

 Among his acclaimed publications:

The Days When the Animals Talked (1978)

Brer Tiger and the Big Wind (1995)

Phyllis M. May-Machunda