Race and Remembrance: A Memoir

Foreword: A Magnificent Life and Journey: Dr. Arthur L. Johnson

x i Foreword A Magnificent Life and Journey: Dr. Arthur L. Johnson Great lives, in their encounters with successes and failures, hope and despair, glory and tragedy, heights and depths, and faith and doubt, disclose much about the vitality and creative power, the meaning and mystery of the human spirit at its best. Such is the case of Dr. Arthur L. Johnson, who has been a dear friend of mine since we were freshmen at Morehouse College in 1944. This book is powerful, illuminating, insightful, honest, straightforward , and inspiring. It is about Art Johnson and his times and multidimensional institutional involvements, opportunities, and challenges. It tells us much about the battles he has fought; the social, civic, educational, public policy, and political struggles in which he has been involved; the institutions and forces that have nurtured and sustained him as well as those that have oppressed and crushed him; his contributions and achievements; his pains and sufferings; his sorrows and joys; his inner strength and reserves; his fears, tears, and doubts; his triumphs over tragedies; his sensitivities in the face of brutal insensitivities, heartlessness, institutional and barbaric evils; his persistence and determination in confronting entrenched, institutionalized wrongs, perversities, degradation, humiliation, and dehumanization; his inordinate integrity, decency, and warm humanity ; and his loving, gentle, giving, and forgiving spirit. Ultimately, this book is about the human mind, heart, spirit, and will. It is also about social and institutional change and continuity, power struggles and moral purposes, strategies and tactics, rebellion and affirmation, American ideals and realities, protests and x i i | Foreword celebration of the status quo, individual rights and community responsibilities, “the children of light” and “the children of darkness.” Arthur Johnson was born in Americus, Georgia, in 1925, in the heart of the Old South, in the days of rabid Jim Crow segregation and discrimination with its controlling ideology of white supremacy and superiority. Brutal racism was the order of the day and night. Significantly, Americus is in south Georgia, near Plains, the birthplace of the thirty-ninth president of the United States, Jimmy Carter. At the age of twelve, Arthur moved to Birmingham, Alabama, a city made famous during the civil rights movement for its horrible bombings, “Bull” Connor and his fire hoses and police dogs, and its efforts to avoid social, institutional, and historical change. Early in the days of his youth, Arthur, somehow and for some reason , developed, deep in his heart and bones, a lifelong passion for racial and social justice and equality, and the inclusivity of human rights and dignity for all of God’s children. The passion gripped him, and he gripped the passion. He became a social activist in high school. His social activism intensified and accelerated at Morehouse College, where he was the founder of the institution’s chapter of the NAACP. AtMorehouse,he,likeMartinLutherKingJr.,LeroneBennettJr.,Bob Johnson, Charles V. Willie, and countless others, came under the magical influence, prophetic power, and majestic and transcendent spell of Dr. Benjamin Elijah Mays, whose creative and inexhaustible moral and intellectual restlessness and passionate commitment to social justice, righteousness, and the Kingdom of God are legendary. The powerful, transformative impact and humanistic commitment captured him and, to this day and hour, never let him go. They never shall. Arthur Johnson graduated from Morehouse in 1948. In 1949 he received a master’s degree in sociology from Atlanta University, having written a thesis titled “The Social Theories of W. E. B. DuBois.” In 1949–50 he was a research fellow in sociology at Fisk University. In July 1950, at the tender age of twenty-four, Dr. Johnson became the executive secretary of the Detroit branch of the NAACP at an annual salary of $3,000. To his surprise, he was in for a new awakening Foreword | x i i i about the depths, universality, and tyranny of racism in the Motor City. He discovered massive racial discrimination and segregation in housing, restaurants, hotels, bars, the entertainment industry, hospitals , and the police department. He found it in the banking business in loans and mortgages, in “redlining” by insurance companies, and in Jim Crow practices in government and politics. “The practices of discrimination and segregation in health care,” he writes, “were not much different in Detroit than in the Jim Crow South.” With his passionate commitment to social justice and racial equality , Arthur went to work to battle and...