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Twenty-seven. June Johnson
- Syracuse University Press
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175 t w e n t y - s e v e n June Johnson when I first saw June Johnson in 1978, it was on the sun-dappled campus of Tougaloo College. Dressed in white, a very tall and striking woman with glowing dark skin, she commanded the scene merely by her presence. I was immediately aware of the total composure of the young woman. She was a person who was comfortable with her height, and stood confidently erect. The confrontational, unapologetic look in her eyes made me think, unaccountably, of a proud African warrior. She stood alone, watchfully waiting for our film crew to set up for her scheduled interview. I had looked forward to meeting June Johnson because I knew that at age fourteen, she had been arrested with Fannie Lou Hamer, and the two had been brutally beaten in the Winona, Mississippi, jail. Her recollection of those events was to be an important element in our film biography Never Turn Back: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer. I turned to Charles McLaurin, who had known her when she was growing up in Greenwood and had set up this meeting. “What a great-looking young woman,” I said admiringly. “It’s hard to visualize her being beaten up anywhere.” He nodded agreement. “She is strong,” he said. “But anybody,” he added dryly, “can get beat up in a police station.” He cleared his throat and led me to meet June Johnson. “June is strong,” he repeated, and then chuckled. “But you should have known her mama. Now that was one tough lady!” Filming that interview for our documentary about Mrs. Hamer, a woman whom she so admired, established a trusting friendship that has prevailed over the years. “Was it Mrs. Hamer who got you involved in the civil rights movement, June?” I asked. 176 | The Roads from the Delta “No, Tracy, but Mrs. Hamer influenced me a lot by her example. I first heard her in 1963 in a Greenwood Baptist church. I happened to be passing by, and I heard this strong woman’s voice singing. Something told me to stop, and I eased into the church and sat in the back. I was struck by her, just hearing what she had to say. She was such a Christian woman! She was a giant with the scriptures and the Bible. She knew how to paraphrase it. For her, an illiterate woman, to have such knowledge about the Bible, and wisdom about how things were in Mississippi, just touched me deeply. She was there with several others from the Voter Education Project, but she was the one I remember so clearly. “It was really what I was seeing in my mother’s home and in Greenwood that led me to get involved with the movement. Too often, I would see my mother come home very disturbed after working long, long hours. She would leave at five in the afternoon when I’d be coming home from school, and she’d get home at four or five the next morning as we were getting up to get ready for school. We were just passing each other. And she was making fifteen dollars a week.” She frowned as her mind retraced those events, and her eyes were moist. “One night, she came home from work after walking over two miles in the rain. She was crying, and we asked her, ‘Why are you home so early, Mama? It’s only eight o’clock.’ She was very upset, and pulled off all the wet clothes. ‘I’m not going back,’ she said. ‘I’m not ever going back.’ She had messed up on her job, she told us, put onions on this white man’s hamburger by mistake. He had cursed her, and then he spat on her.” “What a terrible story for a girl to have to hear from her mother,” I said sympathetically. “Did you, yourself, know any white folks while you were living at home, June?” “I did because my mother did a lot of washing and ironing and cooking for them. I remember my mother taking in ironing on Sunday mornings , and I resented it. Because she got up and made biscuits for them before she cooked food for her own family. And in a closed society, like our black community in Greenwood, that was the way it always was. I watched my mother wash their drawers before she washed our clothes. I saw that she was...