Johnson, Charles Spurgeon

Source:

 African American National Biography

Johnson, Charles Spurgeon

(24 July 1893–27 Oct. 1956),

sociologist and college president, was born in Bristol, Virginia, the eldest of six children of Charles Henry Johnson, a Baptist minister, and Winifred Branch. Because there was not a high school for blacks in Bristol, he moved to Richmond and attended the Wayland Academy. In 1913 Johnson entered college at Virginia Union in Richmond, and graduated in only three years. While at college, Johnson volunteered with the Richmond Welfare Association, and one incident there had a profound impact on his future career. During the holiday season, while delivering baskets to needy people, he came across a young woman lying on a pile of rags, groaning in labor. Although none of the doctors in the area would help the young woman, Johnson persuaded a midwife to deliver the baby. He then tried to locate a home for the young woman, but those he approached shut the door in his face. Some families rejected the young woman because she was black and others because, in their eyes, she had sinned. Edwin Embree, Johnson's longtime friend, once noted that Johnson could not get the image of the young woman out of his mind and could not “cease pondering the anger of people at human catastrophe while they calmly accept conditions that caused it” (Thirteen against the Odds [1944], 214).

In 1916 Johnson moved north to pursue a PhD at the University of Chicago, which at that time employed some of the world's most prominent sociologists. It was there that he would meet his lifetime mentor, Robert E. Park. As a result of this relationship, many of Johnson's writings and approaches to race relations bear the mark of the eminent Chicago researcher. Johnson interrupted his studies to enlist in the military in 1918, but upon returning to Chicago a year later, he found himself in the middle of one of the most horrific race riots in U.S. history.

This incident sparked Johnson's involvement with the Chicago Race Relations Commission; as associate executive secretary for that body, he was largely responsible for the writing of The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (1922). With this publication Johnson spearheaded a tradition of social science research that described changes in race relations as cycles of tension and resolution, largely caused by outside forces. Although partly based on the work of Park, Johnson's version of this sociological model envisioned a wider role for human intervention; in particular, he believed that government could influence this process. Johnson's work with the Chicago Race Relations Commission also introduced him to Julius Rosenwald, the Sears and Roebuck tycoon and creator of the Julius Rosenwald Fund (which assisted with the establishment of black schools in the South and provided scholarships to talented black intellectuals).

Johnson married Marie Antoinette Burgette on 6 November 1920. Johnson moved with his wife to New York City, where he became the director of research and investigations for the National Urban League. During this period he also edited the league's journal, Opportunity, and published short stories and poems by several prominent Harlem Renaissance authors, including Langston Hughes, Countée Cullen, Aaron Douglas, and Zora Neale Hurston. Johnson also used his well-established connections to white philanthropists to secure financial support for black literature and art. In his view, promoting culture was a way of combating racism.

The sociologist Blyden Jackson, Johnson's colleague while he was attending Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, credits him with helping to “ease the transformation of more than one neophyte in the arts, like a Zora Neale Hurston, from a nonentity into a luminary of the Renaissance” (Southern Review 25.4 [1990]: 753). Indeed, both Jackson and Alain Locke point to a 1924 dinner Johnson hosted in New York as one of the most important contributions to the Renaissance. With more than three hundred people from both the white and black worlds in attendance (including Locke, James Weldon Johnson, William Baldwin III, Jessie Fauset, Countée Cullen, Albert Barnes, and W. E. B. Du Bois), the event helped many black poets, artists, and writers find mainstream publishers and venues for their endeavors. For Johnson, events like this dinner were part of a carefully planned effort to improve opportunities for African Americans in the 1920s in ways that had not been possible during the nadir of race relations before World War I.

Near the close of the Renaissance in 1928, Charles Johnson returned south to Nashville to chair the department of social sciences at Fisk University. Supported by a grant from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, the department was set up with the idea that Johnson would be its leader. Armed with solid connections and ample funding, he brought many important individuals to the Fisk campus, including Sterling Brown, James Weldon Johnson, Horace Mann Bond, Robert E. Park, E. Franklin Frazier, Arna Bontemps, and Aaron Douglas. Along with his colleagues in the social sciences, Johnson published widely. It was during this time that he produced some of his best known works, such as Shadow of the Plantation (1934), Growing Up in the Black Belt (1938), and Patterns of Negro Segregation (1942). Johnson also created an internationally renowned race relations institute at Fisk, which brought together leaders, scholars, and ordinary citizens from throughout the United States and the world to discuss race relations in an integrated setting. Despite suffering extensive criticism locally, especially from the segregationist Nashville Banner, the institute and Johnson's leadership drew great prominence to Fisk and to Johnson as an individual.

In 1946, at time when Fisk was experiencing a leadership crisis, its board of trustees considered selecting the first black candidate to lead the institution. Given his international stature and administrative skills, Johnson seemed like the most obvious candidate, but several of the alumni, including Fisk's most prominent graduate, Du Bois, spoke out vehemently against his selection. Johnson's close ties to philanthropy, including the Whitney, Ford, and Rosenwald foundations, made him suspect in their minds. For this group, the foundations were forever tainted by their previous efforts to promote an industrial curriculum at black colleges. Despite this opposition, the financial needs of Fisk prevailed over ideology, and Johnson was inaugurated president in 1947; the board of trustees had recognized Johnson's success in advancing and improving Fisk's race relations institutes through his fund-raising efforts and believed that he might similarly ensure progress for the university as a whole.

In his role as president, Johnson created the Basic College Early Entry Program. Although Johnson was a proponent of integration, he doubted that it would occur quickly and thus was inspired to initiate a program to nurture young black minds within the black college setting. The Basic College offered students a cohesive learning environment in which they benefited from the knowledge and experience of literary, artistic, and political figures that Johnson invited to campus in the years before his death in 1956. The program produced such figures as the Pulitzer Prize–winning author David Levering Lewis; Hazel O'Leary, energy secretary during the administration of President Bill Clinton; and Spelman College president Johnnetta Cole.

In addition to his university-related service, Johnson served as a trustee for the Julius Rosenwald Fund from 1933 to 1948, working specifically as the codirector of the fund's race-relations program. From 1944 to 1950 he acted as the director of the race-relations division of the American Missionary Association. Concurrently with his foundation work, Johnson conducted research for the federal government and worked as a cultural ambassador. As a member of the New Deal's Committee on Farm Tenancy, Johnson supported President Franklin Roosevelt's efforts to end poverty and racism in the rural South. After World War II, under the direction of President Harry Truman, Johnson was one of ten U.S. delegates for the first United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) conference in Paris. And he assisted President Dwight Eisenhower by serving on the Board of Foreign Scholarships under the Fulbright-Hays Act.

Johnson spent a lifetime cultivating black scholarship, creativity, and leadership and used research and culture as tools to fight racism. As he grew older, however, the pressure generated by his many obligations began to take its toll: his migraine headaches worsened, and he developed a heart condition. On 27 October 1956, on the way to a board meeting in New York, Johnson died of a heart attack on the train platform in Louisville, Kentucky, at age sixty-three.

Although Johnson's professional training and early practical experience in race relations were in the urban North, he chose to address race relations in the South, thereby differentiating himself from Du Bois and other black intellectuals. He was not a radical, but rather a diplomat who, through his collaborations, realized many of the ideas of thinkers more radical than he.

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