Sociologist and college administrator, Charles Spurgeon Johnson was born July 24, 1893 in Bristol, Virginia, to well-educated parents. Because there were no high schools in Bristol, Johnson followed in his father’s footsteps and went to Richmond to attend Wayland Academy. By 1899, Wayland had combined with Richmond Institute to form Virginia Union. He shined shoes in a barbershop, worked as a watchman on one of the steamers running from New York to Providence and worked in hotels and resorts in order to pay his way through school. In 1916 after only three years, Johnson earned a B.A. from Virginia Union University. Not only did Johnson graduate from Virginia Union ahead of schedule, but he was chosen to give the valedictory speech.
In 1917 Johnson moved to Chicago to pursue graduate studies in sociology at the University of Chicago. His study was interrupted during his second year by service in France during World War I as a non-commissioned officer with the United States army. He saw action in the MeuseArgonne offensive and was under fire for twenty-two consecutive days. In 1919, Johnson returned to Chicago to continue his work with the renowned sociologist Robert Ezra Park. It was Park that exposed Johnson to the theory that suggested that the way to break barriers of segregation and discrimination could only come through contact, interaction, and personal relationships with White people. Park claimed that, “’Personal relations and personal friendships are the great moral solvents. Under their influence all distinctions of class, caste, and even race, are dissolved into the general flux which we sometimes call democracy.'" It was this idea of contact among races that would permeate Charles Johnson’s work towards the advancement of the African American race.
Soon he would find himself amidst one of the worst racial confrontations in American history. On July 27, 1919, several Black children who were swimming at a public beach drifted beyond the invisible boundary area designated for African Americans. Before they knew it, incensed Whites stoned one of the boys, Eugene Williams, to death. A White man on the shore, George Stauber was the one that stoned young Williams. The White cop on duty refused to arrest Stauber. A crowd of Blacks and Whites gathered. Police reinforcements confronted the Black crowd, instead of investigating Williams death. Word and rumors spread, one thing lead to another and the city suddenly erupted in racial violence. Williams’s death was the spark that ignited the Chicago riot of 1919.
As he walked toward his office at the Urban League on Wabash Avenue, “he saw a man stabbed to death on the steps of the building. He himself was shot at.” He was blocked from his room near the University of Chicago, and as he made his way from the Loop to the Midway, he “ran into fresh bursts of rioting all the way.” He spent the remainder of the day trying to aid the victims. When the riot was over, 15 whites and 23 Blacks would be killed and more than five hundred wounded and thousands more left homeless. Johnson never expected that less than three months after this narrow escape from death, he would be one of the candidates under consideration for the post of executive secretary for the Chicago Commission on Race Relations. Illinois Governor Frank O. Lowden appointed twelve members, six Whites and six Blacks, to the commission. Johnson was well qualified to react to the aftermath of the violence in Chicago.
Although Johnson attempted for a time to resume his studies, much of his activity for the next three years centered on the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, which was created to investigate the riot’s causes. Completing a study for the organization, he investigated and analyzed the facts and causes of the Chicago Riot during the Red Summer of 1919, in "The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot", published in 1922. Written under Park's supervision, this was Johnson's first major research project. The report was noteworthy for the application of scientific objectivity to the emotional issue of race. It was the first of numerous published 20th century studies of the causes urban riots and their consequences. It was also one of the first significant sociological studies indicating the persistence of racial segregation and discrimination within northern cities, and it warned that the pervasive barriers to African American economic and social equality might provoke additional riots. By this time, Johnson had gained a national reputation in the field of race relations.
He received offers to do studies in other areas where the Great Migration was making an impact, such as Baltimore, Trenton, Buffalo, and Los Angeles. Eventually, he accepted a position with the National Urban League and, in 1921, went to New York as director of the Department of Research and Investigations. By 1923, Johnson became the founder and editor of the NUl's magazine, "Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life". It was in this environment that he helped spawn the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Believing that art and literature could lift up African Americans, the journal proved to be an important cultural force in the Harlem Renaissance, publishing many of the Black poets and writers of the time. The magazine would organized literary contests and awards ceremonies to gain recognition for these authors and encourage White publishers to support them. He corralled some of these new voices in a literary anthology, "Ebony and Topaz". The "Opportunity" published a wide variety of social science research and popular essays which revealed the impact Jim Crow on Black communities.
As Johnson was in the midst of editing "The Opportunity", he witnessed the rise of other magazines in the literary scene around him. Among the most popular were "The Crisis", by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and "The Messenger", by the United Nations Improvement Association (UNIA), the both of which began publishing more literary works by African American artists. To Johnson, the world of the Black literati was not merely underappreciated, it was completely obscure. The world of Black literature needed a stage of its own on which its exposure would not be able to be suppressed by this normally White dominated domain. This was particularly important because many publishing venues were closed to Blacks. Johnson had this unprecedented notion to provide an outlet for African American scholars and writers alike whose work was not acceptable to other media.
Johnson looked upon African American arts as a powerful agent of movement toward racial assimilation in American society. At the same time that Johnson’s career was advancing, he was also nurturing one of the most important relationships of his personal life. This would come to fruition in 1920 when he married Marie Antoinette Burgette. They gave the world five children. Johnson yearned to return to the South, not only to study race relations but to change them. In 1926 he moved to Nashville, taking a position as chair of the Department of Sociology at Fisk University, which was established by a gift from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, where he worked for the rest of his career. Here the bulk of Johnson's sociological contribution was made. In various publications, Johnson made a major contribution to the understanding of the South as a region, the economic foundation of race relations, and contemporary debate on racial problems. Johnson’s work emphasized the importance of empirical research in understanding and addressing social issues, making him a pioneer in the field.
The collaborative research teams led by Johnson interviewed formerly enslaved Tennesseans, documenting their life experiences and beliefs. Their series of reports on counties and individual communities in Tennessee is an important documentary source of rural and Black life in the mid-twentieth century. As a sociologist, he published widely. His works in race relations are voluminous. Using the survey method, combined with the case study approach, he made impressive use of the human document. Looking at Johnson’s scholarly productivity during this time included, "The Negro in Chicago" (1922), "Patterns of Negro Segregation" (1943), and "Into the Main Stream" (1947) one could see how thoroughly Johnson dissected the racial problems of the times. His book "The Negro in American Civilization" in 1930 became a widely accepted sociological text, where Johnson’s use of economic and statistical data is exemplified.
One of his most important books is Shadow of the Plantation (1934), a study of the collapse of southern cotton tenancy, in which he demonstrated that racial discrimination was compounded by the economic exploitation that existed in the South during the Great Depression. Johnson argued that sharecropping created an ongoing economic basis for racial discrimination, and demonstrated how powerful agrarian and industrial interests shaped the "human relations" of race and racism. His other works include "The Negro College Graduate", which he described in great detail how difficult it was for African Americans to gain entrance to college and to advance professionally after graduation, and the economic and psychological problems this caused. Other books that use economic and statistical data, followed: "The Collapse of Cotton Tenancy" (1935), and "Statistical Atlas of Southern Counties" (1941).
In 1930, Johnson was appointed by the State Department to represent the United States on the International Commission of the League of Nations to investigate slavery and enforced labor in Liberia. The work he did on this commission would be published posthumously as "Bitter Canaan", one of his most controversial works. In 1931, he received the William E. Harmon Foundation Gold Medal Award for Distinguished Achievement among African Americans in the field of science. During the Depression, he wrote the volume on Negro housing for President Herbert C. Hoover’s Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership. During the New Deal, he served President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a member of the Committee on Farm Tenancy. In 1937 he became the first African American elected vice president of the American Sociological Society. During World War II, Johnson openly attacked segregation. He examined urban race relations at a moment when Whites fought to preserve their power and privilege, especially in education, employment, and housing.
One of his more important works in this period was a 98 page study of San Francisco's Black community. It highlighted the institutional racism throughout the city. In the 1940s, Johnson and his team documented Black folkways in Coahoma County, Mississippi, in collaboration with the Library of Congress. In 1943 with the help of the Rosenwald Fund, Johnson published "The Monthly Summary". It provided 8,000 subscribers with the status of race relations in various parts of the country, documented by several thousand items. Beginning in 1944, also with the assistance of the Rosenwald Fund, Johnson led annual Race Relations Institutes, attended by leaders from all over the country. Based in ethnographic research, these institutes were renowned for their series of research reports and community studies in the Deep South. These meetings at Fisk University were extremely influential in the developing Civil Rights movement. NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall was a frequent speaker during the 1950's, and Johnson provided him with evidence to use in his legal briefs for Brown v. Board of Education.
His leadership and scholarly ability were recognized by Fisk's board of trustees, and in October 1946 it named Johnson the FIRST African American president of Fisk University. Given his national stature and administrative background, he seemed like a natural choice to lead the Nashville institution. However, many of the alumni, and W.E.B Du Bois in particular, staged an all-out protest to stop his selection for the position. Johnson’s strong ties to the nation’s leading philanthropists were seen as a reason to mistrust him. Regardless, the necessity of raising money won out over ideology, and Johnson took over the reins as acting president in 1946. In this role, he was able to realize one of his goals—creating a center for black scholarship. By providing a nurturing environment for talented Black students, he passed on to a new generation his legacy of “activism through scholarship”. As the first Black president of Fisk University, he arranged for James Weldon Johnson, Aaron Douglas, and many other Renaissance men and women to find work at the college.
He served until 1956. During his tenure, he focused on expanding the university’s academic programs and fostering an environment of intellectual rigor and social responsibility. In this role, he was able to realize one of his goals—creating a center for black scholarship. By providing a nurturing environment for talented Black students, he passed on to a new generation his legacy of “activism through scholarship.” The Basic College early entry program is perhaps the best example of Johnson’s overall philosophy pertaining to students and student learning. Unsure of the possibility of integrated black education in the South, Johnson created the Basic College to give promising Black students the opportunity to learn in a nurturing, stimulating environment. Students were taught in cohesive learning groups and benefited from the presence of artistic, literary, and political figures that Johnson invited to the Fisk campus.
Johnson’s leadership at Fisk solidified the institution’s reputation as a leading center for Black education and research. From 1944 to 1950, he was director of the Race Relations Division of the American Missionary Association of the Congregational and Christian Churches of America. And in 1948, he was a delegate to the Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam, Holland. Johnson’s impact extended beyond academia. Johnson’s international reputation was best acknowledged in the fall of 1955, when he was invited by the Social Sciences Section of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to participate in—and later chair—a conference of world experts on race relations. Following this honor, on the invitation of the American-Scandinavian Foundation and the Universities of Stockholm, Oslo, and Copenhagen, he made a lecture tour of the Scandinavian countries.
Charles Johnson paid great personal dues for his continuing involvement in the struggle for freedom. His contemporaries recall his suffering through interminable conferences in his multiple roles as scholar, service intellectual, and entrepreneur of race relations. As the years moved on, the migraine headaches that developed early in his career worsened. The pressures on him came to a head on October 27, 1956, when he died of a heart attack. Charles Spurgeon Johnson played a key role in the effort to implement the decision in the face of "massive resistance" in the South. He was a key figure in the Civil Rights Movement, advocating for desegregation and equal opportunities for African Americans. Although he had had a full and brilliant career, he did not live to see the fruition of the freedom movement or the Black liberation movement. But this man, born during the nadir of American democracy and race relations, had, along with his generation, laid the groundwork upon which the Martin Luther Kings, Malcolm Xs, Fannie Lou Hamers, and others would lead the way.
Over his long career, he advised three American presidents on education and civil rights, and was awarded five honorary doctorates (Virginia Union, Harvard, Columbia, Howard University, and University of Glasgow in Scotland). The failure of White moderate southerners to embrace the court’s decree quickly bitterly disappointed Johnson. His achievements in the worlds of education and civil rights had finally brought him recognition from various national and international organizations. His work and that of his peers also contributed to passage of federal civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s. Despite the fact that Johnson’s professional training and early practical experience in race relations were in the urban North, he chose to address race problems in the South. In this way, he differentiated himself from Du Bois and other Black intellectuals. He was not a radical, but a diplomat who, through his collaborations, realized many of the ideas of thinkers more radical than himself. From the education of a “Talented Tenth” to the establishment of a center for black social science to the funding of Harlem Renaissance artists, Johnson’s accomplishments paved the way for the advancement of Black Americans later in the century.