Charles Spurgeon Johnson

Background

Johnson was born on July 24, 1893, in Bristol, Virginia, the son of the Reverend Charles Henry Johnson, a Baptist minister, and Winifred Branch.

Education

There was no high school for blacks in Bristol, so Johnson was sent to Richmond, where he also graduated from Virginia Union University, with honors, in 1916. Determined to learn more in the urban-industrial setting, he moved to Chicago, where he completed a Ph. B. at the University of Chicago in 1918 and began a lifelong association with Robert E. Park, a founder of the "Chicago school" of sociology.

Career

In Richmond, as a part-time social worker, Johnson observed firsthand the terrible social conditions under which blacks had to live. Throughout his career he applied Park's precepts to race relations. After a year of combat service in France, Johnson returned to Chicago in 1919, virtually on the eve of one of the worst race riots up to that time in American history, which left twenty-five blacks and fifteen whites dead and hundreds wounded.

Appointed secretary and research director of the Chicago commission of investigation in 1920, Johnson produced a massive report, The Negro in Chicago (1922), a landmark study that demonstrated that the riots were the surface manifestation of the deep problems of job and housing discrimination. Also in 1922, Johnson became national research director for the new Urban League in New York. At the Urban League, Johnson founded and edited Opportunity, a journal of black life dedicated to the improvement of social conditions and to furthering black creativity in literature and art.

In the 1920's, Harlem, for all its problems, pulsed with life; and Johnson, aided by his assistant editor, the poet Countee Cullen, effectively assumed the task of bringing talented young black writers and artists to the attention of white writers and publishers in New York. The "entrepreneur of the Harlem Renaissance" opened the pages of Opportunity to Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, the artist Aaron Douglas, and many others. The "New Negro" movement inevitably faded in the grim days of the Great Depression, but it had a lasting impact on black creative expression. Through these years Johnson never ceased to think about the South, his own roots there, and the great need to document the socioeconomic and racial system in the region.

In 1928 he became professor of sociology and director of the social sciences department at Fisk University. The next eighteen years established Johnson's national reputation. With limited resources and in the face of a hostile structure of racial segregation that made a black university in the South seem like a city under siege, Johnson went to work. As research director for both the Julius Rosenwald Fund and the American Missionary Association, he traveled constantly between Chicago, New York, and Nashville, raising funds for field studies. He succeeded in making Fisk a center of southern social science research second only to that at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, carrying out the projects and training students on an interracial basis. He wrote a dozen books and more than sixty articles. Some of Johnson's works, such as The Negro in American Civilization (1930) and Race Relations (1934), were sometimes criticized as too cautious in accommodating to the white power structure.

Johnson served on national commissions dealing with such issues as housing and rural farm tenancy. He investigated forced labor in Liberia for the League of Nations, was a member of the first American delegation to UNESCO at Paris in 1946, and served on President Harry S. Truman's commission for the reorganization of education in postwar Japan.

Moreover, the annual Race Relations Institutes that he developed brought a steady stream of foreign scholars and political leaders to the Fisk campus. When he was named president of Fisk in 1946 - the first black to be appointed - Johnson remained the entrepreneur, pressing for reform of and research on southern race relations. But the task of maintaining the national importance of Fisk did not leave enough time for effective day-to-day administration.

In 1956, two years after the Supreme Court decision declaring racial segregation in the public schools unconstitutional, Johnson, in the New York Times Magazine, realistically described the massive resistance to change in the South. With continued faith in democracy he also wrote of the prospects for further changes, inevitably in the direction of liberation for black Americans. He died at Louisville, Kentucky, on October 27, 1956.

Achievements

• As a "founding father" of race relations research, a national leader in education and in intergroup relations, and as president of Fisk University, one of the most important black universities in the country, Johnson was passionately devoted to the cause of equality of opportunity and full freedom for blacks. At the same time, as a black man and social scientist, he chose to work toward that end primarily through rigorous research that could demonstrate objectively the appalling human cost of racial segregation and discrimination. The most important of his books - Shadow of the Plantation (1934), Growing up in the Black Belt (1941), and Patterns of Negro Segregation (1943) - are valuable for their forceful analysis of white exploitation of blacks and the resilience of the black community in adapting to it. They were also a distinctive contribution to methodology, combining survey data with folk ethnography and individual personality profiles.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Growing Up in the Black Belt: Negro Youth in the Rural South
  • The collapse of cotton tenancy: Summary of Field studies & statistical surveys, 1933-35,
  • Shadow of the Plantation
  • The Negro in American Civilization: A Study of Negro Life and Race Relations in the Light of Social Research

Politics

With continued faith in democracy Johnson wrote of the prospects for further changes, inevitably in the direction of liberation for black Americans.

Views

Johnson never concealed his anger at segregation; rather, he wanted sociological analysis itself to stand as the irrefutable indictment of racism. In his prolific writing and in his role as adviser to public agencies and private foundations, he pursued the two goals of reform and research calmly and consistently. In these terms he is often linked with two other black social science contemporaries, W. E. B. DuBois and E. Franklin Frazier, though DuBois combined the roles into a more militant strategy against racism than either Johnson or Frazier were prepared to undertake, given their priorities for scholarship.

Connections

On November 6, 1920, Johnson married Marie Antoinette Burgette; they had four children.

Father:

Charles Henry Johnson

Mother:

Winifred Branch

Spouse:

Marie Antoinette Burgette

colleague:

Robert E. Park

He was an American urban sociologist who is considered to be one of the most influential figures in early U.S. sociology.

References

• Brothers and Strangers: Black Zion, Black Slavery, 1914–1940
• Charles S. Johnson: Leadership beyond the Veil in the Age of Jim Crow
• Proud Servant: The Memoirs of a Career Ambassador