Background
Johnson was born on January 4, 1891, in Paris, Tennessee, the son of the Reverend Wyatt Johnson, a former slave who was a stationary engine operator in a mill, and Caroline Freeman, a homemaker.
Johnson was born on January 4, 1891, in Paris, Tennessee, the son of the Reverend Wyatt Johnson, a former slave who was a stationary engine operator in a mill, and Caroline Freeman, a homemaker.
After his grammar school education in Paris, Johnson entered the Academy of Roger Williams University in Nashville (1903). When the school was destroyed by fire in 1905, he completed the term at Howe Institute in Memphis. In the fall of 1905 he entered the Preparatory Department of Atlanta Baptist College (Morehouse after 1913), where he completed his high school studies.
During his college years, also at Atlanta Baptist College (1907-1911), he was strongly influenced by President John Hope, Dean Samuel Howard Archer, and Professor Benjamin Brawley, from whom he learned a mastery of language and a deep respect for learning placed in the service of others. A leading student at the college, Johnson played varsity football and tennis, was on the debating team, and sang in the glee club and chorus.
During the summers of 1912 and 1913, he studied at the University of Chicago and received a second B. A. degree in 1913. From 1913 to 1916 he was enrolled at the Rochester Theological Seminary, graduating with the degree of Bachelor of Divinity in 1916. The most important intellectual influence on him was Walter Rauschenbusch, whose doctrine of the Social Gospel aimed to place Christianity in the service of social and economic reform.
From 1921 to 1922 he was on leave from his church to study at Harvard University, where he received the Master of Sacred Theology degree in 1922. A year later he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree by Howard University in recognition of his application of religion to social problems.
As a result of his outstanding academic record, Johnson was appointed to the faculty and taught history, economics, and English for two years. He also served as acting dean of Atlanta Baptist College from 1911 to 1912. During his studies at Rochester he was the pastor of the Second Baptist Church in Mumford, New York.
From 1916 to 1917, Johnson was a secretary of the International Committee of the YMCA, working in the Southwest. In 1917 he became pastor of the First Baptist Church of Charleston, West Virginia, and established a reputation as a brilliant orator and community organizer. In Charleston he organized the Rochdale Cooperative Cash Grocery and the Charleston branch of the NAACP.
In June 1926, Johnson was selected the first African American president of Howard University. His appointment as president was regarded as a test of whether, in the context of a segregated society, an African American president could lead a high-quality university, since all of the leading black colleges and universities at the time - Fisk, Hampton, Spelman, Shaw, Morgan, Talladega, and Lincoln - had white presidents. Equally significant was the impact of segregation on educational opportunities for African Americans, who were barred by statute from attending the universities of the South, and there was no provision for professional or graduate education in the racially separate institutions that those states maintained for black students. The most serious problem was the uncertainty of continuing federal support because there was no statutory authority for the annual appropriations to Howard that had been granted by Congress since 1879. Only two of the university's schools and colleges were accredited, liberal arts and dentistry. The academic problems in the professional schools, notably law and medicine, were particularly severe. On December 13, 1928, Congress enacted legislation amending the charter that Howard had received in 1867 to provide for annual appropriations. In recognition of this landmark change, Johnson was awarded the NAACP's Spingarn Medal "for the highest achievement of an American Negro" on July 2, 1929.
In the early years of his administration, Johnson succeeded in winning government approval of a twenty-year development plan and in attracting the financial support of the Rockefeller Foundation, the General Education Board, and the Rosenwald Fund. During his tenure, Howard's annual budget rose from $700, 000 to $8 million, and twenty major buildings were added to the physical plant, increasing its value from $3 million to $34 million. In the first decade of his presidency the faculty doubled, library resources doubled, and the scientific equipment of laboratories tripled. During his administration each school and college of the university was accredited, and each was conducting instruction and research in new facilities. Most significant was the transformation of the professional schools. The school of law became a full-time day school, was admitted to membership in the Association of American Law Schools, and developed a program in civil rights litigation that led to the Supreme Court's landmark decision, Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. In the College of Medicine, there was a complete rebuilding of the faculty that paralleled the improvement in physical facilities, substantially enhancing the quality of instruction and research. The college of liberal arts faculty in the 1930's and 1940's included the largest number of blacks with Ph. D. 's in the nation, and many of its departments were headed by scholars of international reputation. The award of the university's first Ph. D. , in chemistry, in 1958 was perhaps the clearest indication of a new level of maturity as an institution committed to graduate instruction and research.
During Johnson's tenure, Howard attracted students from more than ninety countries. He articulated the view that Howard was providing progressive leadership not only for African Americans but also for Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, at the time when there was a contest between the Soviet Union and the United States for the allegiance of nonaligned countries. He insisted that Howard, continuing the tradition of its abolitionist founders, was a "world university" open to all races and religions, a microcosm of a future in which democratic values would shape higher education in all countries. The central figure in the development of Howard into a major American university, Johnson retired in 1960. In 1962 he was appointed to the District of Columbia Board of Education, where for the next three years he was a prominent critic of the inequitable funding of schools in poor neighborhoods and the persistence of racial discrimination in schools even after the elimination of mandated racial segregation. Johnson was honored by Liberia and Ethiopia for his leadership in education.
He died in Washington, D. C. , on September 10, 1976.
During most of Johnson's administration, Howard trained 48 percent of the nation's black physicians, 49 percent of the black dentists, and 96 percent of the black lawyers. The academic quality of Howard was therefore of national significance. In the 1920's Howard's instructional facilities were inadequate, its library and laboratory development substandard, and its faculty poorly paid.
Despite a reputation for strong, even authoritarian, leadership, Johnson was a champion of academic freedom. During the McCarthy era, he publicly fought all efforts by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and congressional committees to interfere with outspoken Howard faculty. Among the nation's university presidents, Johnson was also the outstanding spokesman for countries then under the colonial domination of Britain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. He was one of the early American supporters of Indian independence from Britain, and lectured widely on the life and work of Mohandas Gandhi. It was one of these lectures, at Crozer Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, that introduced Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolent social action to Martin Luther King, Jr. , when he was a seminarian, thus eventually changing the center of gravity of the civil rights movement in the United States.
On December 25, 1916, Johnson married Anna Ethelyn Gardner; they had five children. His wife died in 1969, and he married Alice Clinton Taylor King on April 12, 1970.