Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,085

This is the grave of Mordecai Johnson.

Born in 1890 in Paris, Tennessee, Johnson grew up reasonably well of for his time and place and race, which still wasn’t much. His father was a minister but you couldn’t make much of a living in a small-town Black church, so he also worked in mills. His mother was a domestic worker, as good of a job as a Black woman could get. But his parents were determined to get him an education. He did not have a good relationship with his father, a former slave who was partly disabled from the beatings he had received. His father was very old when Mordecai was born and he basically thought that parenting required physical abuse for the slightest error. He was much, much closer with his mother. Still, Johnson did well and managed to get to better schools in Nashville, where Black educational institutions were rising. He went to Roger Williams University, not the one in Rhode Island, but the one in Nashville, before transferring to Howe Institute in Memphis and then Morehouse in Atlanta.

Johnson graduated from Morehouse and everyone saw his potential, so the school asked him to stay on and teach there. He did, but he wanted to rise. Now with backers, he went to the University of Chicago after a year for another undergraduate degree. Then he became a student of Walter Rauschenbusch at Rochester Theological Seminary. Rauschenbusch was the great articulator of the Social Gospel that became prominent in white liberal and Black churches in the early 20th century and became a major influence on how Johnson wanted to spend his life. Finally, Johnson ended up at Harvard, getting a PhD in 1923.

Johnson was also a minister and in fact, while working on his degrees, or perhaps taking a break between some of them (not totally sure of all the timeline details here), he took a job as a minister at a church in Charleston, West Virginia in 1917. One reason this made him happy is that he opposed American involvement in World War I and clergy were exempt from the draft. That’s most certainly not why he became a minister, but it does give you a sense of how he thought about America and the world at that time. He was active in civil rights there too and helped found the city’s NAACP chapter. But he was not going to stay in Charleston. As one of the few Black Americans with a PhD, he could do a lot of things and what he decided to do was become president of Howard University in 1926. Now, Howard was a Black school, named for General O.O. Howard, who helped found it. But before Johnson, it had always been led by whites. Johnson changed that.

Johnson would stay at Howard until 1960. He became a force there, making Howard an absolute powerhouse of Black academia, hiring many of the nation’s leading Black scholars to work there. One was Charles Hamilton Houston, who would use his position as the dean of the law school there to do powerful work for civil rights in the 1920s and 1930s that laid a lot of the legal groundwork for Brown v. Board of Education, even as that case happened after Houston’s death. Even more significantly, he brought Alain Locke to Howard. Locke was perhaps the leading Black academic of the first half of the twentieth century.

But wait, there’s more. Johnson hired Ralph Bunche to teach political science and it was hard to get more prestigious and famous and important than he. He brought in Charles Drew, the pioneering doctor who specialized in the use of plasma. Sterling Allen Brown was a major poet who was maybe not quite as famous as Locke, but was most certainly a big deal in his time. Johnson actually believed in faculty, increased budgets and faculty lines and urged departments to be leaders on campus and in the community. This wasn’t that easy either. The idea that the Black upper classes were anymore tolerant of radical ideas than the white upper classes isn’t really backed by the evidence. Howard’s other big leaders–funders, its governing structure, people Johnson had some accountability to–were really uncomfortable with the kind of radicalism, both political and culture, he promoted here. So he risked his own job on many occasions through his hiring and through what he tolerated on campus. But he also fought for his faculty and students and kept his job. Imagine a leader like this in academia today……..I can’t.

Basically, Johnson believed strongly in DuBois’ ideas of the “talented tenth,” that if you could provide higher and political education to the top 10% of the Black community, they would become the leaders of the civil rights movement and pioneer the fight for white supremacy. This didn’t prove quite accurate–DuBois was a snob who did not believe in the struggle from below as an effective method and plenty of these well-educated Black leaders would choose to protect their own status and money rather than fight white supremacy. But it was more right than Booker T. Washington’s beliefs in accepting white supremacy for now and maybe the future. And those were the general outlines of the debate when Johnson took over Howard.

All of this revolved around Johnson’s pioneering ideas to combine the Black struggle at home with anticolonialism abroad and bring in thinkers to unite these ideas around the principles of the Social Gospel. For all his leadership, Johnson didn’t really write much and so isn’t as remembered today as he could be. He was, however, by all account an outstanding preacher, especially to parishioners more intellectually inclined and some consider him to be among the great Black ministers of the 20th century.

Johnson used his power and money and prestige to fight for civil rights too. He was a major speaker on the topic around the nation. He worked closely with Martin Luther King, often speaking with him, as the younger man rose to prominence in the 1950s. He retired from Howard in 1960 but lived a long life after that, dying in 1976, at the age of 86.

Mordecai Johnson is buried in Lincoln Memorial Cemetery, Suitland, Maryland.

If you would like this series to visit other early 20th century civil rights leaders, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Homer Phillips is in Normandy, Missouri and Charles S. Johnson is in Nashville. You can donate to cover the required expenses here and here.