Reports / Admin Survey / May 14, 2004

Charles S. Johnson: Leadership Beyond the Veil in the Age of Jim Crow

BOOK REVIEW by Merline Pitre

Charles S. Johnson: Leadership Beyond the Veil in the Age of Jim Crow by Patrick J. Gilpin (right) and Marybeth Gasman (New York: State University of New York Press 2003) [pp. xii, 317]

In a detailed and carefully constructed study, Patrick J. Gilpin and Marybeth Gasman investigate the life of Charles Spurgeon Johnson, a black leader who had a major impact on race relations during the era of Jim Crow.  Based on exhaustive research and other archival sources, too numerous to mention, and supported by Johnson’s own works, as well as by pertinent secondary sources and oral interviews, Gilpin and Gasman have written a comprehensive, engaging biography.  They do an admirable job of providing the historical context for Johnson’s life and locating him in significant places and important moments in African American history.   This historical biography of Johnson’s accomplishments and frustrations provide a new perspective on the black leadership in this country from 1920 to 1957.  What distinguished Johnson from other black leaders, such as Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., A. Phillip Randolph and Walter White was his base of operation—the South.  In the South, he was forced to function on a day-to-day basis with white southern liberals, individuals who were benevolent segregationists at best (p. 144).  Metaphorically, Johnson was sailing on a ship trying to traverse the dangerous raging sea of Jim Crow laws, customs and practices to land ashore and improve race relations and the quality of life for African Americans.  How he went about his task of improving race relations to dismantle Jim Crow, both as a leader and a scholar, was central to his modus operandi—closing no doors but pushing steadily toward the left.

Charles S. Johnson, the son of a Baptist preacher, was born in Bristol, Virginia on July 24, 1893.  He attended the public schools of Bristol and graduated with honors from Virginia Union University.  After serving in the army as a sergeant major in World War I, Johnson entered into graduate studies in Sociology at the University of Chicago where he became acquainted with one of the founders of the discipline, Robert Park, a mentor who had a profound influence on his life.  Upon completion of his doctorate degree, Johnson moved to New York in 1921, where he became the Urban League national director of research and editor of its new monthly publication, Opportunity.   The main focus of this magazine was to disseminate social scientists’ findings on the race problem.  In 1928, Johnson left the Urban League to establish and chair the Social Sciences Department at Fisk University.  There, he would spend the rest of his life as he became the first person of color to assume the presidency and remained at Fisk until his death in 1956.

“Johnson’s academic precocity and diplomatic finesse were such that he would become one of this country’s most influential scholars in the field of race relations.” (xi)  In the first half of this study, the authors provide insight into the metamorphosis of Johnson’s concept of ‘race’ and the ‘Negro problem.’   “The problem,” said Johnson, “was not one of the Negroes considering themselves as a race, as others treating them as a race with special connotations inherit in the classification.”  Johnson was insistent that racism was a consequence of misperceived grievances rather than an intrinsic cause of group enmity and conflict. His academic training, research and superlative skills in dealing with powerful personalities and institutions enabled him to win research funds to foster his ideas.  In Johnson’s mind the race problem could be solved via assimilation, scholarship and governmental intervention.  He believed strongly that scholarship should help guide public policy.  His publication with Edwin Embree and Will Alexander, The Collapse of Cotton Tenancy, was an example of how research might influence government activities.  A prolific writer, the academic and philanthropic establishment found Johnson’s brand of scholarship congenial as the climate of race relations began to change in the late 1930s.  While Johnson’s scholarship was cautious, empirical and appeared to let the facts speak for themselves, his pronouncements and writings were not perceived as threatening to the status quo, certainly not in the manner as W.E.B. Dubois’.

At the same time that Johnson was writing and working to find a new definition of race relations, he was also establishing new programs at Fisk.  Once called upon to establish a Social Science Department, he implemented a new area of research, “The Negro and Race Relations.”  With additional funding, Johnson would later establish the Department of Race Relations.  Out of this department would come the development of the Race Institutes for which Johnson is most noted.  These institutes were perceived as an extended “practice course to study problems and methods of dealing with racial situations.”  (p. 197)  In other words, they were intensive professional meetings (a cradle of ideas, investigations, and policy recommendations) for scholars interested in race relations.   Because these institutes were interracial, Johnson first experimented with them in the North.  After overcoming a conservative environment and threats of trying to dissolve them, Johnson took these institutes to the bastion of segregation—the Fisk campus.  There, these institutes demonstrated that integration was possible via communication and interracial living on campus.  While praising these institutes, Gilpin and Gasmer pointed out that the most controversial black leaders of the first half of the twentieth century, W.E.B. DuBois, A. Phillip Randolph, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. and Benjamin Davis, Jr. did not make appearances before these august meetings.  They were not invited because they were perceived as being too militant, and because Johnson believed that such an invitation “could not be risked, given the implicit hostility towards Fisk (p. 197).”  Cognizant of where he was geographically and realizing the impact of Jim Crow on black Americans while at the same time pondering which was the best method to effect change, Johnson “salvaged much that was valuable from Booker T. Washington to keep these programs (institutes) afloat—using financial support from philanthropists to develop Fisk programs and at the same time pointing the way toward the Freedom Movement with his sociology of tensions” (p. 141).

The strength of this biography lies in chapters 11 and 12 where the authors discuss Charles S. Johnson in relation to and comparison with Booker T. Washington.  Johnson placed his hope and faith in changing race relations in white southern liberalism. But, “southern liberalism was not liberalism as found elsewhere in America…It was molded by the forces of the region where it carried out its fight” (p. 142).  Every move for change had to deal with segregation.  In relating to southern liberalism, Johnson was faced with a paradoxical and Herculean task.  Privately, he was an integrationist who did not want to change the American system, but wanted barriers eliminated and a situation created that would aid African American entrance into that system.  Publicly, he was not in a position to challenge segregation.  While many outside the south criticized him for being a black pawn for white leaders, others (mostly from within the South) saw him as a shrewd man building Trojan horses in the center of Jim Crow.  Johnson characterized his position best when he said, “there is not enough recognition of the fact that the most strategic pressures are those that are best timed and next carefully applied, not a random uncalculated and hectic scattering of protest and opposition” (p. 144).  Johnson did not believe in accommodation, as did Washington.  But like Washington, he was born and raised in the south, and wisdom born from experience had taught him that caution and public safety were methods of survival, whether one was speaking of an individual or an institution.

As a bridge leader in the Jim Crow South who was situated between Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr., Johnson used the above tactic when he became President of Fisk University.  He kept all options open and was not married to any ideology.   In order to reach his goal of nurturing black students to become scholars and leaders of the future, Johnson knew he needed significant funds, the confidence of those in power, the blessings of the black community and the cooperation of white liberals.  To maintain this support, he made many compromises; some that were even humiliating.  Yet, as the authors implied, it would be misleading and incorrect to label Johnson as a pure unadulterated accommodationist.  Such leaders as Johnson could do what many African Americans of his time could never do.  He could bring the overpowering influence of the boardrooms of northern capital as leverage for social action plans, while living in the midst of pressure so unremitting as to stagger the imagination.  Charles Johnson often led “Beyond the Veil” and in the dark, because the very nature of his subtle strategy, if fully known, would have destroyed the value of his tactic and the power of his influence—to overturn segregation and to advance black people.

This is an uncommonly good biography of an often-neglected African American leader during the era of Jim Crow.  Written with vigor and skill, Gilpin and Gasman present a warm and positive portrait of Johnson that is neither uncritical nor apologetic.  This work will be a welcome addition to the literature on the Jim Crow South.  Specialists and the general reader will find much of interest in it.  The profession and the society at large stand to profit much from these scholars’ labor, here and in the future.

Reviewer: Merline Pitre, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Behavioral Sciences, Texas Southern University

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