Charles Spurgeon Johnson (July 24, 1893 – October 27, 1956) was an American sociologist and college administrator, the first black president of historically black Fisk University, and a lifelong advocate for racial equality and the advancement of civil rights for African Americans and all ethnic minorities. He preferred to work collaboratively with liberal white groups in the South, quietly as a "sideline activist," to get practical results.
His position is often contrasted with that of W. E. B. Du Bois, who was a powerful and militant advocate for blacks and described Johnson as "too conservative." During Johnson's academic studies and leadership of Fisk University during the 1930s and 1940s, the South had legal racial segregation and Jim Crow discriminatory laws and practices, including having disfranchised most black voters in constitutions passed at the turn of the century. Johnson was unwavering in personal terms in his opposition to this oppressive system, yet he worked hard to change race relations in terms of short-term practical gains.
His grandson Jeh Johnson served as the United States Secretary of Homeland Security from 2013 to 2017.
Early life and education
Johnson was born in 1893 in Bristol, Virginia, to well-educated parents. His father was a respected Baptist minister, and his mother was educated in public school. He attended a boarding school in Richmond, Virginia, then earned a B.A. in sociology from Virginia Union University. Afterward, he began graduate study of sociology at the University of Chicago, though his study was interrupted by service in France during World War I as a non-commissioned officer with the US army. After returning to the US, he resumed graduate work at the University of Chicago, where he earned his Ph.D. in sociology. In 1920 Johnson married Marie Antoinette Burgette. When he was appointed director of research and investigation of the National Urban League, the couple moved to New York City.
Career
After the race riot of 1919, when blacks fought back against white attacks as part of the urban violence in numerous cities during Red Summer, Johnson worked as a researcher for the National Urban League and in 1921, he became the League's research director. During his time with the National Urban League, he also founded the magazine Opportunity as an outlet for black expression in the arts. He was a principal researcher and author for the Chicago Commission on Race Relations for its report on the riot. Newspapers of the period had reported that the instigators were largely ethnic Irish trying to maintain economic and social dominance over blacks in South Chicago; Johnson noted that African Americans had rebelled against the denial of economic and social opportunity. His work was fundamental to The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (1922), published by the University of Chicago Press. It was considered a classic model for comprehensive commission reports.
In the 1920s Johnson moved to New York City, where he became research director for the National Urban League. He was an "entrepreneur of the Harlem Renaissance," the creative movement by African-American writers and artists of that time. He edited two journals that published many writers of the period, and established prizes at the National Urban League to recognize young writers. In Harlem, he argued for black artists saying that they must use their own experiences as the basis for their creativity, rejecting European standards. His goal was to improve Negro self-image and character, and he felt that by writing they could achieve this.
Return to the South
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, a historically black college. There he wrote or directed numerous studies of how combined legal, economic and social factors produced an oppressive racial structure. Two of his works have become classics: Shadow of the Plantation (1934), and Growing up in the Black Belt (1940).