Walk, Not Run

Several visitors to Gee's Bend, Ala. were talking to an old Negro, and making heavy weather of it. The old man spotted a friend and called out: "Mistuh Johnson, Mistuh Johnson! Come on over hyar and understan' 'em fer me."

Sociologist Charles Spurgeon Johnson had been "understanding" white folks for Negroes and Negroes for white folks much of his life. Last week, at 53, he became the first Negro president of Nashville's Fisk University.

In 1919, just home from the Meuse-Argonne, he walked down a Chicago street right into the disastrous race riot in which 25 Negroes and 15 whites were killed, 538 injured. He himself was shot at, but sat right down and wrote an on-the-spot analysis of the riot which won him appointment to the Governor's commission on racial tensions. His 600-page report on The Negro in Chicago was the start of a career for Charles Johnson.

Son of a book-loving Baptist preacher, Johnson had been a brilliant sociology student at Virginia Union University and the University of Chicago, sweated his way through as stevedore, ditchdigger, mess boy, night watchman and waiter. In 1923 he founded Opportunity, a Negro journal which published the work of men like Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson, gave a lift to musicians like W. C. Handy and William Grant Still.

In 1928 Johnson went to Fisk as head of social studies. With an interracial team of experts, he has studied such race-strained cities as San Francisco, Detroit, St. Louis and New Orleans. Next target: Minneapolis. He was U.S. delegate on the League of Nations Commission on Liberia, which helped abolish slavery in the African republic.

Three and a half years ago Johnson invited a group of whites to Fisk to live, eat and work for three weeks in unheard-of proximity to Negroes. It was a dangerous experiment for Nashville, but Johnson carried it off; and it has become an annual affair. Says Johnson: "People who are separated in their compartments always believe the worst of others. If you bring them together so that it doesn't violate their first defenses, they discover that the worst isn't going to happen. . . ."

Johnson believes that Negroes should walk, not run, to the nearest opportunity. Militant Negroes say that people like him are interested in "data and not trouble," but Johnson, who has what he calls "a certain rooting in the South," thinks he goes as fast as he can. He knows his new job will be difficult ("Unquestionably I will have more limited mobility than a white president") but it will be worth it. Says he: "I have built a great deal of myself into Fisk."

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