Johnson, Mordecai Wyatt

Impact on the world

Became Howard University's first African American president in 1926, initially reluctant to accept the role out of concern that a Black president would be set up to fail amid institutional turmoil he had inherited, then led the university for 34 years until 1960, during which Congressional appropriations grew from roughly $200,000 to $6,000,000 annually, enrollment increased from about 2,000 to over 10,000, and Howard achieved Phi Beta Kappa status while recruiting a faculty including Ralph Bunche, Charles Drew, Alain Locke, and Percy Julian, several of whom are individually profiled elsewhere in this collection.

Life & background

Born in Paris, Tennessee to a formerly enslaved father who worked twelve-hour mill shifts six days a week and a mother who worked as a domestic servant, Johnson was a notably mischievous student at Atlanta Baptist College, now Morehouse, where future Morehouse president John Hope once wrote his father a letter of concern after Johnson was suspended for playing cards, a major infraction at the missionary-founded school; he nonetheless graduated with high honors. After earning a second bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago and divinity degrees from Rochester Theological Seminary and Harvard, Johnson served as pastor of a Charleston, West Virginia Baptist church and founded that city's NAACP chapter before a unanimous 1926 trustee vote convinced him, despite his own reluctance, to accept Howard University's presidency, becoming the first Black person to permanently lead an institution whose first 59 years had been overseen exclusively by white ministers. He prioritized securing dependable annual federal funding for the university, successfully lobbying Congress for legislation guaranteeing consistent appropriations, and used the resulting financial stability to recruit what became, by multiple accounts, the greatest concentration of African American scholars assembled anywhere in the country, while expanding Howard's law school into the preeminent training ground for the civil rights movement's attorneys. His tenure was not without serious internal conflict; in 1933 he and Howard's board pressured the university's pioneering Dean of Women, Lucy Diggs Slowe, to vacate the home she shared with her longtime partner Mary Burrill and relocate to campus housing, a demand Slowe resisted. Johnson received the NAACP's Spingarn Medal in 1929, spoke alongside Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, and in that same year personally offered King the deanship of Howard's School of Religion, an offer King declined to remain focused on civil rights organizing; Johnson retired in 1960 and died in 1976, with Howard's main administration building renamed in his honor.

Sources

1. BlackPast.org; The Dig at Howard University; African American Registry; Encyclopedia.com; Stanford Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute