I was fortunate enough to meet Peter Johnson in 2018, before I knew much about his enormous impact on equality in Dallas. With my friend Trey Grant, a Black pastor in Keller, I had written something in these pages about race and religion. Johnson reached out to introduce himself. We met for coffee in Oak Cliff and he gave me a blurry, mimeographed copy of a poster with the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.”
That poster hung on the back of my office door for years. It summarizes Johnson’s approach to civil rights: Inequality exists, and it’s a problem for all of us.
Johnson has never shied from highlighting the problems created by racial injustice. On New Year’s Day in 1970, he famously negotiated for one of the leaders of the Fair Park Neighborhood Association — a Black neighborhood being pushed around by Dallas City Hall — to ride with Mayor Erik Jonsson in a convertible at the head of the Cotton Bowl Parade, avoiding violence that had threatened to engulf the city, and spotlighting the plight of the Black community at the same time.
In the years after that, he led boycotts of grocery chains to force South Dallas stores to improve sanitary conditions, lower prices and provide jobs to Black workers.
But his message is more collaborative than combative. When Johnson first came to Dallas in 1969, sent by Ralph Abernathy and the rest of the leadership at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to raise money for King’s bereaved family, he made inroads with whites and members of the Dallas Citizens Council. Those allies may indeed be the reason Johnson is alive today, having escaped racist threats against his life. We’re all in the same boat.
The second time I got to sit down with Johnson was last month. Again, we were in Oak Cliff, and again his message was a hopeful one. He remembered icons of the Civil Rights Movement as mentors. He worried for Jesse Jackson’s health. He swore MLK (“Martin,” he called him) could shoot hoops with the best. And he recalled that he had promised Abernathy that he would chronicle the stories from their movement. Johnson had been younger than King, Abernathy and other leaders, likely to see more of the future they worked together to create.
When he asked if The Dallas Morning News might be a repository for those stories, Editorial Page Editor Rudy Bush and I gave an enthusiastic yes.
Johnson is 79 years old. His memory is still sharp, though his writing will be aided by Don Robinson, executive director of the Peter Johnson Institute for Non-Violence. And his insight may be even sharper. Johnson’s columns will speak to America’s current condition as much as they do to our past. The first of them, published nearby, recalls civil rights workers such as Viola Fauver Liuzzo who have faded from public memory, and reminds us their work isn’t finished.
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