Rev. Nelson Johnson: A Legacy Beyond Tragedy

When Rev. Nelson Johnson died Monday at 81, everyone from local Greensboro activists to the city’s highest elected leaders praised the Civil Rights icon who stayed rooted in the city despite his national profile.

From his days as a young radical at N.C. A&T University to surviving the Greensboro Massacre in 1979 and beyond, Johnson earned a reputation as an uncompromising crusader for workers’ rights, the city’s poor, and fighting racism. That often put him at odds with the police, business leaders, and the political establishment.

Jim Melvin, mayor of Greensboro for much of the 1970s, once called him”the most dangerous man in Greensboro.” That reputation lingered long after Johnson became pastor of Faith Community Church and founding co-executive director of The Beloved Community Center of Greensboro.

“It is somewhat rare for me to be in a setting where I’m not under attack or under suspicion,” Johnson told a crowd at the Bethel AME church in 2015. The line drew knowing laughter, but Johnson wasn’t kidding.

This week, area leaders and community activists alike—Black and white, Democrat and Republican—paid tribute to his legacy.

“He came to Greensboro to come to N.C. A&T, to be an Aggie, and this became his chosen home,” said Melvin “Skip” Alston, chair of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners. “That never changed, because he had a heart for the community. We didn’t always agree, but we could disagree without being disagreeable. I never doubted where his heart was.”

Greensboro Mayor Nancy Vaughan agreed.

“People will remember the Greensboro Massacre, of course,” said Vaughan. “But Rev. Johnson and [his wife] Joyce Johnson continued their work and continued to build future activists, right until a couple months ago. I think that there are a lot of people, not only in this community but throughout the country, who they’ve had a very deep impact on.”

Being the subject of Johnson’s criticism could be uncomfortable, Vaughan said. But she found Johnson willing to work with city leaders on common goals while remaining firm in his principles.

Robbie Perkins, a former mayor and current mayoral candidate, said he and Johnson could always keep open lines of communication on city issues, despite their political and cultural differences.

“We looked for the things we had in common, trying to help folks who needed a leg up, which he was always focused on,” Perkins said. “We didn’t talk about the past a lot, because we were looking at things in the present moment and concentrating on the future.”

“You’ve got a number of people out there who were impacted by him and his work who are trying to make Greensboro a better place,” Perkins said.

Among them are current Greensboro City Council hopefuls April Parker and Irving Allen, who both call Johnson a mentor. So does Lamar Gibson, a fundraiser and political adviser now working with the Hip Hop Caucus. He started as an intern with the Beloved Community Center in high school and college and went on to become an organizer and fundraiser.

“Really everything I’m up to now in my fundraising career is all because of the formative years there,” Gibson said.

“Rev was one of the few adults in my life, at that age, who could have a debate with an activist and get back to work,” Gibson said. “And I was a pain in the ass. I would argue about strategy. He was patient and the learning for me was transformative.”

“He was also a lightning rod in Greensboro,” Gibson said. “That’s always been the case. It still is.”

A&T, Activism, and Uprising

Nelson Johnson was born in Airlie, North Carolina, in 1943. He came of age in a society where segregation and racist violence were like bad weather—a reality for which to prepare, but something few believed they could change.

Johnson joined the Air Force and served as a military policeman before moving to Greensboro in 1965 to attend N.C. A&T. The school, now the largest historically black college or university in America, had been a hub of racial justice activism and social change for generations. In 1960, four of its students had set off a national sit-in movement for desegregation with their demonstration at the downtown Woolworth’s lunch counter.

“That’s a history and legacy in Greensboro that we take pride in,” said Alston. “When you look at what people were fighting against, the racism and the tactics that were used, it’s ridiculous that then people wanted to blame them for the violence and still blame them today.”

Johnson’s youthful activism targeted injustice on campus as well as off. He rallied other Aggies to support a cafeteria worker strike for better wages, setting up a makeshift eating space in the student union as part of a boycott to pressure the university. He also urged students to act in solidarity with the poor, Black residents of East Greensboro more broadly and worked to build bridges among activist movements across the city.

In 1969, when a Dudley High School student supportive of the Black Power movement won a landslide victory for student body president, the all-white city school board prevented him from taking office. Johnson helped unite Dudley and A&T students in protests that would come to be called the “Greensboro Uprising.” Clashes between students and police escalated to tear gas and gunfire. The National Guard was called in with a tank, airplane, and helicopter, and hundreds of students were detained or arrested. One A&T student, 22-year-old Willie Grimes, was shot and killed, while a number of  police and students suffered serious injuries. The campus was shut down and a state of emergency declared in the city.

Johnson’s college activism solidified a radical reputation that would follow him for the rest of his life.

The Long Shadow of Tragedy

In 1970, Johnson helped organize a tenant strike against the city’s largest landlord to improve living conditions. The same year, he helped organize workers at Industries of the Blind, on what was then Lee Street, to strike for better working conditions. He would expand on that work in factories and textile mills throughout the Triad and beyond, putting him on the radar of local police, the State Bureau of Investigation, and the FBI. 

“I had relatives growing up in Greensboro who worked in those textile mills,” said Gibson. “Even within my family, there were mixed views of Rev. Johnson. Some people felt he was trying to do party building as much as labor organizing.”

By the late ‘70s Johnson’s multi-racial group of activists, the Workers Viewpoint Organization, had become the Communist Workers Party. The shift divided and alienated even some of his allies. It incensed local Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups, who were as rabidly anti-communist as they were racist. Johnson’s group confronted and clashed with them, setting up the conflict that would follow him throughout his life.

On November 3, 1979, Johnson and other members of the Communist Workers Party met at the largely Black Morningside Homes public housing project for what they billed as a “Death to the Klan” rally. Members of the Klan and the American Nazi Party arrived with a cache of guns, killing five protesters and injuring at least 10 more, Johnson among them.

The tragedy garnered national attention, upended the lives of its survivors, and led to years of investigations, court cases, and a Truth and Reconciliation process. 

Last year, writer Aran Shetterly published a book reexamining the history and context of the event, Morningside: The 1979 Greensboro Massacre and the Struggle for an American City’s Soul. It was important, the author said, to also  shine a light on the work Johnson did in the many years after.

“The thing about Nelson Johnson is, his legacy is so much more than that event,” Shetterly said in an interview this week. “It’s really the people in Greensboro, it seems to me, because of that event, who don’t understand the huge impact he’s had on movement work all around the country.”

“Just go down and start to think of the people who have considered him a mentor,” Shetterly said, listing notables like Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow; Ai-jen Poo, the president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance; and William Barber, the former head of the state NAACP and co-founder of the Poor Peoples’ Campaign.

Though many of those he mentored or inspired would go on to larger platforms, Johnson remained focused on Greensboro. In the 1980s, two all-white juries acquitted the men accused of the Greensboro Massacre killings. But a civil jury found six members of the Klan and American Nazi party liable for wrongful deaths, and found  two Greensboro police officers had foreknowledge of the attack but failed to prevent it.

Johnson eventually finished his undergraduate studies at A&T in 1986 and, after earning a master of divinity at Virginia Union School of Theology, returned to the Gate City to preach at Faith Community Church. He later founded the Beloved Community Center, from which he continued his activism and trained generations of organizers. His work continued to focus on the poor and on racial justice, including rallying local faith leaders to support workers trying to unionize a Kmart distribution center in Greensboro in the early 1990s.

“Nelson’s big ambition was, in his words, to make Greensboro a model,” Shetterly said. “And he believed that Greensboro could be a model for other cities around the country in terms of how it organized itself and how it treated its citizens. And if that could happen, that would be big.”

‘He Found a Way’

Greensboro Mayor Pro Tem Marikay Abuzuaiter said she saw firsthand how Johnson, in his later years, married the fiery activism of his youth with the wisdom of hard-won lessons.

“He always had that passion, you could see it and that never changed,” Abuzuaiter said. “When he was focused on something, you knew he was going to continue to pursue it, even if he didn’t succeed at first. And I admired that. He found a way to work with people, he found a way to succeed.”

That included pushing the city government to officially acknowledge and apologize for its part in the events of the Greensboro Massacre in a series of statements from 2017 to 2020. He also worked tirelessly to get an accurate historical marker in a city still very much divided over who was to blame and how to characterize the tragedy.

In the mid-2000s, when Black police officers in the city alleged a pattern of harassment and unfounded investigations leading all the way to the police chief, they came to Johnson for advice and support. It was a gut-check moment, many of his friends and allies said, given the department’s historic resistance to accepting any responsibility for the Greensboro Massacre.

“I was pissed when the Black officers came to Reverend Johnson for support,” said Gibson. “I had no idea, with what he’d experienced, how he could be an advocate for anybody in the Greensboro Police Department. I didn’t understand then that the same sense of obligation that led him to defend the legacies of his friends and the people lost on November 3 was the same obligation he was carrying when those officers came to him to seek his counsel and support.”

It still bothers Gibson so many people still think only of the events of 1979 when Johnson’s name is mentioned. The reverend lived with that and stayed anyway, Gibson said.

“He still chose this city, and he still chose to do the work here,” Gibson said. “That was part of his love and his faith that I could use more of myself. We all could.”

Johnson is survived by his wife, Joyce; daughters Akua Johnson-Matherson and Ayo Johnson; as well as granddaughters Alise, Imani, and Nia and grandson Nelson Josiah.

Information on public viewing and funeral arrangements, along with details on how to contribute to the Nelson N. Johnson Legacy Fund, can he found here.

Joe Killian is The Assembly’s Greensboro editor. He covered cops, courts, government and politics at Greensboro’s daily paper, The News & Record, for a decade. He joined us from NC Newsline in Raleigh, where he was senior investigative reporter.

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