Ryan Sanders: Peter Johnson is a Dallas civil rights icon who has never shied away from spotlighting injustice, but his approach is collaborative. When he...
The Rev. Peter Johnson of Dallas, in front of a poster of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in his Oak CliffI was fortunate enough to meet Peter Johnson in 2018, before I knew much about his enormous impact on equality in Dallas. With my friend. 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.
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 could shoot hoops with the best. And he recalled that he had promised Abernathy that he would chronicle the stories from their movement.
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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