D8 N THE NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARIESMONDAY, AUGUST 3, 2020In 1958, when Roland Johnson was
12, his parents sent him to the
Pennhurst State School and Hospital
outside Philadelphia. There he would
spend 13 tormented years living
through the nightmare of institutional-
ization that was commonplace in
mid-20th-century America.
Terrified and confused, Roland, who
had an intellectual disability, quickly
discovered the inhumane realities of
Pennhurst, including neglect, beatings
and sexual assault. And as a Black
child, he encountered the toxic racism
roiling life both outside and within the
institution’s walls.
“After that long ride up there, it was
just horrible,” Johnson wrote of his
arrival at Pennhurst in a posthumously
published autobiography, “Lost in a
Desert World” (2002, with Karl
Williams). He described himself as
having been “lost and lonely,” as if “in a
desert world.”
“I thought I would be there forever,”
he added.
But Johnson did get out, and would
see his family again. More remarkably,
he would survive a prolonged and
difficult transition to the outside world
and emerge as a pioneering champion
for the disabled. Through speeches
across the country and in courtroom
testimony, he played a significant part
in the shutting down of Pennhurst in
- He also assisted in the release of
countless people from other state insti-
tutions. By demonstrating that the
developmentally disabled could speak
up for themselves, he was at the fore-
front of an emerging self-advocacy
movement that would take hold in the
Philadelphia area in the 1970s.
As president of the Philadelphia
chapter of Speaking for Ourselves, a
Pennsylvania organization that later
expanded nationally, Johnson became a
spokesman and a mentor for others
who had been institutionalized, includ-
ing Deborah Robinson, who succeeded
Johnson as president.
“He was a strong and powerful
speaker,” Robinson said in an interview,
“who believed in people getting out of
institutions, living in the community
and having their own voice.”
Johnson began every speech with his
mantra: “Who’s in control?” He urged
his audiences not to feel trapped by
others dictating every facet of their
existence. “The only way to break that
barrier is to tell people that you are in
control over your own life and in your
own ways,” he declared.
When Johnson died on Aug. 29, 1994,
at 48 after being trapped in a house fire,
he left an indelible legacy: his work on
behalf of one of the most disenfran-
chised segments of society. He became
president of the board of Speaking for
Ourselves and a board member of Self
Advocates Becoming Empowered, a
national organization. When President
George H.W. Bush signed the landmark
Americans with Disabilities Act on July
26, 1990, on the South Lawn of the
White House, Johnson was there, part
of a delegation that had arrived to
witness that historic moment.
“It is impossible to know the courage
of a man who had slung at him the
worst labels and insults imaginable,
who suffered abuse and neglect, and
who belonged to a group totally dis-
counted by society,” Nancy Thaler, the
former deputy secretary of the Penn-
sylvania Office of Developmental Pro-
grams, wrote in an open letter after his
death, “but who nevertheless stood upin public to speak for himself and his
people. Roland gave voice to the people.
Roland made us listen. Roland changed
how we think about disabilities.”
James W. Conroy, a medical sociolo-
gist who worked on the litigation that
led to the closing of Pennhurst, worked
closely with Johnson in overseeing
studies of what happens to people when
they leave institutions.
“He motivated his friends and others
at Speaking for Ourselves, and he really
pushed the movement toward free-
dom,” Conroy said in a phone interview.
“His was a fantastic contribution unlike
any I’ve ever seen.”
Roland Johnson was born in Philadel-
phia on Sept. 14, 1945, to Grace and Roy
Johnson. His father was an auto me-
chanic, his mother a housekeeper. Ro-
land’s twin, Rosemary, died in infancy.
With nine children, life was a struggle
for the Johnson family. Because both
parents had to work, the older children
had to care for the younger ones.
When it became clear that Roland
had been born with an intellectual
disability, his parents were urged to put
the baby in an institution, the norm at
the time. But Roland’s parents refused
to do that and tried to raise him at
home.
“His family failed him,” LaVerne
Cheatham, his closest sibling, said in an
interview. “It was a sad situation. All of
us, including me, didn’t give him what
he needed.” She said of her mother,
“There wasn’t a day that she didn’t
worry about him.”
With public schools unable or unwill-
ing to accommodate him, he stayed at
home. In his book, Johnson describes
himself as having had an insatiableappetite and a penchant for stealing
food from stores and running away. His
mother, he wrote, “didn’t know how to
handle me.”
To punish him, he said, she’d first
heat a knife on a stove. “Then she put it
on my hand and burnt me with it,” he
wrote. “And then she had an iron and
she whipped me with the iron cord and
made bruises all over my back. I don’t
blame her for it — I probably needed it,
a licking. My mother tried but she
couldn’t take it anymore.”
His parents turned to the Philadel-
phia children’s court for help. In-
structed to send him to a state institu-
tion, they chose Pennhurst, originally
called the Eastern State Institution for
the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic when
it opened in 1908.
“This is it for me,” Johnson remem-
bered thinking. “I guess I will be locked
up in there, in a big cellar with locks.”
At Pennhurst he was traumatized by
the emotional and physical abuse. He
was ridiculed: “You’re stupid. You’re
crazy. Dummy, Dopey, don’t know noth-
ing.” He witnessed patients being beat-
en by other patients with broom han-
dles and hid under the bed to avoid the
same fate. He saw a young patient
drink a bottle of liquid Thorazine, an
antipsychotic, and die of an overdose. A
young friend was strangled with a rope
and left to die in a filthy, rat-infested
punishment ward. In his frustration and
anger, Johnson broke windows, for
which he was locked in the punishment
ward and forced to scrub its walls and
floors.
The sexual abuse began early on. “All
this stuff happened late at night,” he
wrote, adding, “They did awful thingsto me.” From multiple rapes, he said, he
contracted sexually transmitted dis-
eases. Years after he left Pennhurst he
learned that he was H.I.V. positive.
Because the institution was severely
understaffed and overpopulated, John-
son and others were forced to do laun-
dry and maintenance and care for the
young children and babies. “Nobody
got paid,” he wrote. “They would work,
work, work.”
Pennhurst was once called “the
shame of the nation,” according to
Preserve Pennhurst, a website dedi-
cated to preserving the lessons from its
dark legacy.
In 1968, Bill Baldini, a Philadelphia
television news reporter, produced a
six-part exposé about Pennhurst called
“Suffer the Little Children.” Johnson
was one of the children he interviewed.
“We ship them 25 miles out of town
to an institution and forget them, while
they decay from neglect,” Baldini said
in the introduction to the series. “Zoos
spend more on their wild animals than
Pennsylvania spends on its 2,800 pa-
tients at Pennhurst.”
The series resulted in lawsuits that
led to Pennhurst’s closing. Johnson was
released in 1971.
Afterward he stayed with his family,
but the old tensions flared up anew, and
before long he moved out, rooming in
boardinghouses and holding low-paying
jobs. At one boardinghouse he got into
a fight with another former patient and
was arrested. “The police threw me
against the wall and threw me in the
paddy wagon, and it hurt my head,” he
recalled in his book.
A bicycle accident and a series of
illnesses landed him in a hospital. He
eventually joined a psychiatric day
program, and his life began to improve.
Johnson heard about Speaking for
Ourselves in the early 1980s while
working as a janitor. He went to a con-
ference and stood in the back to ob-
serve. Surprising himself, he spoke up.
“We’re tired of the old system,” he
recalled saying. “We need to make
things change, to make things happen.”
Mark Friedman, who helped found
the organization, saw something in
Johnson.
“He found great camaraderie with
other disabled people, who accepted
him and loved him,” Mr. Friedman said
in a phone interview. “To this day, peo-
ple still talk about him and share
stories and still look up to Roland —
and it’s been decades since he passed.”1945-1994Roland Johnson
A champion for the disabled, he survived 13 years of neglect and abuse then fought to shut down institutions.
By GLENN RIFKINOverlooked is a series of obituaries
about remarkable people whose
deaths, beginning in 1851, went
unreported in The Times.
nytimes.com/overlookedONLINE:OVERLOOKEDRoland Johnson in 1963 and, right, with his niece in 1954. By speaking up about the horrors he endured at a state-
run hospital for the disabled outside Philadelphia, he was at the forefront of an emerging self-advocacy movement.VIA THE JOHNSON FAMILY
VIA THE JOHNSON FAMILYJohnson in 1993 offering an award
to President George H.W. Bush for
his work to ban discrimination
against people with disabilities.AB HISTORIC/ALAMYJames Silberman, a revered
book editor whose meticu-
lousness, intuition and patience
helped propel the publishing ca-
reers of a distinguished roster of
authors, including James Bald-
win, Marilyn French, Hunter S.
Thompson and Alvin Toffler, died
on July 26 at his home in Manhat-
tan. He was 93.
His son, Michael, said the cause
was complications of a stroke.
Mr. Silberman was “a man who
knows how to edit a manuscript,
to read a manuscript and to pub-
lish a manuscript,” another of his
authors, Elie Wiesel, told The New
York Times in 1991.
Mr. Silberman’s career path
was serendipitous. A government
major at Harvard, he enrolled in
the Radcliffe Publishing Course
(now the Columbia Publishing
Course) after graduating in 1950,
then got hired in the shipping de-
partment of The Writer, which, he
recalled in an oral history, was in
the business of “selling a maga-
zine to aspiring writers, telling
them how to become rich and fa-
mous.”
He found an advertising job at
Little, Brown & Company, then be-
came a publicist for the Dial Press
in New York in 1953. When the
company’s sole editor left to have
her second child, he was pro-
moted to replace her and assumed
the title that would define his vo-
cation.
After Alfred A. Knopf, James
Baldwin’s first publisher, rejected
“Giovanni’s Room” because they
felt its gay white characters might
alienate Mr. Baldwin’s Black audi-
ence, Mr. Silberman scooped it up
for Dial. He went on to edit Mr.
Baldwin’s “Another Country” and
“The Fire Next Time.”
In 1963, Mr. Silberman was
lured to Random House as senior
editor by Bennett Cerf, the compa-
ny’s co-founder, who later named
him editor in chief and publisher
of adult trade books.
Joining an impressive editorial
team that included Robert
Loomis, Jason Epstein and Joe
Fox, Mr. Silberman published
Hunter S. Thompson’s “Hell’s An-
gels” (1967), Alvin Toffler’s “Fu-
ture Shock” (1970), Stewart
Brand’s “The Last Whole Earth
Catalog” (1971, in association with
the Portola Institute), David Hal-
berstam’s “The Best and the
Brightest” (1972) and E.L. Doc-
torow’s “The Book of Daniel”
(1971) and “Ragtime” (1975).
Mr. Silberman left Random
House in 1975 after refusing to fire
Selma Shapiro, the company’s
vice president for publicity, with
whom he was having an affair and
whom he later married; he
blamed the company’s “moral ri-
gidity.” He was immediately hired
by Richard E. Snyder, Simon &
Schuster’s competitive chairman,
to launch his own imprint, Summit
Books.
At Summit he published Mari-
lyn French’s debut novel, “The
Women’s Room” (1977), which
sold some 20 million copies; Sey-
mour Hersh’s “The Price of
Power: Kissinger in the Nixon
White House” (1983); and Oliver
Sacks’s “The Man Who Mistook
His Wife for a Hat” (1985).
“Jim could see things in what I
was doing as a reporter that I did
not see,” Mr. Hersh said by email,
citing his books on Mr. Kissinger
and John F. Kennedy. “Amidst con-
stant negative pressure from the
subjects, he never flinched and
had my back all the way.”
Mr. Silberman lost his job at
Summit in 1991 when the imprint
was eliminated to cut costs. He
was a vice president and senior
editor at Little Brown until 1998
and then established James H. Sil-
berman Books.
Over the course of his career,
his authors also included Muham-
mad Ali, Betty Friedan, George
Goodman (who wrote about eco-
nomics under the name Adam
Smith), John Irving and Chris
Matthews, whom he encouraged
to write “Hardball: How Politics
Is Played Told by One Who Knows
the Game” (1988).
“He spotted a piece I’d done for
The New Republic as Tip O’Neill’s
guy going to daily war with the
Reagan White House,” Mr.
Matthews said by email. “He
asked me to write a book about the
inside political world to match‘The Money Game,’ ” Mr. Good-
man’s influential 1968 book. “It be-
came ‘Hardball.’ ”
Invoking the editor who fos-
tered Hemingway and Fitzgerald,
Mr. Matthews said, “Jim was my
Max Perkins.”
James Henry Silberman was
born on March 21, 1927, in Boston
to Henry R. Silberman, who ran a
news clipping service and was the
executive director of the Massa-chusetts Progressive Party, and
Dorothy (Conrad) Silberman.
After graduating from Cam-
bridge Latin School, he served in
the Army after World War II and
then attended Harvard.
He married Leona Nevler, an
editor, in 1960; they divorced in- In 1986 he married Ms. Sha-
piro, who survives him, along with
two children from his first mar-
riage, Michael and Ellen Silber-
man; his sister, Dorothy Altman;
and four grandchildren.
Mr. Silberman was a natty
dresser, a dashing wheelman (he
became an amateur pilot at 50 and
drove a Mazda RX-7 convertible
sports car on weekends) and a
scrupulous wordsmith who at 86,
even after suffering a stroke, fin-
ished editing two books.
Mr. Cerf, who took pride in all
his top editors, said in the
mid-1960s that “the best one of all
for the purposes of great corpo-
rate handling of manuscripts is
Jim Silberman, who is now being
made editor in chief, because he’s
the one willing to do all of the dirty
work of seeing what happens to all
of these manuscripts.”
Among the authors with whom
Mr. Silberman had especially tor-
tured relationships was Mr.
Thompson, the gonzo journalist
who wrote books about “Fear andLoathing” and whose struggle to
write a book tentatively called
“The Death of the American
Dream” is recorded in his letters
to Mr. Silberman in books edited
by Douglas Brinkley.
Mr. Silberman once said of Mr.
Thompson, “Your method of re-
search is to tie yourself to a rail-
road track when you know a train
is coming to it, and see what hap-
pens.” And, when Mr. Thompson
killed himself at 67 in 2005, Mr. Sil-
berman remarked, “He spent his
life in search of an honest man,
and he seldom found any.”
Coaxing a book out of Mr.
Thompson, or for that matter a
more conventional writer, meant
“helping the author write the best
book he or she can write at that
moment in time,” which requires
that “every time you turn that
page, you are open and hopeful,”
Mr. Silberman once said.
“It’s very difficult to think your
way into a story,” he added. “You
have to feel your way into it, which
requires you to approach the
manuscript with a certain kind of
naïveté. You have to return to the
kind of reader all of us once were.”James Silberman, Editor Who Nurtured Literary Careers, Is Dead at 93
VIA SILBERMAN FAMILYBy SAM ROBERTSJames Silberman in an undat-
ed photo. Among the notewor-
thy books Mr. Silberman pub-
lished were novels by James
Baldwin and Marilyn French.A roster of authors
that included Hunter
S. Thompson and
Muhammad Ali.