Johnson, Charles Spurgeon(1893–1956)
One of the most influential scholars and leaders of
the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson, a sociologist,
became a highly respected advocate for children,
racial equality, and civil rights. He is perhaps best
known for his longtime editorship of OPPORTU-
NITY, the official publication of the NATIONAL
URBANLEAGUE, and for his years at FISKUNIVER-
SITY, where he served as a faculty member, depart-
ment chair, and as president.
Born in Bristol, Virginia, he was the first of
five children in the family of the Reverend Charles
Henry and Winifred Branch Johnson. He and his
siblings, Lillie, Sarah, Julia, and Maurice, grew up
in a supportive family but a segregated southern
town. Their father, whose own father had been en-
slaved in Virginia, was a dynamic Baptist minister
who for 42 years presided over the historic Lee
Street Baptist Church, which grew under his lead-
ership from a modest shed to an expansive brick
church with a distinctive spire. As scholar Kath-
leen Hauke notes, the Reverend Johnson, though
not an overbearing personality, once used “force of
personality and the Bible” to “so sham[e] a lynch
mob that lynching ceased in Bristol” (Hauke, 147).
Charles Johnson married Marie Antoinette Bur-
gette of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in November
- A graduate of the Wisconsin Conservatory
of Speech and Fine Arts, she became an activist in
her own right as she pursued a career in teaching
following her landmark appointment as the first
African-American employed in the Milwaukee li-
brary system. The couple had four children:
Charles, Jr., a physician; Robert Burgette, a sociol-
ogy professor and Cornell University Ph.D.; Patri-
cia Marie, a Fisk University graduate; and Jeh
Vincent, a COLUMBIAUNIVERSITY–educated ar-
chitect and former student-body president of the
School of Architecture. Marie Johnson, who was
an active philanthropist and wife dedicated to
maintaining her husband’s legacy after his death in
1956, died nine years later.
Johnson was one of the many learned and ac-
complished figures of the Harlem Renaissance. He
graduated in 1913 from Wayland Academy, a pri-
vate school in Richmond, where his parents sent
him in order to circumvent the intense racial prej-
udice of his hometown. He completed require-
ments for the bachelor’s degree in three years and
graduated from the Virginia Union University, with
which Wayland Academy was affiliated, in 1916.
He then began graduate studies in sociology at the
UNIVERSITY OFCHICAGO. There, he studied with
the renowned sociologist Robert Park, a former re-
porter whose work on African and African-
Americanissues included projects on the Belgian
Congo and working as an aide, ghostwriter, and
secretary to BOOKERT. WASHINGTON. He earned
a Ph.B. degree in 1917 and by 1918 became a
member of the armed forces. He joined the 803rd
Pioneer Infantry of the American Expeditionary
Forces and became part of the massive numbers of
African Americans who fought in World War I.
Johnson, a regimental sergeant major, was sent to
the front lines in France, but as biographer Richard
Robbins notes, he recorded very little about his
military experience, which would have been
marked for its intense racial segregation and limitedJohnson, Charles Spurgeon 279Charles Spurgeon Johnson, editor of Opportunity,
photographed by Carl Van Vechten. Permission granted
by the Van Vechten Trust (Yale Collection of American
Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)