Charles S. Johnson

Charles Spurgeon Johnson (1893 to 1956) was an American sociologist and college administrator, the first black president of Fisk University, and a lifelong advocate for racial equality. Born in Bristol, Virginia, he took a B.A. in sociology at Virginia Union University and a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Chicago, where his friendship with Robert E. Park strongly influenced his work. As research director of the National Urban League he founded the magazine Opportunity, and he was a principal researcher and author for the Chicago Commission on Race Relations report on the 1919 riot, The Negro in Chicago (1922). From 1926 he chaired the sociology department at Fisk University in Nashville, where he wrote or directed studies of how legal, economic and social factors produced an oppressive racial structure, among them Shadow of the Plantation (1934) and Growing up in the Black Belt (1940). He preferred to work quietly with liberal white groups in the South for practical gains, a position often contrasted with that of W. E. B. Du Bois, and he advised Thurgood Marshall in preparing the second brief in the lead up to Brown v. Board of Education.