|
|
Funeral services will be at 3 p.m. Saturday at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church in Greenwood.
Visitation will be 6 until 8 p.m. Friday at Strangers Home Missionary Baptist Church.
Ms. Johnson was born in Greenwood to Lula Bell and Theoda Johnson Sr., who often hosted during the 1960s members of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a civil rights organization.
As a young teenager, Ms. Johnson became active in SNCC.
While attempting at the age of 15 to desegregate a bus stop in Columbus, Miss., in 1963, she was arrested, along with the well-known civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer and others, beaten and jailed.
However, that did not stop her dedication to fighting for equal rights.
She had an "untimely death," said Arance Williamson, a former president of the Greenwood City Council who was led to become involved in the civil rights movement by Ms. Johnson.
"She was a very, very vocal person," said Williamson. "Her days were filled with mass meetings, marches and picket lines."
"She loved to make life better for all people. She saw a vision and she wanted to follow her heart," Williamson said.
In the 1970s, Ms. Johnson worked as a paralegal at North Mississippi Rural Legal Services in Greenwood with attorney Solomon Osborne.
"I knew June for about 20 or 30 years," said Osborne, now Leflore County judge. "I knew she had been involved with civil rights from an early age."
Osborne said Ms. Johnson was often involved as the plaintiff in lawsuits.
In one historic case, she challenged employment practices of Greenwood's city government. "At that time, there were no blacks in any positions ... except in the Sanitation Department," Osborne said.
The suit resulted in the city being required to hire blacks on an equal basis in its various departments and in supervisory positions, he said.
Ms. Johnson was one of the first black women to apply for a job with the city's Fire Department and was the first black woman to run for a position on the Leflore County Board of Supervisors, Osborne said. Her efforts, rooted in Greenwood, branched farther into the rest of the nation.
With Marion Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund, Ms. Johnson drew attention to failures of Mississippi's anti-poverty agencies and to substandard conditions in the state's prisons.
In 1982, Ms. Johnson moved to Washington, where she worked for three years in the capital city's Office of Paternity and Child Support Enforcement and later as a home hospital teacher. From 1995 until her health began to fail in September, she served as program monitor in the Office of Early Childhood Development and served as the first vice president of the Washington Ward 6 Democrats.
In 2000, she worked as a research consultant for the film "Freedom Song," a documentary about the Mississippi SNCC workers, and served as lead consultant for "Standing on My Sisters' Shoulders," a documentary about her civil rights activism and that of Hamer, Victoria Gray Adams and others. Additionally, she was featured in the public radio documentary "Mississippi Becomes a Democracy."
It was the work of local activists such as Ms. Johnson who created a large impact for the civil rights movement nationally, said Susan Glisson, director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi.
"Young people's work in Mississippi was crucial to national change," Glisson said.
The activities of the NAACP and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were important mobilizing strategies, she said, but the efforts of the students of SNCC "created a grass roots empowerment so that when they left, others were still working."
"The personal strength of June Johnson as a young person to be thrown in jail and beaten and not lose commitment to equal rights is a profound testament of courage," Glisson said.
