Collect Day #37, LIONEL JOHNSON
Heavenly Father, in you we live and move and have our being: help us to remember at all times your earnest desire for justice for all your people; The gentle courage of your faithful servant Lionel Johnson laid the foundation for civil rights and equal opportunities regardless of birth. Leadership and thoughtful determination has allowed us who follow in his footsteps, signposts for the road ahead; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
DAY #37, March 28, 2018
Manchester
LIONEL JOHNSON
(1923 – 2004)
By Arnie Alpert
After being stationed in a segregated unit at Grenier Field (now called Manchester-Boston Regional Airport) during World War II, Lionel Johnson decided Manchester would be a better place to raise a family than Louisiana, where he was born.
Manchester was not the Deep South, but neither was it entirely welcoming to African Americans in the 1950s and ‘60s. Housing and other forms of discrimination were common, so when discussion about starting a local branch of the NAACP started in 1964, Lionel was right there. Ten years later, he was right there again to bring the Greater Manchester Black Scholarship Foundation into being.
Lionel took over a dry-cleaning business, Fashion Cleaners, and ran it for more than 40 years. He ran for and was elected to be a selectman, a local office involved in overseeing elections. He raised five daughters. And he established himself as a civic leader and as a go-to person for people concerned about civil rights violations. Though Lionel was never a “militant” in any sense of the word, it didn’t take much agitation to stir things up in the Queen City, where politics were dominated by the publisher of The Manchester Union Leader, a supporter of segregation. Lionel’s style was never about seeking confrontation, but over the years he acquired the skills, connections, and determination to help the small Black community stand up for dignified treatment by landlords, realtors, employers, educators and politicians.
When Coretta Scott King called for community observances to bolster the call for a national holiday on her late husband’s birthday in 1983, Lionel was there again. As the NAACP branch president, he brought together leaders of the Scholarship Foundation and the Manchester YWCA to organize the city’s first Martin Luther King Day event, held at Brookside Congregational Church during a raging blizzard. When Congress passed, and President Ronald Reagan signed legislation enacting a federal holiday named for Dr. King later that year, Lionel joined the rising call for New Hampshire to adopt a state holiday, too. Legislation to establish a King Holiday in New Hampshire had been first introduced – and defeated – in 1979. The same results occurred again in 1981, 1985, and 1987. By 1988, with frustration rising over New Hampshire’s increasingly isolated status, Lionel united an informal association of Black civic leaders with labor and civil rights activists, educators and business leaders to mount the first organized push for the MLK state holiday. Known as the Martin Luther King Day Committee, Lionel became one of its chief leaders and spokespeople.
That year, Lionel also stepped down from his NAACP leadership role to seek and win office as a state representative, motivated largely by his desire to organize for the King holiday from the inside. The first robust effort to pass an MLK Day bill, in 1989 with Lionel as a co-sponsor, drew substantial support. But with active opposition from the editors of the Manchester newspaper, it failed again.
After being re-elected in 1990, Lionel tried again. This time, a bill to establish a New Hampshire holiday for Dr. King passed in the State Senate, but the House majority refused to go along. Along with the only other Black state representative that session, Lionel accepted a compromise bill to create a holiday known as “Civil Rights Day,” an MLK Day alternative. Immediately, he and the MLK Day Committee began efforts to add Dr. King’s name to the day. It took another eight years of steady campaigning, but with Rep. Lionel Johnson serving as a co-sponsor, a bill adding Dr. King’s name to Civil Rights Day finally passed the NH House, 212 to 148, May 25, 1999. Lionel was proudly there on June 5 when Gov. Jeanne Shaheen signed it into law during a rally on the State House lawn.
Lionel Johnson was 81 years old when he died in his home on June 5, 2004. “It was about what he did,” Lionel often said about Dr. King. In respect and appreciation for his commitment to educating young people about the African American freedom struggle, the Martin Luther King Coalition, which continues the tradition started in 1983 of holding annual MLK Day celebrations in Manchester, named the award for its Arts and Writing Contest after Lionel Johnson.
