Vernon Johnson: The Struggle is Real, and Continues

Note: This is the second of four articles as the campus begins Equity and Inclusion Month and in advance of the first Equity and Inclusion Forum event from 2-4 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 15, in the Wilson Library Reading Room. Seminars and offerings from the forum facilitators will run throughout the school year.

Vernon Johnson, professor of Political Science at Western and one of the facilitators of the new campus Equity and Inclusion Forum, left the University of Akron in the early 1970s with a bachelor’s degree, a laissez-faire attitude toward studying, and a righteous, unbending zeal to foment radical social change in this country.

“We were in our 20s, and full of vinegar, anger, and ideals,” he said. “We were so self-righteous. We just thought there was no way things weren’t going to change, because we were working so hard to facilitate that change.”

Johnson was a member of the All African Peoples Revolutionary Party, a successor to the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, one of the most important civil-rights organizations of the era, and he was an ardent Pan-Africanist – an ideology which believes that the fates of all African peoples, whether on the continent or in the diaspora, are intertwined, with all sharing a common destiny.

His peers in SNCC like Stokely Carmichael built a fervor in him to spread the word – and when he was asked to leave the confines of his native Ohio to begin to take the message farther afield, he leapt at the chance to head west, and before too long, he found himself in Pullman.

“I knew that if I wanted students to listen to what I had to say, I couldn’t do it as an outsider – I needed to be a student too,” Johnson said. “So I started work on my master’s degree at Washington State purely as political cover, to keep spreading the message of 'The Struggle' … I was actually lucky to get in, because my grades as an undergraduate were not, shall we say, exemplary.”

Johnson said Pullman was fertile ground at the time for his message; the school had a very vibrant Black Studies program, and, just as importantly, Johnson said he began to meet and interact with a new set of mentors and peers who would influence him in many of the same ways as those he had met in Ohio.

Johnson recounted a night when he went to a WSU basketball game with one of these new mentors. Johnson had, for years by then, made a point of not standing during the National Anthem as a way of protesting against the system that he felt was unjust to people of color. That night, 12,000 people, including his professor, a well-respected black man who shared many of the same feelings as Johnson, rose as the anthem played, while Johnson remained seated.

Afterward, his professor sat down next to him and gave him a piece of advice that he has never forgotten.

“He said, ‘You know what, Vernon? There are 12,000 people in this arena who don’t know anything about you except for the fact that you won’t stand for the National Anthem. Most of them will never get a chance to know why you feel the way you do, but most importantly, most of them now have their impression of you, and aren’t interested in finding out.’ And he was right,” he said. “I’ve stood for every anthem since then.”

As he progressed through his master’s degree and then his doctorate, a number of changes were beginning to occur in Johnson’s life, changes that had him slowly recharting his path from the one he once envisioned, as life so often does.

“I began to realize that the Leninist and Maoist ideals of my youth weren’t really likely to occur, and what’s more, it was probably better that they didn’t,” he said. “A robust middle class prevented that type of revolution and, in reality, was proof positive that such actions weren’t the way to make change anyway.”

More importantly, the ardent Pan-Africanist had committed what it turns out was an act of almost treasonous levels to many of his peers, both in Pullman and back in Ohio: he had fallen in love with a white woman.

“I would call my friends, and some of them would say, ‘What’s going on with you, man? What are you doing?’ All I could do was answer to them that I was falling in love, the most human thing a person can do,” he said. “My friends who really knew me, knew who I was, they understood. They would just tell the others that ‘Vernon hasn’t changed, he’s the same guy he always was.’”

After he married his wife, Rebecca, herself an ardent political junkie with many of the same views, and they began to raise a multicultural family, Johnson said his views on many of the issues of his youth began to change even further, and the need to see inclusion and equality for everyone – not just one sector of society – became a bigger and bigger part of his mindset. This became especially true after they were organizers for Jesse Jackson’s presidential run in 1988.

“The idea of Jackson’s ‘Rainbow Coalition,’ where everyone had a voice, and a place, that really gave us language we could build our lives around,” he said.

“It really became, especially once I was married and began to raise a family, about living within the institution and the society with integrity and with honor,” he said. “And the academic world was a place where I found I could keep my views, could express myself, but could also continue to learn from my peers and my students.”

Johnson has taken many of the ideals of his youth and brought them with him as a way of inspiring his students and getting them to participate in discussions that are often not for the faint of heart.

“Honest conversations about our society, about race and gender and social norms and roles – truly honest ones – have to involve everybody squirming a bit, feeling a little bit uncomfortable, even the professor,” he said. “My students still have things to say, after all these years, that make me pause and think ‘You know, I’ve never thought of it that way.’

“And that’s really what it’s all about.”

Note: For a full list of all 15 E&I workshop opportunities, click here or go to https://west.wwu.edu/training/default.aspx#.