On Sunday, February 9, our movement lost another giant when our beloved Reverend Nelson Johnson passed away at the age of 81. Based in Greensboro, Rev. Johnson dedicated his life to building a movement of Black, Brown and working class people for liberation, justice and power. His patient, long-term efforts to build our social movement have helped lay the groundwork for our efforts to build UE Local 150 and improve conditions of working class people, and build a truly people-centered democracy.
While a student at NC A&T University in the late 1960s, Rev. Johnson was a leader during the 1969 student protests. In the 1960s and 70s, Johnson was a strong fighter for civil rights and Black liberation as part of the Student Organization for Black Unity and later the African Liberation Support Committee. Through this work, he met leaders and organizers that would later be part of founding UE150.
In the late 1970s, Rev. Johnson was part of the Workers Viewpoint Organization. WVO and the movement organized low wage workers at Cone Mills, Duke Hospital, textile mills, and other workplaces, along with tenants in public housing in Greensboro. In retaliation for their successful organizing against racism and to build unions, on November 3, 1979, the Ku Klux Klan murdered five of his close comrades in front of news cameras but were never convicted. As a survivor of the Greensboro Massacre, Rev. Johnson organized an international campaign, which included Archbishop Desmond Tutu, for truth and reconciliation.
From these efforts, Rev. Johnson went deeper into community and became a pastor, founding the Faith Community Church and the Beloved Community Center in Greensboro. BCC would become a critical hub for organizing against racism and police brutality for several decades, including hosting weekly community roundtable discussions.
In the 1980s, Rev. Johnson also played a key role in founding the Pulpit Forum, a group of Black ministers that would support labor and civil rights fights for many years. One of the forum’s important fights was to organize mostly Black women at a local K-Mart. He was one of eight “clergy arrested in labor protest,” which would define the struggle of the workers at K-Mart’s Greensboro distribution center, and capture its contradictions: a labor protest, but with prayer not picket signs, and those in handcuffs were not union leaders, but the pastors of the city’s leading Black churches. It was a significant success for organized labor in the least unionized state in the nation. It resulted in the signing of union contract by a $30 billion corporation that had thwarted prior organizing attempts everywhere else in the country.
Rev. Johnson founded the Southern Faith, Labor, and Community Alliance in 2006. This alliance brought together workers, unions and faith leaders from across the South to help build more unions in the region, an effort in which UE150 participated. In 2008, through this alliance, Rev. Johnson played a critical role supporting workers during the Justice at Smithfield campaign to win a union at the world’s largest pig slaughtering plant in the town of Tar Heel.
Rev. Johnson also helped bridge the divisions that the bosses created between Black and Latine workers. In 2008, he helped organize the Black and Brown Unity Conference which brought together Latine workers, including farmworkers, and Black workers, including members of Black Workers for Justice, UE150 and others. Latin Kings leader Jorge Cornell attended this conference. Rev. Johnson and Cornell played a critical role in orchestrating a cease fire to stop gun violence, which upset the Greensboro police. Rev. Johnson supported Cornell’s historic bid for mayor of Greensboro. Cornell was later attacked by federal agents and sentenced on bogus RICO charges. Rev. Johnson led an effort to have President Obama commute his sentence.
In 2007, as UE150 was expanding from eastern and central North Carolina to organize state mental health workers in the western part of the state, Rev. Johnson hosted the first ever statewide meeting of the UE150 Council for Department of Health in Human Services at the Beloved Community Center. This meeting launched the Mental Health Workers Bill of Rights campaign.
In 2016, when UE150 was working to build the Greensboro City Workers Union, Rev. Johnson played a critical role in helping to build relationships with city council members and eventually winning union payroll deduction.
It is not possible to list all the achievements and actions taken by Rev. Johnson to help build a thriving movement for social justice across North Carolina, the South, and the country. He has taught us many lessons. His legacy will live in our daily pursuits for the liberation of our labor.
Long live Reverend Nelson Johnson!
Comments