Atlanta Magazine • Atlanta Magazine August 2025 • Unsung Hero

He was one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most trusted and dependable commanders in almost every field of battle during the civil rights movement. So why haven’t you ever heard of J.T. Johnson?

Whenever he speaks to a group of young people, they invariably wonder why they’re there, how quickly they can leave, and who exactly they’re looking at.

“My name is John Thomas Johnson,” the stranger informs them with startling authority, especially for someone of advanced age, “and I want you to know one thing.”

“The civil rights movement was the most important thing of the 20th century,” J.T. Johnson says, his deep, gravelly voice intimidating in a way that demands respect. “And you guys—I’m not trying to put you down—but y’all know very little of anything about it.”

He doesn’t expect to be recognized. No schools or streets are named for him. He isn’t famous, though arguably he should be.

“J.T. was a personal assistant to Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy,” says Andrew Young, “and he was a friend of mine.”

Young, a former United Nations ambassador, congressman, and twice-elected mayor of Atlanta, is often identified as the last close associate of Martin Luther King Jr. still alive—but he points out the glaring omission.

“The movement was very much like an iceberg,” says Young. “There was a beautiful part at the top that you can see, but the frozen waters underneath were really the solid base. And J.T. Johnson was part of the solid base of the movement.”

Johnson was a leader of the Ground Crew, a sort of special forces unit within Dr. Martin Luther King’s organization the SCLC—the Southern Christian Leadership Council—and he ran operations in the streets of nearly every city where the movement played out.

“Dr. King was a genius who knew where people needed to be,” Johnson says. “This man had a way of convincing you and motivating you.”

“Whatever you did in the civil rights movement, it was important,” Johnson says. “The janitor who turned off the lights at night after we left the church, they could have got killed. Especially the people who let us stay in their houses.”

With the trim, fit body of an athlete, Johnson was viewed as a confident physical presence during the movement. His appearance has remained so deceptively youthful and vigorous that until very recently, no one would guess, or believe, he’s 87. Now, on the mend after surgery, he’s lost some weight, and his advanced age is finally beginning to show.

He is keenly aware that Gen Z youths are angry and see him as an interloper in the 21st century, someone who has overstayed his welcome on their planet, an old man out of touch with the difficulties they face, and that among each other they likely dismiss him with an easy slur: Boomer.

Johnson isn’t a Boomer, though. He was born in 1937, into the so-called Silent Generation, a label that doesn’t fit him at all. When he’s silent, Johnson appears to be simmering, a serious man with important things on his mind and not enough time for anything foolish. And seldom if ever has he been reluctant to speak out—not during the civil rights movement and certainly not while discussing it.

“That’s the first thing I’m going to talk to you about, if you want me to talk,” Johnson tells every young group. “Now, the other part of this is that I will listen to what you have to say—and you have to share.”

“THEY SHARE A LOT OF SUFFERING,” Johnson says, speaking quietly during a recent interview at his modest home in Cascade Heights, where he’s lived since 2003. “You’d be surprised what they tell you.”

Young people open up to Johnson about things like gun violence; grief over the deaths of classmates and friends; experiences with ketamine, fentanyl, and alcohol; sexual harassment, molestation, and assault; their own parents and problems at home; poverty; and the seeming inevitability of gang membership.

“Kids are raising themselves,” Johnson says. “And the gang folks know it, so they just grab them. They make them think that they’re their best friend in the world.”

He is adept at hearing what they have to say, at least partially because of his role in the movement.

“A lot of the foot soldiers were very young guys with a whole lot of energy, but they needed to be directed so they didn’t just go hog wild,” recalls Dr. Barbara Emerson, the oldest daughter of the brilliant but unpredictable provocateur Hosea Williams, a top King strategist and field general.

“J.T. was like a sergeant,” Emerson says. “He was an intermediary for the generals, and that was necessary to refine their decisions and make it all work for the foot soldiers. He was good at directing their raw energy.”

IN THE SUMMER OF 1962, Johnson was living happily in Harlem, New York, with no intention of ever returning to Georgia or the segregated South. He oversaw shipping and receiving at a manufacturing company, had spending money in his wallet, and loved New York’s thriving Black culture—and, of course, its women.

One evening, he turned on The Huntley-Brinkley Report and was stunned to see Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with large numbers of people who were being shoved around and beaten—people he knew.

Within two days, he packed everything, located a ride, and was on his way back to Albany, Georgia.

In the growing civil rights movement, his hometown had become ground zero—one of the first cities to protest with mass marches. “Albany’s half crazy,” Johnson says, dead serious and not even cracking a smile. “They didn’t fear nothing.”

Johnson was born an hour or so away in tiny Montezuma, where his grandfather, a Morehouse graduate, owned a small shoe shop. A local dry-cleaning operation was the other African American business nearby.

“They were the only two Blacks in that racist town that had anything down there,” he says.

His parents separated when he was in the fifth grade. Johnson says, without elaboration, that his mother and grandfather were alcoholics. He decided to leave his sister, Lucille, in the care of an aunt in Valdosta and went to stay with his father, Robert Ford Johnson, who had relocated to Albany to work in construction.

Soon after, however, his father landed “a serious contract” in Titusville, Florida. “So, he said, ‘We’re moving to Florida,’” Johnson remembers. “I said, “We ain’t moving. You’re moving to Florida. Not me. You have taught me everything I need to know. I can take care of myself in this house.’ I said, ‘You just go head on.’ So, he did.”

A money order for $40 would arrive every Sunday morning from Florida. “My daddy, he’d come home some weekends and hang out with me,” Johnson says, but mostly he was self-sufficient. For about 18 months, Johnson lived at home alone while he completed middle school. He became a Boy Scout, sang in the choir, and excelled at sports, especially football.

“I was a great football player,” Johnson says. “I ain’t lying, now.”

Johnson may have been one of the greatest football players Georgia ever produced, but there’s no way to know for sure. Games at Black high schools weren’t covered in newspapers, record books weren’t kept, and few who saw him play are still alive.

“He was the best running back, I would say, in the entire state,” declares Harris, whose memories of him on the field remain vivid. She graduated from Monroe High School a year behind Johnson and considers him a brother. A retired teacher still living in Albany, Harris was active in the local civil rights movement and became one of the original Freedom Singers, a quartet that performed at mass meetings around the country.

Her mother, the no-nonsense widow of a Baptist minister, had four boys and four girls, including Rutha Mae, but decided to give Johnson a real home. He was in the eighth grade when she informed him, “Get rid of what you can get rid of, because you’re moving over here.”

Katie B. Harris, whom Johnson knew as “Little Mom,” would become a major influence in his life. “She was a different kind of lady,” Johnson says, with a slight chuckle.

After that, he lived at 623 Whitney Street, an address that was known in the community and commanded respect, for good reason. “They didn’t answer to White people,” Johnson says.

“I didn’t grow up nonviolent,” Johnson says. “But I ain’t never had a fight in my life—with nobody. I carried myself in a way nobody’s gonna bother me.”

Handsome, with flecks of gray in his hair even in high school, Johnson was always a snappy dresser. When he was recruited to spend a summer of backbreaking labor on a tobacco farm in Connecticut, fashionable men’s stores in the North caught his attention, and he came home with herringbone suits and several pairs of handcrafted Edmonds shoes. He returned to the farm in Hartford every year for more hard work and new attire.

“Mr. Debonaire,” Rutha Mae Harris recalls. “He was a very distinguished young man. Humble, outgoing, trustworthy, and smart.”

Scoutmaster Millard F. Adams, a Presbyterian minister, was a mentor to Johnson, enabling him to attend a Boy Scout jamboree in Cimarron, New Mexico, where he explored trails on horseback and camped overnight in fear of mountain lions. On the way, he stayed at the Butler Street YMCA in Atlanta.

Johnson was captain of the football team at Monroe High when Adams warned him school officials were planning to determine which teachers were members of the NAACP and fire them. So Johnson organized fellow players, cheerleaders, and other students. Hearing of plans for a walkout in protest, the officials backed off.

He enjoyed growing up in Albany, he says, but knew most doors were closed to him. He was getting nowhere, but he was getting there fast—very, very fast.

“There’s no limit to how many yards I gained in football games because I’d score five, six touchdowns every Friday night,” Johnson says. “We were great athletes because we didn’t have nothing else to do.”

He was told that legendary Georgia Tech head coach Bobby Dodd said that he wished he could recruit J.T. Johnson. “I would have liked to go to Georgia Tech myself, but that was not going to happen,” Johnson says. After graduating, he played a year at Albany State University, a Black college, before visiting Harlem and deciding to stay.

“He got his ass out of Albany,” says former civil rights activist Al Lingo, a White Protestant minister who lives in Atlanta and now teaches Buddhist meditation. “He was an informed Northern idealogue. He was exposed to something other than the South.”

Lingo had just graduated from seminary when he decided to do whatever he could to help the movement in any way he could—and his life became inextricably connected to Johnson’s when a publicity stunt helped change the course of history.

NEVER FORMALLY INTRODUCED, J.T. Johnson and Al Lingo met in a motel swimming pool in the United States’ oldest city one very hot day in the summer of 1964.

“J.T. set in motion the very firm commitment to John Kennedy’s bill on public accommodations,” Lingo says.

Not long before his assassination, President John F. Kennedy introduced a bill to prohibit discrimination based on race, but that proposed legislation faced determined resistance throughout the South, with powerful “Dixiecrats” attempting to block it with the longest filibuster in U.S. Senate history.

Hosea Williams had recruited Johnson from the Albany movement to join the SCLC’s Ground Crew in St. Augustine, Florida, and for weeks they and local demonstrators were attacked daily by law enforcement and the Ku Klux Klan—with virtually no press coverage.

“They beat us morning, noon, and night,” Johnson says. “They never lightened up. There was always blood in the streets, blood in the church, when we got back at night.”

On June 9, Andrew Young was violently ambushed, beaten, and repeatedly kicked while leading a nonviolent march. Until then, King had no intention of visiting St. Augustine at such a critical juncture. He arrived on June 10 with a show of force from the SCLC, the media right behind. Almost simultaneously, the 72-day filibuster ended, clearing the way for a vote but by no means ensuring passage.

To stir things up in Washington, King and his close friend and associate Ralph David Abernathy were arrested and jailed for attempting to enter the restaurant at St. Augustine’s Monson Motor Lodge to buy coffee on June 11.

A week later, Johnson was standing with Williams at the bayfront, directly across from the motel. “I’ll tell you what,” Williams said. “We got to do something to get some attention here.”

“The Monson’s got a swimming pool right up by the highway,” he observed—and together, they cooked up a plan to “integrate” the pool. Johnson easily recruited a few young Black volunteers to join him. Williams, meanwhile, went to find someone White.

Lingo had just arrived. He’d intended to join the voter drive in Mississippi but first dropped off a friend in Jacksonville, where he heard about what was going on in St. Augustine and headed there instead.

Williams asked Lingo and another White volunteer to check in to the motel on June 18, change into swimming trunks, and head for the pool. Behind the low-cut hedges, waiting to swim as Lingo’s invited guests, Johnson was hiding with his group—and television and newspaper photographers.

“I jumped over first,” Johnson says. “I waited on the girls, and when they got there, we all dived in.”

James Brock, manager of the Monson, initially had been distracted by protesters on the other side of the building. But when he realized Black and White people were swimming together in his pool, he seemed to lose his mind.

Brock ran around the side of the pool, wildly pouring muriatic acid into the water. Further chaos ensued as a uniformed police officer jumped into the pool to physically remove and arrest the swimmers. The acid was diluted in pool water and didn’t harm them—but the hate-filled images were damning.

“An absolute gift,” says Lingo. “It so happens that J.T. and I were in that pool.”

Footage of the melee led newscasts that night, and dramatic photos appeared on front pages around the world.

Johnson, Lingo, and the others had been roughed up while being arrested and were still in jail cells the next day, wearing only swimsuits, while President Lyndon Johnson demanded action.

“Our whole foreign policy and everything else can go to hell over this,” the president said in a phone conversation on June 19. Two weeks later, he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law.

J.T. Johnson has always credited James Brock. “Had it not been for him, I’m not so sure that we would have gotten that bill,” Johnson says. “Sometimes, your enemy can be your best friend.”

LESS THAN A YEAR LATER, Johnson played a role in events that led to another landmark piece of legislation, the Voting Rights Act of 1965—signed into law 60 years ago on August 6.

That spring, on what came to be called “Bloody Sunday,” nonviolent marchers led by Hosea Williams and John Lewis crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, expecting to be turned around or arrested. Instead, they were savagely attacked by state troopers and local police.

Johnson had been sent ahead to Montgomery to organize the actual Selma-to-Montgomery march that would begin two weeks after Bloody Sunday, which drew people from around the world to take part in an epic trek that spanned 55 miles and required five days to complete.

At its conclusion, Johnson was one of the last people to see civil rights martyr Viola Liuzzo, a White housewife from Detroit who eagerly volunteered to help.

“She wanted to be part of this freedom movement, and she was very, very dedicated,” Johnson says. “We had a lot of respect for her.”

In the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Johnson ran into Liuzzo as she was about to drive Leroy Moton, a young Black volunteer, back to Selma. Alarmed, Johnson tried to talk her out of it, then summoned Hosea Williams to help, but neither of them could stop her.

“We couldn’t take her car keys,” Johnson says. “Maybe we should have, but we didn’t.”

JOHNSON WAS IN MEMPHIS on April 4, 1968, and had just left the Lorraine Motel when he stopped for gas, and a service station attendant asked if he’d heard the news. In disbelief, he turned around and sped back.

Ralph Abernathy took over the SCLC and did his best to carry on the work of his closest friend—choosing Johnson as his chief aide. “Everybody hit the road running their own way,” Johnson says. “We could never get back in action.”

He maintains active membership in the SCLC to this day, cherishing the organization for what it originally was and what he believes it still could be. But he laments, “We don’t have civil rights leaders anymore.”

“J.T. stuck with the movement until today,” Andrew Young says of his longtime friend. “He was one of the heroes who donated his life, contributed his life, gave his life, to the task of trying to make America the dream of our forefathers.”

Johnson still believes in the power of nonviolence as a means of social change, and he believes that its message will resonate, even with young people in 2025—if it is taught.

“They don’t hear anything about Martin Luther King or Gandhi in high school,” Johnson says. “They hear nothing about nonviolence.”

To facilitate what he believes is a critical dialogue with disaffected youth, he founded Take 2 America Foundation, but has struggled to obtain funding and community support for the nonprofit—in part, he believes, because his name isn’t better known.

“It was not how much you did, but whether the press was there when you did it,” says Young. “If Martin Luther King was not in town, the chances are the press was not there.”

But Johnson continues the fight; the message is too important. “You don’t need to just pass through this world,” Johnson likes to tell young people. “Live in it. You have to make a contribution.”

[Full disclosure: the author is communications director at the Andrew J. Young Foundation and is the producer of the Andrew Young Presents documentary series.]