"Black pioneer began life in Gravity," June 9, 1991
OUR PEOPLE Black pioneer began life in Gravity DES MOINES ^ Gravity A woman who turned obstacles into successes now enjoys retirement and downplays her pioneering role for blacks. By VICTORIA BENNING Register Staff Writer Lulu Merle Johnson led a pretty nor¬ mal childhood growing up near Gravity during the early 1900s. She was captain of the high school girls' basketball team and took her turn as secretary of her Sunday school class. It didn't seem to matter that she and her family were the only blacks in town. "Someone once asked my mother, 'Don't you have any mirrors in your house? Doesn't Lulu know she's colored?'" Johnson recalled. The fact is, Johnson didn't know what it meant to be "colored" until she attended the University of Iowa several years later. She and the handful of other black students weren't allowed to live in the university's dormitories, nor could they socialize with other students at the town's hangouts. "You talk about discrimination, well I knew it at the University of Iowa," she said during a recent trip to Des Moines for her U of I class reunion. Johnson, who paid for her college education by working a variety of jobs and with scholarship money from the Rockefeller Foundation, remembers her sophomore year when she was one of three black students in a political science class. On the first day, the professor assigned seats to all the white students. He said, "The rest of you can sit wherever you want." "Well, we all plopped down right in the front row," she said with a laugh. The professor never gave any black student a grade higher than a C, she said, but she said every time he asked a question, "you can bet three black hands shot up -- and we always knew the answers." Johnson is not bitter about about her years at Iowa, however. She always managed to turn obstacles into successes. During her years at Clinton High School, Johnson dreamed of becoming a commercial artist. Economic realities led her to her lifelong career in history. After registering on the first day of class at the U of I, Johnson had $25 left. The supplies she would need for art class would cost her $17, so she opted to invest her $25 in a bank account at Iowa State Bank and find another major. Why history? "It was Tuesday, the first day of my European history class," she recalled. "The professor decided to give a pop quiz on the seven ancient wonders of the world. Well, I knew all of them and got an A-plus and I didn't have $17 for art. I decided right then that history was for me." Johnson went on to become a pioneer in her field. In 1941, she became the first black woman to receive a Ph.D. from an Iowa institution and one of only a dozen or so black women in the country to achieve such status at the time. But even graduate school happened almost by chance. It was 1931, the country was in the midst of a depression and Johnson had finished her undergraduate work. Graduation approached, but Johnson couldn't afford the $3 for her teaching certificate or the $10 fee for her cap and gown. "Since I didn't have any money and there were no jobs available anyway, I just kept on in school. I had plenty of scholarship money left," she said. After getting her doctorate, Johnson left Iowa to become assistant professor of history at Tougaloo College in Tougaloo, Miss. It would be another six years before Iowa would allow black teachers to teach in public schools. Besides, schools out east paid better, she said. That first job paid a salary of $125 a month, her train fare from Iowa, room, board and laundry service. She remembers the day she got her first paycheck. "I laid down on the bed and stared at the check on the dresser. I was rich. I could afford to buy luxuries like cigarettes, and I even had a charge account."
Later, Johnson would hold various teaching and administrative positions at West Virginia University and Florida A & M. She remembers being summoned for a meeting with the governor of Florida. "He said he wanted to see this Ph.D. that the state of Florida was willing to pay almost $6,000 a year for." Johnson retired from academia in 1971 as director of the Department of Social and Behavioral Science at Cheney State University in Pennsylvania. She spends her days fishing for crab from the piers near her home in Millsboro, Dell, and traveling. She downplays her pioneer status. "I didn't do anything special," she says. "I'm just a systematic person. I decided what I wanted and went about getting it."
Lulu Merle Johnson
Found discrimination at U of I
DMSR 6/9/91
University of Iowa Libraries. University Archives