The cherished gift of an apology, 60 years later

It was Sunday, Sept. 1, 1963 – four days after Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his clarion call for racial justice with his “I Have a Dream” speech to hundreds of thousands gathered at the Lincoln Memorial and to millions more watching on TV.

In Plaquemine, Louisiana – just south and west of Baton Rouge – 16-year-old Calvin Johnson shoehorned inside Plymouth Rock Baptist Church to hear James Farmer, founder of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and a close associate of Dr. King, give a passionate talk about the moral imperative of registering African Americans in the Deep South to vote.

Just two weeks earlier, Farmer had led a protest march through downtown Plaquemine, shadowed by city police. Police chief Dennis Songy claimed he had gotten assurances that “the Negroes had promised not to sing,” which became hollow justification for what would happen next: As the protesters defiantly intoned “We Shall Overcome,” police fired canisters of tear gas, scattering the marchers and triggering the arrest of Farmer and other leaders.

But on Sunday, Sept. 1, Farmer was out of jail, and the 200 people inside Plymouth Rock Baptist Church were still seething over the tear gas attack and the black-and-white images of government oppression.

On orders from Louisiana Gov. Jimmie Davis, police looking for Farmer and other youthful “instigators” decided enough was enough. In the dark of night, police fired a barrage of tear gas, and officers on horseback rode into the church with cattle prods to drive people outside. They then pelted the sanctuary with high-pressure hoses, breaking windows and overturning pews.

Johnson was a skinny teenager – all of 6-foot-2 and 120 pounds – but at least he had the benefit of agility. He leaped through a church window and then tried to outrace the horses to a fence at the edge of the property.

“It was a barbed-wire fence, but I had to jump across it to keep from being run over by the horses,” Johnson recalled. “My left arm got caught on one of the barbs, and that gave me a slit. I still have the scar on my arm.”

But what Johnson recalls even more vividly than his deep and elongated flesh wound and the stitches was the smell of tear gas.

“Today, if I think about tear gas enough, I can smell it,” Johnson said.

Police went door to door, looking for Farmer, who had found a hiding spot at a funeral home next to the church. In a contemporaneous journal, Farmer wrote that protesters had told him police were ramming down doors in the neighborhood looking for him, promising to lynch him on sight. Farmer wanted to hand himself over to end the terror but was talked out of it by neighbors, who said he wouldn’t be alive in the morning.

The woman who owned the funeral home hatched an ingenious plan: She would send out two hearses in different directions, and Farmer could jump into a casket in the back of one hearse, with its curtains pulled tightly, and drive inconspicuously through the police cordon, with the other hearse serving as a decoy.

Later that month, Johnson, a senior leader at all-black Iberville High School, felt emboldened to rally his classmates to leave school and march peacefully to the school board office in downtown Plaquemine to push for the integration of public schools. This was nine years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision made desegregation the law of the land, but that message had not yet infiltrated Louisiana.

“We basically had just about the entire high school population of 400 or 500 kids,” Johnson said. “We did the traditional thing, walking two by two down the street. The march was stopped again by law enforcement, and they told everybody to get back to school. There were 26 of us who didn’t, and we laid down on the ground and got arrested.”

As a 16-year-old juvenile, Johnson was charged with inciting a riot. He went to court in the spring of 1964, defended by famed New Orleans civil rights attorney Lolis Edward Elie, whose cool demeanor in the courtroom left a lasting impression.

“Lolis became a pivotal point for me just in seeing this man practice law and dealing with this judge, who was not nice at all,” Johnson said. “The way Lolis carried himself, the way Lolis talked – to me, that was a revelation.”

Spurred to enter law school

Johnson eventually went on to Loyola University Law School and for years earned a living as a criminal defense attorney and also as a professor of criminal law at Loyola University. In 1990, on the advice of good friend and mentor Jack Nelson, he successfully ran for a criminal court judgeship in Orleans Parish.

For the son of a Donaldsonville lumber mill laborer, it was one more example of gold being tested by fire. Johnson’s older brother William became a member of the school board in Glen Cove, New York, and his older sister Linda was president of Louisiana’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.

“My father preached to his children their obligation – it was kind of a W.E.B. Du Bois concept – that we were part of the ‘Talented 10,’ the talented 10% – and we had an obligation to others,” Johnson said.

As Johnson created the first drug court alternative in New Orleans and used his gifts to serve others who are mentally disabled, the memory of his 1963 arrest gnawed at him. In 2008, just before Christmas, he penned an op-ed for The Times-Picayune in which he viewed his rich life from 35,000 feet. His daughter had asked him what he wanted for Christmas.

“I had everything I ever wanted,” Johnson wrote – cars, clothes, houses, fine wine, good food.

“However, there is something else I want,” he continued. “It’s not ‘stuff.’ It’s something I have wanted for almost 45 years, which I have never received. I want it not just for me, but for all those similarly situated. It’s not a costly thing to give. In fact, it’s free. I want an apology.”

The gift he yearned for

Johnson said he wanted someone who was present on the day he was arrested and present during the other “violent incidents that proliferated in our state” to say they were sorry.

Former New Orleans Mayor Moon Landrieu read Johnson’s piece, and his daughter Madeleine went to his house to type up a letter to the editor to the Times-Picayune: “Although I was not in Plaquemine, La., at the time, I was an adult who stood silent as that inequity and countless others were inflicted on him and other African Americans during the Jim Crow era. My gift is not much and words may seem wholly inadequate, but I apologize to him for my inaction.”

Johnson also received a phone call from a white woman who grew up in Plaquemine.

“She was a woman about my age, and as strange as this sounds, these activities went on and a lot of white people really didn’t know they were going on,” Johnson said.

When Madeleine Landrieu became dean of the Loyola Law School, she kept Johnson’s 2008 op-ed displayed on her office credenza, always wondering if someday she might be in a position to deliver a more concrete response.

“For the longest time I had it folded up in my desk drawer because it was such an inspiring thing, and then I decided to laminate it and put it on the credenza,” Landrieu said.

Johnson was not interested in a “pardon” –  which would imply that he had done something wrong. As the law school worked on honoring Johnson for his service to budding attorneys and to the community, Landrieu knew it was time to approach Gov. John Bel Edwards.

What the governor’s office came up with was an “amende honorable” – an ancient French action of reparation for “an offense or injury done by making an open and usually humbling acknowledgment.”

Landrieu had asked Johnson to show up for the Baccalaureate Mass on May 12, even though he was to be the commencement speaker and receive an honorary doctor of law degree the next evening at the graduation ceremonies. Johnson was wrestling internally whether to attend the Mass because his schedule was slammed – he had to finish a professional development test in the parking lot of Holy Name of Jesus Church for his role as interim director of the local office of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

“My wife was harassing me with the idea that I had to show up for the Mass,” Johnson said. “I was really busy. The whole time I was thinking, ‘Why am I actually here?’”

And then, after Communion, Landrieu walked into the sanctuary. Johnson noticed something in her hands. He had seen it before. It was the laminated copy of his 2008 plea for an apology.

And then, Landrieu turned to another document and read the words Johnson had been yearning to hear for nearly 60 years: An apology from the state by Gov. Edwards.

“It was such an absolute, total surprise,” Johnson said. “I was just in tears.”

It was one small acknowledgment of the razor-sharp barbs imposed on an innocent life.

“It means something,” Johnson said. “It absolutely does.”

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