Johnson pushed for consolidation, but later had doubts

He could have been mayor. Most people told Earl Johnson that.

Think of it: the first black mayor of Jacksonville, his adopted city, the city he fought in court as an NAACP attorney, pushing it to give up on racial segregation. The city where he met, in his family's house, with Martin Luther King Jr. to plan civil-rights demonstrations in nearby St. Augustine.

In the mid-1960s, Johnson knew that becoming mayor was a distinct possibility, especially if Jacksonville's black population, then more than 40 percent of the total, became a majority.

But he passed up on that chance and instead become a prominent advocate and designer of the plan to consolidate Jacksonville and Duval County, pulling together the city and the suburbs into one large entity.

Such a step would keep Jacksonville a majority white city, diluting black political power. He knew that as well as anybody.

But Duval County 50 years ago was in deep trouble, and consolidation, Johnson said, was crucial to the future of the place he'd come to call home, to the people — white and black — who lived there.

"My father was most concerned about the entirety of this region," his son, Earl M. Johnson Jr., a Jacksonville attorney, said recently. "And so while having the opportunity to become mayor of a town where the majority black electorate voted you in seemed a modern trend and very possible, ultimately my father would say that being mayor of a bankrupt town would not be very much fun.”

In mid-1960s Duval, both inside the city and in the growing suburbs, there were failing schools, rampant political corruption, unpaved roads, and poor services. Civic leaders, after earlier consolidation proposals failed, made another try.

Earl Johnson was secretary of the local commission that came up with the new plan, and was a prominent voice pushing it, especially in the black community.

He was a pragmatist, his son said, someone who saw the long view. Consolidation, he believed, would improve the whole county, and that would mean better lives for its black residents.

When voters went to the polls in 1967, consolidation passed by an almost 2-1 margin. Black voters supported by it by a comfortable margin. Johnson's advocacy paid off.

His son, 50 years later, still has a newspaper clipping with a quote from his father, which he can recite by memory: "You must not only show consolidation is the best hope for the black community, you must show it's the best hope for the whole community."

'NUDGE THE SYSTEM'

Earl Johnson was the son of a railroad laborer in Huntington, W.Va., a Howard University grad who got to Jacksonville at age 30 and became a civil-rights attorney. He went on to file the landmark desegregation suit in federal court against Duval County schools and pushed to integrate parks and hospitals and other facilities. A few years later, he represented major civil-rights leaders such as King and Andrew Young in court.

Those were high-profile, bold stands.

But in person Johnson, the first African-American to join the Jacksonville Bar Association, was calm and thoughtful, befitting a politician who took up the slogan "quiet effectiveness."

After the successful consolidation vote, he became the first black person to be elected to an at-large seat on the City Council. He was re-elected three times.

In a council resolution as he stepped down in 1983, his colleagues proclaimed that Johnson "acted as a bridge between the races, between the rich and the poor and as a conscience for the Council, whose opinions and judgments were respected by all."

He was just 60 when he died of cancer in 1988. He is now a member of the Florida Civil Rights Hall of Fame, and Earl M. Johnson Memorial Park on the Southside is named for him.

In 1976, after being named the first black president of the City Council, Johnson got emotional when he spoke of his life's work. "I have tried," he said, "in a quiet and unobtrusive way, to nudge the system along."

'LONG WAY TO GO'

Earl Johnson Jr. said his father saw beyond just the city of Jacksonville. He loved visiting Little Talbot Island, and he and his wife, Janet, moved their family in 1970 to Old Scott Mill Road in Mandarin.

“They, my parents, liked the idea of having the freedom of travel and being able to live where you wanted,” he said.

The elder Johnson, though a leading force in consolidation, could still see its faults, where it fell short, as well as where it succeeded. It was, after all, a complex issue that resisted easy answers.

You could see that in Johnson's comments as the years went on.

Historian James B. Crooks, in his book "Jacksonville: The Consolidation Story, From Civil Rights to the Jaguars," notes a 1971 Harper's Magazine quote from Johnson — whom he calls "the city's most influential African American leader" — in which he said, "We still have a long way to go, but we have come a long way too."

In 1978, Johnson was more skeptical, telling the Times-Union that though tough black neighborhoods were improving, money went where there was political power, and those neighborhoods had little power.

"Knowing what I know now, I'm not sure I would take the same position," he said.

By 1981, in an interview with the Jacksonville Journal, he said consolidation led to a more segregated city, where "there is a substantial relaxation of racist philosophy as to where blacks ought to be."

And he acknowledged that, in the troubled 1960s, he had thought that a majority-black Jacksonville would struggle to succeed. But times had changed, and perhaps, he thought, a black city would have turned out just fine.

"In hindsight," he said, "I suspect if consolidation had not come about and had we gained that political power, we might have fared better. We would have had a more sympathetic administration. This is not to say the following administrations have done us in, but I don't think the white counterpart of Earl Johnson quite understands the black experience."

In 1983, though, he called consolidation good for the city — though he still had some caveats.

"I would say that consolidation is the way for blacks to go," he said. "But blacks may still have to decide whether the government is colorless. There could be some issues on which some blacks have to vote selfishly until there is more parity in the things of life, until their quality of life is raised."

Matt Soergel: (904) 359-4082

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