Ben Johnson Services in Huntsville Monday
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Funeral services for Ben Johnson, the veteran journalist who died at 53, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, are scheduled for Monday at 10 a.m. at First Missionary Baptist Church in Huntsville, Ala., the city’s Royal Funeral Home reports.
As reported Wednesday, a utility crew found Johnson’s body Monday in a wooded area behind his Huntsville home, police said. An autopsy was to be performed.
Since 1997, Johnson had been a radio talk-show host in Huntsville. WEUP News Director Tony Jordan said Johnson had been battling diabetes and that he had lost a grandchild to crib death about a year and a half ago, but said, “I wouldn’t even venture to speculate [on] what his frame of mind was.” He mentioned the “tremendous pedigree” Johnson came to Huntsville with, and said he was one of the city’s “more articulate voices.”
[Added Dec. 27] “It’s tough to know what drives a person to take his own life, especially a colleague and one you consider a friend,” Huntsville Times columnist David Person told Journal-isms. “Like many others, I’ve struggled to reconcile the strong, sometimes brash, always passionate and opinionated Ben Johnson with the one found dead on Monday of an apparently self-inflicted gun shot. Perhaps the combination of diabetes, depression and professional frustrations took their toll on Ben’s psyche.
“While I can’t be sure exactly why he might have wanted to die, I do know that life has been an uphill battle for him for most of the seven years that I’ve been at The Times. And from what he has told me from time to time, I don’t think he ever really reconciled where he had been in his career with where he found himself in Huntsville. It didn’t help that his many projects — most recently his own newspaper — never seemed to get off the ground.
“I fear that Ben, always full of big ideas and dreams, apparently finally ran out of both and couldn’t find anything else to sustain him. My thoughts and prayers are with Mary Esther and their daughters.” [end addition]
Like most journalists, Johnson had worked in various cities.
He was night city editor and assistant to the managing editor during his stint of about five years at the Detroit Free Press in the 1980s, as the Free Press recalled. In that city, he was founding president of the Detroit chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists, and in 1980 and 1981 served on the national NABJ board as regional representative.
Johnson joined Florida’s St. Petersburg Times in 1990 as assistant managing editor of development, “a position created to help the newspaper attract and maintain minority staffers, and to increase multicultural awareness in the newsroom,” as the Times recalled in its obituary.
And “Mr. Johnson and his wife, Mary Esther Bullard-Johnson, co-authored Who’s What and Where, a directory and reference book on minority journalists,” the newspaper remembered.
“They also co-authored special newspaper supplements on black history and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Additionally, they helped found the Multicultural Management Program at the University of Missouri, where Mr. Johnson taught journalism for five years.”
Johnson also worked for the Washington Post as a young reporter in 1974 and 1975; for the Louisville Courier-Journal; as associate editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, where he also filed pieces from Africa; and on the copy desk at the Huntsville Times from 1995 to 1997. He wrote columns for the next six years about a variety of topics, particularly the black community, the St. Petersburg Times said.
“To say Ben was a character is an understatement. He always had me cracking up laughing whenever we got a chance to talk,” columnist Roland S. Martin told colleagues on the NABJ listserve.
“I also remember him to be an incredibly Afrocentric brother. The 1989 New York convention was the first one I ever attended. There was Ben, then at the University of Missouri, wearing his kente cloth draped over his suit.”
Jackie Jones, another former NABJ board member, now at Penn State University, remembered that, “When I got to the Detroit Free Press in 1981, Ben and his wife, Esther, took me and my son in like family.” Jones’ son “Tony was too young for the Big Brothers program, so Ben became his (un)official Big Brother. Tony and Ben’s older daughter, Jamilah, were like two peas in a pod.”
“Ben was a great journalist and passionate and a great human being, and I’ll certainly miss his presence, even though it was a polarizing one at times,” news director Jordan told Chris Welch in the Huntsville Times. “And that was the wonderful thing about Ben — you could never ignore him.
“He brought passion to everything he did. He was never ambivalent, and he was one of those kind of people who folks reacted to, whether in a good way or bad way.”
He “provided The Times and our community with a voice that needed to be heard,” Times editorial writer Person said in the same story. Person will be a pallbearer at the funeral.
“I . . . wonder why when Ben was running for NABJ president we rejected him so,” in 1981, when he ran against Les Payne, said Paul Delaney, an NABJ founder who in the 1990s was chairman of the University of Alabama’s journalism department. “I liked Ben then, in the 1970s, and recently when we were both in Alabama, he in Huntsville, me in Tuscaloosa. We were participating in the university’s summer minority program in the 1990s and I found that he had mellowed, from his hawkish post-Vietnam days, from the imposing, sometimes blustery personality that turned so many of us off in the old days, to a more thoughtful Ben, maybe the ‘Brother Ben’ he became, but still passionate and human and humane. So I think he might have been ahead of the rest of us in ways we didn’t appreciate back then.”
In February 2002, Johnson, who said then he was president of Umzi Wabantu (South African Xhosa for “People’s Village”), a multi-media service company in addition to his radio job, sent along some samples of his radio commentary for “Just Talkin’.” While Johnson might have written commentaries that were longer and more profound, these brief pieces give a window into his thinking at the time.
On Symbolism
This is Ben Johnson. Let’s talk about symbolism.
Symbols mean a lot, no matter your station in life. They offer morality lessons, positively or negatively. They give us guides to live our lives. They can get us pumped or deflate our egos. They can be road maps for our lives, our souls.
The Bible tells about the symbol, the star of Bethlehem, that guided the three wise men to that barn of a nursery where they found the Christ child, lying in a manger with mother Mary and father Joseph. Generations later, another symbol, the North Star, would guide untold numbers of escaped slaves to the Promised Land way up north.
Symbols are oh so important in our lives. I talked the other day about a negative symbol, the pending divorce of the Jordans, Michael and Juanita. That’s one of the world’s grandest power couples. Michael Jordan has one of the most recognizable names and faces on the planet. Juanita is his trusted life partner. I fretted that the breakup signaled even more retrogression for the family, especially the black family. And you know that, as goes the family, so goes the union.
So I was thrilled today to learn that the Jordans have reconciled. These life partners have chosen to remain life partners. They’re going to work through their differences. And, oh what a great symbol that is. There’s hope, my brothers and sisters. There’s hope. Just don’t give up. Keep your eyes on the symbol. Keep your eyes on the prize. Maintain that life partnership. Life partners forever.
This is Ben Johnson, Brother Ben. Just Talkin’.
— Feb. 5, 2002
© Benjamin Johnson Jr., 2002
On Football
This is Ben Johnson. Let’s talk about football.
Are you ready for some football! No, I’m not talking about the Super Bowl, although we could. The powerful St. Louis Rams are going to blow the pretenders New England Patriots off the field.
No, I want to talk about Alabama. The Crimson Tide. The program Bear Bryant put on the map. The sport that makes it bearable — get it — to say you live in Alabama.
The NCAA hammered Alabama football. The program may never be the same again. Surely, there will be no bids for the national title in that time. Bama is forbidden from postseason play the next two years. Beyond that, the scholarship losses and other hits will make these teams among the least competitive in school history. Bear Bryant is spinning in his grave.
Why, you ask? No, not because of the major violations and the effective self-prosecution, conviction and sentencing. No, because they got care. The Bear did this kind of stuff and more, if we’re to believe the legends. No, these dunderheads cheated and got caught. Now the whole state suffers. This is Ben Johnson, Brother Ben. Just Talkin’.
— Feb. 1, 2002
© Benjamin Johnson Jr., 2002
On Pacifism and War
This is Ben Johnson. Let’s talk about pacifism, war and the global good.
Forever will I remember the day I turned into a hawk. I was just a teen-ager, a high school senior. My future was bright. Architecture school beckoned. I had already been accepted at Howard University and was working on scholarships to afford same. Then there was the visit from the two Marines in beautiful dress blue uniforms. They came with news about my brother, Vic, a grunt working on his second tour in Vietnam. He had been hit for the second time. When he finally made it home, he was never the same. He left a part of himself there. His mind. All I could think about was getting even. Gotta kill some VC for my brother. I became a Marine then and there. I became a hawk. I learned to kill.
It’s taken decades of encounters to soften my hawkish resolve. I’ve become a proponent of multiculturalism. I’ve urged understanding and tolerance, even of those who are your sworn enemies. I’ve consulted far and wide on that approach. Until recent events I’ve been more inclined to counsel pacifism. Turn the other cheek. Make love, not war, as the peaceniks of the ’60s said. But 9-11 changed me. The World Trade Center disaster changed me. Getting even became understandable again.
Our president is leading the country and its allies down that same path. We’re primed to spend billions on war, on getting even. Hardly seems right though. Billions for defense. But what about the people? Schools? Housing? Education?
I confess that I’m conflicted and I’m confused. War? Killing? Really? Isn’t there a better way?
This is Ben Johnson, Brother Ben. Just Talkin’.
— Jan. 30, 2002
© Benjamin Johnson Jr., 2002
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