Johnson’s book, Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation, is celebrated on Times Square jumbotron during 2024 holiday season.
J. Chester Johnson has proven to be an effective writer of both poetry and nonfiction. For the better part of his literary career, Johnson concentrated on poetry, both short and long forms, reflected in well-received pieces and books of verse. Then, a couple of decades ago, as one of only two surviving members of the drafting committee for the retranslation of the psalms, contained in the Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church (Johnson is now the sole surviving member), he was strongly encouraged to write the story of the extensive, twelve-year project. Thus, Johnson penned his first nonfiction book, Auden, the Psalms, and Me. Published in 2017, the book described the historical context for the retranslation and the roles that W. H. Auden (1968-71) and Johnson (1971-79) played on the drafting committee; this retranslation has become a standard.
Pleased with the process and outcome of his writing in this different genre, Johnson wrote various essays and, in 2020, completed the book-length, best-seller volume, Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation, which told of a major, though forgotten, massacre in 1919 of Blacks by whites in southeast Arkansas along the Mississippi River Delta, in which Johnson’s own grandfather had participated. In addition, the book discusses the work toward racial healing between Johnson and Sheila Walker, a descendant of Black sharecroppers who were victims in the massacre. Among many achievements, Damaged Heritage became an Amazon best-seller and appeared on a Goodreads’ multi-year, international list of Best Nonfiction Books.
J. Chester Johnson has written poetry since his youth. Spanning that time, his work has received praise by a number of well-regarded poets and writers – from, among others, Gwendolyn Brooks, Pulitzer Prize Winner for Poetry (first Black poet to be so awarded), Poet Laureate Allen Tate, and Nobel Laureate I. B. Singer to current, well-recognized poets, such as Cornelius Eady, Major Jackson, Molly Peacock, Lawrence Joseph, Vijay Seshadri, and Elizabeth A. I. Powell. Recent poetry books, authored by Johnson, are St. Paul’s Chapel & Selected Shorter Poems (second edition, 2010) and Now And Then: Selected Longer Poems (2017).
DAMAGED HERITAGE: THE ELAINE RACE MASSACRE AND A STORY OF RECONCILIATION
Published by Pegasus; Distributed by Simon & Schuster.
The 1919 Elaine Race Massacre, arguably the worst white attacks on Blacks in our country’s history, has been widely unknown for more than a century, thanks to the perceived necessity, among many white Americans, of hiding this event locally and nationally. In 2008, Johnson was asked to write the Litany of Offense and Apology for a National Day of Repentance when the Episcopal Church formally apologized for its role in transatlantic slavery and related evils.
In his research, Johnson came upon a treatise by Black historian and anti-lynching advocate Ida B. Wells on the Elaine Massacre, where more than a hundred and, possibly hundreds, of Black men, women, and children perished at the hands of local white posses, white vigilantes from Mississippi, Tennessee, and neighboring Arkansas communities, and white federal troops with machine guns in Phillips County, Arkansas along the Mississippi River Delta.
As he worked, Johnson would discover that his beloved grandfather had participated in the Massacre. The discovery shook him to his core. Determined to find some way to acknowledge and reconcile this terrible truth, Chester would develop a racial healing relationship with Sheila L. Walker, a descendant of victims of the Massacre. Sheila Walker, who wrote the Foreword to Damaged Heritage, had also been on her own journey through family history that led straight to the Elaine Race Massacre. Together, she and Chester committed themselves to a journey of racial healing and abiding friendship.
For seven years before Sheila’s death in 2021, the two often spoke in one voice of the need for racial healing between Blacks and whites in this country. Damaged Heritage not only brings to light a nearly erased chapter in American history, but also offers a blueprint for how our pluralistic society can at last acknowledge – and address – damaged heritage and follow a path to healing. Renowned Black poet and writer, Cornelius Eady, says this about the book: “J. Chester Johnson has done more than tell us a story that must be told – he has laid the healing tools in our hands, and left instructions. This is how it starts.”
Johnson has spoken or been interviewed over 80 times on behalf of Damaged Heritage,which has been an Amazon best-seller; in addition, the book appears on a Goodreads’ multi-year, international list for Best Nonfiction Books (alongside The Diary of Anne Frank, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, The Great Fire of London, The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, etc.)
The 2009 Pulitzer Prize Winner, Douglas A. Blackmon, praised Damaged Heritage this way: “Only a poet can see this clearly, be this honest, and still hope this much.”
MEMORIAL RECONCILIATION BENCH
Johnson foreshadowed in Damaged Heritage neighboring communities to the Elaine Massacre Memorial creating perpetual, physical memorials that acknowledge inherited racial acts of violence and brutal racial murders that were part of the histories of those communities. Monticello, Arkansas, Johnson’s hometown, became a first to follow Johnson’s proposal with the creation of the Memorial Reconciliation Bench, located in front of the town’s City Hall and dedicated to the memory of two simultaneous murders – one Black man and one white man, a deputy sheriff with racially progressive views, murdered by 14-15 Ku Klux Klansmen soon after the Civil War with the bodies left in an embrace to rot in the sun.
More information appears under “CIVIL RIGHTS ARCHIVES”.
ST. PAUL’S CHAPEL & SELECTED SHORTER POEMS
The poem, “St. Paul’s Chapel,” has been used since 2002 as the memento card at St. Paul’s Chapel, the little chapel that stood after 9/11, becoming the relief center (where Johnson volunteered during the clean-up period) for the recovery workers at Ground Zero; the Chapel has served as the de facto memorial for millions of visitors, who have come to the World Trade Center site since the attacks. The poem, extensively published both here and abroad (also translated into foreign languages), has been called the country’s most widely read piece of recent verse.
“Undoubtedly, this is a work headed for literary permanence in our collective ear.”
To read the poem, “St. Paul’s Chapel,” click on the face of the poem.
NOW AND THEN: SELECTED LONGER POEMS
“The scope of NOW AND THEN is epic. It provides its readers with the same amplitude of intelligence, passion and formal achievement as our great American epics – Melville’s MOBY DICK, Whitman’s LEAVES OF GRASS, and Ginsberg’s FALL OF AMERICA. It is a book of fierce spiritual and moral witness, energy and power.”
AUDEN, THE PSALMS, AND ME
The personal story of the retranslation of the Psalms now contained in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer.
FOR CONDUCT AND INNOCENTS
Johnson’s drama in verse, “For Conduct And Innocents,” about the martyr and 20th century theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was presented as a multi-media event (drama, music, dance, film) on Oct. 18, 2015 at Trinity Wall Street with nearly 50 performers participating.
Click here to see the full performance.
To read the full text, click here.
“I love the Bonhoeffer play…The whole dynamic of moral indignation and spiritual ardor, combining and recombining there in endless variation – a quality the lyrics also possess – made the reading fascinating.”
“What an amazing undertaking – so impressive in scope, intent and understanding. This must have taken years of energy.”
ELAINE RACE MASSACRE
Johnson’s literary work, Elaine Race Massacre, was presented as a multi-media production (dramatic reading, music, dance, and visual images) on February 19th, 2017 at Trinity Church Wall Street. The piece is written in the form of persona voices with prose and poetry being employed for historical pertinence and lyrical effect. The Elaine Race Massacre of 1919, which occurred in a rural area on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River Delta, may be the most significant murderous attack against African-Americans in our country’s history, but out of the brutality and death rose a case, Moore v. Dempsey, that was decided by the U. S. Supreme Court in 1923 and that breathed life, for the first time, into the 14th Amendment (equal protection under the law), providing the underpinnings to the civil rights movement. The persona voices in the performance included massacre victims, members of the Supreme Court, and the genuine American hero, Scipio Africanus Jones, the African-American lawyer from Little Rock who represented black sharecroppers, found guilty of murder in unfair and rapid trials immediately following the cessation of the massacre.