Several works of J. Chester Johnson have been included in the Civil Rights Archives at Queens College, City University of New York. These works currently constitute the J. Chester Johnson Collection within the Civil Rights Archives. His work joins, among others, the library of James Forman, one of the civil rights leaders for Freedom Summer, a project that brought Andrew Goodman, a student from Queens College at the time, to Philadelphia, Mississippi, where he, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner met their deaths at the hands of local segregationists. Johnson’s pieces included in the Archives are:
Memorial Reconciliation Bench
During the period that started in early 2024 and ended in early 2025 with the dedication, Johnson participated with four others, including the mayor of Monticello, in the development of the Memorial Reconciliation Bench to commemorate the extraordinary, compelling story surrounding the dual racial murders by a large number of Ku Klux Klansmen that occurred in Monticello in 1868. The renewed discovery of these murders and the significant, related history gave rise to the creation of the 2/3rds ton Memorial Reconciliation Bench, placed right in front of the town’s City Hall. A QR Code facility is available at the Bench to hear that remarkable narrative, which Johnson reads aloud in the video below. Click here for the narrative transcript.
1. The Day of Repentance – Cover Art and Release Courtesy of The Episcopal Church
Offense and Apology
1. In 2008, The Episcopal Church (USA) formally apologized for its long-term participation in slavery and associated evils through a Day of Repentance, led by the presiding bishop. The Day of Repentance employed a litany of poetry and prose, Offense and Apology, written by Johnson at the request of The Episcopal Church.
To download and read the litany, click here.
Evanescence: The Elaine Race Massacre
2. Characterized by Green Mountains Review as “groundbreaking,” the article, “Evanescence: The Elaine Race Massacre,” explores the massacre of African-Americans during the fall of 1919 in Phillips County, Arkansas along the Mississippi Delta. The massacre, whose murderous and legal importance has been conspicuously overlooked by American history, is exposed by Johnson, including his own grandfather’s likely participation in the massacre and the feral racism that led to one of the country’s deadliest assaults against African-Americans.
3. The Mixer
The Mixer
3. For the school year, 1969-70, Johnson decided to return to the South and teach at an African-American public school in Monticello, a small town located on the cusp of the Mississippi Delta in southeast Arkansas and the place he had lived from age four to eighteen. It was the final year before integration of the public education system, and he taught the sixth through the twelfth grades; for a white male of twenty-five, reared in the midst, this period of pedagogy and proximity came as a chance to find people he’d known but not found. Johnson also entered the race for mayor there. The Mixer is a poignant verse story rising out of these two, related experiences, which appears in Johnson’s book, Now And Then: Selected Longer Poems. By the way, he lost the election.
4. For Conduct And Innocents
For Conduct And Innocents
4. A drama in verse, which appears in Johnson’s book, Now And Then: Selected Longer Poems, this poetic play celebrates the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. A well-known theologian in Germany while still in his twenties, Bonhoeffer struggled for years to overthrow Hitler while most of the country and much of Europe crumbled under the weight of Nazism.
Executed by the Hitler regime two weeks before the liberation by the Americans of Flossenburg, the concentration camp in which Bonhoeffer was imprisoned, he became a seminal martyr, one that inspirited the revival of Western civilization after World War II. The play tracks the three years of Bonhoeffer’s life leading up to his arrest.
The Life, Times & Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, courtesy of Trinity Wall Street in the City of New York.
J. Chester Johnson’s drama in verse, For Conduct And Innocents, written in memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, is read in part, celebrating the German martyr’s life and theology on the 65th anniversary of Bonhoeffer’s death.
5. Meditations on Civil Rights Activists – Cover Art Courtesy of Trinity Wall Street in the City of New York
Meditations on Civil Rights Activists
5. Poems by Johnson on the five civil rights activists – Jonathan Daniels, W.E.B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Martin Luther King Jr. – are included in this volume.
Martin
6. Martin
6. This long poem expands on the verse for Martin Luther King Jr., contained in Meditations On Civil Rights Activists. Relying on a variety of verse tools, such as quatrains and traditional rhyme, free verse and ‘elastic rhyme’, the piece references back to events and personal experiences that helped to shape King’s spirituality, leadership and monumental influence on America and its future.