Johnson - My Time with the Kings

When Kathryn Johnson walked into The Associated Press Atlanta bureau in 1947 looking for a reporting job, there were no women and they werent welcome, she recalled. She took a job as a secretary in the bureau with a possibility of someday becoming a journalist. She waited 12 years.

Johnsons reporting career moved faster. She was assigned to the burgeoning civil rights movement because she was young, green and cheap labor, she said, and because the many white men of the times wanted nothing to do with covering sit-ins, marches and tense black-and-white standoffs.

Johnson rose to become one of the news agencys pre-eminent reporters on the American civil rights era. A deep understanding of Southern culture and people helped her grasp and give voice to the historical transformation taking place. A determined and gracious style got her unprecedented access to the major figures of the time, notably the family of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In her nearly 20 years of reporting for AP, she would break some of the most important stories. Beyond civil rights, she covered the My Lai massacre hearings and the court-martial of Lt. William Calley, the travails of the wives of American POWs in Hanoi and their eventual release and readjustment to civilian life.

There was a fearlessness about her when on assignment. She was petite, only 5 feet 3 inches, but never too worried about some of the very dangerous situations that took place. She had an ability to look the part, dressing as a coed to sneak into class alongside Charlayne Hunter when she integrated the University of Georgia in 1961.

Born in 1926 in Columbus, Georgia, to John Lewis and Lula Boondry Johnson, she grew up in a strictly segregated world. Everything was black and white, she said. It never occurred to me that this was wrong, segregation.

She described her childhood as part Huckleberry Finn, trailing an older brother and his friends sometimes into trouble and at other moments into danger. She was rescued from drowning by two elderly African-American fishermen as a small boat she was floating in sank in the Chattahoochee River. Later the boys shot a tin can off her head with a .22-caliber rifle as she replaced the can after each shot. Fortunately, they were excellent shots, she said.

Throughout her career, Kathryn encountered the standard treatment of women of the era and bureau life. One day she would be taking dictation and compiling high school sports scores. On another she would be in the street covering what likely was the top story in the nation.

When she found herself still assigned to dictation and sports scores even after completing a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, she decided to leave the AP. She worked for U.S. News and World Report in Washington and later for CNN in Atlanta.

But her heart remained with AP and its mission. She fell in love with writing and reporting at a young age. She embraced the front lines of journalism and its eyewitness role to history. Shelike many of the people she coveredtasted discrimination firsthand. Kathryn Johnson never turned bitter. She embodied journalisms highest idealsthat the work we do ultimately makes the world better, fairer and safer. In so doing, she inspired generations of AP colleagues, both male and female.

Tom Curley
Former AP president and CEO