Johnson opposed plan for segregated teacher's unions in Atlanta
Johnson criticized a plan to start segregated teacher unions in Atlanta, particularly because the man who suggested it was a northerner who assumed segregation was necessary in the South. Southern states had already started integrated unions by this point.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Lyman Johnson, July 12, 1990. Interview A-0351. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- LYMAN JOHNSON:
-
Tarleton Collier was as nice a person as we'd like to have for his time,
for his time. I made the point quite often. For instance, at a national
convention of Teachers' Federation, there were some teachers that came
out from Atlanta who wanted to establish two chapters in Atlanta, one
black and one white. I took the floor and I argued against it like
everything. And this man, I had checked up on him, who was a big
promoter, I said, "Ladies and gentlemen, there are some people
who were reared in the South, who perhaps have gone out of the South on
occasion but have gone back to the South to settle and establish
themselves and their careers, but here's a man who comes from the City
of Brotherly Love. He was reared, he spent most of his life in
Pennsylvania, and now he's down here in Georgia, he's down here in
Atlanta, and he's promoting a dead issue that the whites of the South
are trying their best to eradicate." I said, "That's
what I don't like about some of these northerners who go south and
out-southern the southerners."
