An Evening with J. Chester Johnson

Wednesday, January 20, 2021
7 p.m., online

St. Paul's Becoming Beloved Community is delighted to host an evening of conversation with J. Chester Johnson the evening of January 20 at 7 p.m. Johnson will present on his newest book Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation. All are welcome to join the ministry for this special event.


About J. Chester Johnson

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J. Chester Johnson is a well-known poet, essayist, and translator, who grew up one county removed from the Elaine Race Massacre site in southeast Arkansas along the Mississippi River Delta. He has written extensively on race and civil rights, composing the Litany for the national Day of Repentance (October 4, 2008) when the Episcopal Church formally apologized for its role in transatlantic slavery and related evils. At the height of the Civil Rights Movement and following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr, Johnson returned to the town of his youth to teach in the all African-American public school before integration of the local education system. Several of his writings are part of the J. Chester Johnson Collection in the Civil Rights Archives at Queens College, the alma mater for Andrew Goodman, one of three martyrs murdered by white supremacists in Mississippi during Freedom Summer. His three most recent books are St. Paul’s Chapel & Selected Shorter Poems (2010), Now And Then: Selected Longer Poems (2017), and Auden, the Psalms, and Me (2017), the story of the retranslation of the psalms in the Book of Common Prayer for which W. H. Auden (1968-1971) and Johnson (1971-1979) were the poets on the drafting committee; published in 1979, this version became a standard. Johnson, who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U. S. Treasury in the Carter Administration, owned and ran, for several decades, an independent consulting firm for large domestic governments and non-profit organizations on capital finance and debt management. His poem about the iconic St. Paul’s Chapel, relief center for the recovery workers at Ground Zero, has been the Chapel’s memento card since soon after the 9/11 terrorists’ attacks (1.5 million cards distributed); American Book Review said of the poem: “Johnson’s ‘St. Paul’s Chapel’ is one of the most widely distributed, lauded, and translated poems of the current century”. One of fifteen writers selected to be showcased for the inaugural Harvard Alumni Authors’ Book Fair in 2019, he was educated at Harvard College and the University of Arkansas (Distinguished Alumnus Award, 2010).


About Damaged Heritage

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Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation is an illuminating journey to racial reconciliation experienced by two Americans—one black and one white.

The 1919 Elaine Race Massacre, arguably the worst in our country’s history, has been widely unknown for the better part of a century, thanks to the whitewashing of history. In 2008, Johnson was asked to write the Litany of Offense and Apology for a National Day of Repentance, where the Episcopal Church formally apologized for its role in transatlantic slavery and related evils.

In his research, Johnson came upon a treatise by historian and anti-lynching advocate Ida B. Wells on the Elaine Massacre, where more than a hundred and possibly hundreds of African-American men, women, and children perished at the hands of white posses, vigilantes, and federal troops in rural Phillips County, Arkansas.

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 eventually meet Sheila L. Walker, a descendant of African-American victims of the Massacre. She herself had also been on her own migration in family history that led straight to the Elaine Race Massacre. Together, she and Johnson committed themselves to a journey of racial reconciliation and abiding friendship.

Damaged Heritage brings to light a deliberately erased chapter in American history, and Chester offers a blueprint for how our pluralistic society can at last acknowledge—and deal with— damaged heritage and follow a path to true healing.

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