J. Chester Johnson & Sheila Walker
Our Families & The Elaine Massacre
Saturday, September 21, 2019
J. Chester Johnson
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) served as the poets on the drafting committee; published in 1979, this version has become a standard. The manuscript, Damaged Heritage: From The Elaine Race Massacre To Reconciliation, is currently being discussed by his agent with prospective publishers. 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 has 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”. He was educated at Harvard College and the University of Arkansas (Distinguished Alumnus Award, 2010).
Sheila Walker
Sheila Walker was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1948. At age six, she and her three siblings joined their mother in Chicago. Walker attended segregated Chicago Public Schools from 1st to 8th grade, and her first experience attending integrated schools came in high school. In tenth grade, she became involved with the University of Chicago’s Student Woodlawn Area Project, a tutoring and mentoring group for disadvantaged children. There, she gained a different perspective of life’s possibilities beyond poverty. At 15, she joined Student Nonviolence Coordination Committee and participated in marches, sit-ins, and boycotts during the Civil Rights era. Walker earned a bachelors degree in Sociology from Loyola University. She then moved to the Bronx and joined the US Army Reserves in 1975, where she served for six years as a radiology technician. Following this, she worked over ten years in federal law enforcement as a uniformed officer and security specialist. After relocating to upstate New York, Walker became a health educator for the NY State Cancer Services Program and facilitated a cancer support group for African American Women. She currently lives in Wilmington, Deleware, and has been married for 49 years.