news-record.com

"We knew something was wrong," said Bobbie Johnson. "They brought all of the kids into the school auditorium," she said. That day, April 4, 1968, in that Shreveport, La., school is burned in the former Bobbie Horton's mind. "I was bawling."

It was the day civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. He was only 39. The children watched the news of his death on TV. "We had so much hope for what he was going to do in civil rights. With his death a lot of our hope died," she said.

"Nobody was talking on the bus as we went home," she said.

Johnson, second youngest of a Caddo Parish sharecropper's 10 children, didn't let her dreams of escaping the cotton fields and the back-breaking work of her ancestors die.

In 1970, she entered Southern University in Baton Rouge where she earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry.Sharecropping was only a memory, albeit a vivid one.
But the memories of Dr. King's death also remain strong.

Johnson, who now lives in Kernersville and works as a quality specialist for Syngenta Crop Protection in Greensboro, recently shared her thoughts about growing up in the civil rights era with the Shreveport Times. She and her son, Curtis Joseph Jr., a Shreveport attorney, did a question and answer session on "Civil Rights Then and Now." The newspaper did several stories with that theme after Barack Obama was elected president.

In that interview, she said, "My father always insisted that we bring all of our books home every day. Because even though we weren't in school, he would make us study as if we'd gone to school. (Sharecroppers' children didn't get to go to school regularly because they had to help pick the cotton. "Anything that grew, we picked it, but cotton was the money-making crop," she said.)

Joseph said that same philosophy was invoked on him and his brother Leon, now a captain in the Army.

"To this day, I'll take a file home at the end of the day. I might get (need) it. I might not, but I'll take it home," he told reporter Alexandyr Kent.

Kent: "Bobbie believes that her generation and her son's generation know why the Civil Rights Movement matters. But she hopes that today's children don't lose sight of the sacrifices made for them, and the stories that tell our history."

Joseph embraces that history, and told Kent, "I know there are so many more that lived and perished that just didn't have the opportunity."

Johnson's story doesn't stop with that interview. Her son can embrace her determination to succeed and even her experiences as a sharecropper. Her strong-willed parents also insisted that their children keep doing their best despite the circumstances, she remembers.

Johnson is proud of her heritage and her culture. "My father was a master carpenter. He could build anything and built the houses we lived in," she said. Her mother, Catherine Horton, also was a strong person, able to do her share of work in the fields and be an inspirational mother to 10 children.

Moving from Gayle Plantation in the rural section of Caddo Parish into the city of Shreveport was a momentous time for Johnson and her siblings. No more working in the fields.

Her accomplishments have made her family proud of her, but Johnson is quick to add that others in her family have been successful without college degrees.

Her first job out of college was with Monsanto Co. Then she enlisted in the Army, and had a chance to study at the University of St. Louis. Later she went to Germany, where she taught troops about readiness for chemical warfare.

Returning to Louisiana after leaving military duty, she was unable to find a job relating to her expertise in chemistry. "I took a job as an accountant at the top radio station in Shreveport," Johnson said. She learned a lot about business during her 10 years there. "I loved the job at KRMD," she said.

But loving the job was not enough to pull her permanently away from chemistry.

"I had that vision in front of me every day that I was in a lab coat with pens in my pocket and my safety glasses on," she said.

Then she got a chance for a job in chemistry with the company now known as Syngenta. That job was in Little Rock, where she worked for several years before transferring to Greensboro in 2001.

Johnson still embraces the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and sees part of that dream fulfilled in the election of Obama. She honors King by memorizing all of his speeches and reciting them every chance she gets.

Johnson has seen changes in race relations through the years but said in her Times interview "we're losing ground big time" because black parents don't "want to remind black folk of the struggle that we had to go through."

Interestingly, it was in Shreveport in 1963 that black entertainer Sam Cooke and his band were denied access to a "whites only" motel. While on his bus in Durham a short time thereafter, the story goes, Cooke was inspired to write "A Change Is Gonna Come."

Johnson and others may find encouragement for the next generation in the song, which was popular during the Civil Rights Movement:

"It's been a long time coming, but I know a change is gonna come," Cooke sang.

Contact Bob Burchette at bburchette@triad.rr.com