As sad as she is to have lost her father, Karen Johnson finds it fitting that his memorial will take place Saturday on Juneteenth, the annual June 19 celebration of the end of slavery in the United States.
Her father, a white man, spent much of his life fighting to unwind some of the legacies of slavery.
Robert “Bob” Allen Johnson suffered from Parkinson’s Disease and dementia when he died on April 18, at age 88. The memorial service, at the family’s longtime church, was delayed to accommodate family schedules and travel from out of state, not because of the newly minted holiday.
It seems fitting, too, that he passed away at his Tustin home, a house that he and his wife, Lois Johnson, bought in 1961 and proceeded to raise three children in. That’s because Johnson understood the intrinsic value of fair and decent housing, the freedom ingrained in being able to live where you want, and the pride — along with the generational wealth building — that can come with home ownership.
For decades, Johnson was a consistent and fearless voice for ending housing discrimination in Orange County.
He was an “ally” of African Americans decades before last summer, when the term became a popular descriptor for supporters who joined Black protests against the police murder of George Floyd and systemic racism.
Holding Johnson’s service at Trinity United Presbyterian Church in Santa Ana, on a newly minted national holiday celebrating the liberation of Black Americans from chattel bondage, is somehow poetic, said daughter Karen Johnson, the middle child.
“Juneteenth is a good day for him.”
The Johnsons attended Trinity from the time they moved to Orange County. They were active members of an adult Sunday school group who raised their children together and, despite a decline in numbers as decades of aging took its toll, continued to meet.
Johnson, an engineer by trade, spent his childhood and early adulthood in all-white neighborhoods in Chicago and Glendale, never having any contact with Black people until he served in the Army. Stationed in Maryland in the mid-1950s, he watched the way Blacks were treated and didn’t like what he saw. Neither did Lois, who was 16 when a 20-year-old Johnson fell for her.
The couple married in 1956, the year after Johnson was drafted, and moved to Aberdeen, Md., where he finished his last year in the Army.
“He was just exposed to the world,” Karen Johnson said of her father’s experience at that time. “Here were some people who were different from him.”
But he saw kinship and developed relationships across racial lines.
Johnson had been taught by his parents, a prosecutor and a homemaker, to stand up for others. And that’s what both he and his wife did when they returned to California and settled in Orange County, a region whose growth and demographics were shaped in good part by white flight from Los Angeles County in the 1960s.
A gregarious man with a huge appetite for history and storytelling — and a mind like a file cabinet — Johnson would co-author the 2009 publication “A Different Shade of Orange: Voices of Orange County, California, Black Pioneers.” The book compiled 22 first-person accounts recorded for a Cal State Fullerton oral history project; he wrote it with the now-deceased Charlene M. Riggins, an African American lecturer and oral historian at Fullerton. The stories of “Different Shade” describe everyday life in the county and local civil rights struggles from 1930 to 1980.
“Oh, he loved the history; he loved the stories,” Karen Johnson said of her father. “He knew if they lived in Orange County, and they were Black, they were going to have an interesting story to tell.”
The Johnsons became lifelong champions for the rights of Black people to rent or own homes where they wanted. They protested. They picketed. They helped organize.
They also exposed discrimination by posing as a couple — “checkers” — looking to rent or buy in neighborhoods where landlords selectively turned away prospective Black residents with the false excuse that their empty places had been snapped up by someone else.
In 1966, the Johnsons joined Orange County’s nascent Fair Housing Council, a step initiated by Lois Johnson but embraced even more enthusiastically by her husband.
To the end of his life, Johnson remained a board member for the Fair Housing Council. In 1978 he also co-founded the Orange County Community Housing Corporation, with the aim of providing affordable housing for people with extremely low incomes. The Housing Corporation annually awards $500 scholarships in Johnson’s name to help buy college textbooks.
In 1981, he earned the Fair Housing Volunteer of the Year award from the Community Relations Conference of Southern California. And, in 2014, the Orange County Human Relations Council presented a shared Legacy Award to Johnson and Dorothy Mulkey, a friend and one of the subjects in “A Different Shade of Orange.”
Karen Johnson hopes Mulkey, who is famous in her own right, will be able to attend her father’s service. In 1963, Mulkey and then-husband Lincoln, both Navy veterans, were turned away from renting a Santa Ana apartment because they were Black, and they later became the subjects of a landmark housing discrimination lawsuit heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Mulkeys prevailed, in a decision that declared unconstitutional Prop 8, a 1964 California law that allowed owners to not rent to whomever they pleased, including race.
One project left unfinished is Johnson’s 450-page manuscript about Black migration to Orange County. Karen Johnson said she’s hoping to get it published, but editors are balking at the length. “I have not figured out what to do with it.”
While Johnson’s avocation, fighting discrimination, was a big part of his private life, his professional life as an engineer also was successful. He retired at age 61 from Collins Radio Co., later known as Rockwell, and held multiple patents for electromechanical filters.
He also was athletic. A lanky six-footer, Johnson enjoyed track and field and would later travel with oldest daughter, Chris Bayati to watch out-of-state track meets. He became a runner and kept it up until he began to fall because of the Parkinson’s.
It was during runs near the Collins Radio work site in Newport Beach that Johnson discovered a newly built YMCA. He started playing pickup basketball on the outdoor courts — bonding with players from their 20s on up, in twice weekly full-court scrimmages. A baller since junior high, Johnson shot hoops in neighborhood games, church leagues and intramural college sports. He played until he was 82.
A UCLA graduate, Johnson always loved to cheer on the Bruins.
He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s six years ago and later also developed dementia. But even as his physical and cognitive abilities waned, Johnson still exercised; he did his last sit-ups two days before he died.
He is survived by his wife, Lois, 84, children Chris Bayati, Karen Johnson and Steven Johnson and their spouses, along with four grandchildren. Anyone wishing to attend his service should contact karenjohnson714@aol.com.
True to his spirit, the family leaves this request in Johnson’s obituary:
“In lieu of flowers Bob would want you to stick up for others.”
