Teachers Make a difference; she's proof by Sandy Wells (cont. from clipping)

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 16:18:32 -0500

Viola Johnson inspired him. She didn’t just tell him he could go to college. She told him he must go to college. “She told us that college was not just an option, but the next step to advancement, like the 13th grade.”

In the book, he recalled her motherly nurturing. He wrote about the bus she rented to take students to Broadway plays, how she introduced them to algebra and Shakespeare and shared tales about her world travels and stayed after school to dye eggs for Easter and make gingerbread men for Christmas.

“She made a lanky, mild-mannered kid growing up in a tough place feel smart and special. She also made me curious about the world I had yet to see.”

On Saturday, during the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Awards Luncheon at the Cultural Center, Johnson, a Jefferson County native, received the Living the Dream award for scholarship from state Supreme Court Justice Larry Starcher.

“Judge Starcher called me and said, ‘Viola, you are going to get a letter because you have received the Living the Dream award for education,’” she said in a telephone interview from her Martinsburg home last week. “Tom Rodd nominated me. I’m so excited! I’ve called everybody I know.”

She talks in exclamations, breathless and exuberant. She laughs a lot. Even over the phone, you can almost see her arms waving. Jenkins remembered her flamboyant gestures, her boundless enthusiasm. He described her in the book: “She was a tiny ball of energy with a high-pitched girlish voice and the same honey-colored complexion as my mother.”

Jenkins returned to Johnson’s classroom years later to tell her about his plans. “He told me he had graduated from high school and was going to college. I had him tell the children how important education was, how they should get good grades so they could get scholarships.”

Johnson retired in 1993 and moved on. For years, Jenkins wondered what happened to the lively little lady who so profoundly affected his life.

She moved to the place where she grew up, back to Johnsontown, a Jefferson County community named after her great-grandfather. She left there at age 4, but returned every year to visit cousins and vacation at her family’s summer home.

“The house in Johnsontown has an outhouse,” she said. “I finally bought a house in Martinsburg because it had a bathroom.”

After she retired, she taught as a substitute teacher for another 12 years. Now, she volunteers. “I read stories to kindergartners,” she said. “And I’m starting a Shakespeare Club at the Boys and Girls Club.”

In the book, Jenkins shared an anecdote about Viola Johnson’s Shakespeare Club:

“The club voted on our official uniform: burgundy sweaters with The Shakespeare Club embroidered over the pocket. We wore our sweaters to a concert at Symphony Hall. Several people in the audience asked Miss Johnson which private school we attended. She smiled, held her head high and announced with great pride that we were from Louise A. Spencer Elementary, a public school in the Central Ward, which practically everyone in Newark considered the ghetto.”

Everyone except Viola Johnson. “I come here and see that I’m in a white ghetto. The majority of the kids are white and not rich. Ghetto simply means all of the same group.”

She remembers the incident about the Shakespeare sweaters. It still rankles her. “Children in a poor neighborhood could not be wearing sweaters that said Shakespeare Club,” she said. “People just couldn’t believe that.”

She bought the sweaters herself. Embroidered on each sweater was the student’s name and position. “Our father taught us to give everybody a job,” she said, “so there was a title under each name. The bibliophile was the person who gives out the books or plays. The provost was the leader for the boys. We had a secretary for the boys and a secretary for the girls. Everybody had a job.”

Jenkins wrote “The Pact,” a bestseller, with Samson Davis and Rameck Hunt, two black doctors who also rose from poverty in Newark. Known nationally now as the Three Doctors, they established a foundation to provide scholarships to inner-city youth. Spark Media turned their book into a feature documentary.

The book and movie reunited teacher and student. “Somebody called me from the library and asked if I knew a Dr. George Jenkins,” Johnson said. “She said my name was in the newspaper in a story about the book coming out.

“Then I got a call from a girlfriend. She said, ‘Are your ears burning?’ I said, ‘No, but I’ve been sneezing a lot.’ She said her preacher preached about me. He read the part about me in the book and then preached about Miss Johnson and how a teacher can make a difference in a child’s life.”

She sent flowers to Jenkins to thank him for mentioning her. He was on the faculty then at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

“Then I got a call. I said, ‘Who is this?’ He said, ‘Who’s your favorite student?’ I said, ‘George, is this you?’”

He invited her to a special showing of the documentary in Washington. He asked her to speak to the audience afterward.

Johnson’s community activities in Martinsburg include working with the Apollo Theater Co. She recently had a featured role in a play about the state’s first African-American lawyer.

As a girl visiting Jefferson County in the summertime, she went to movies at the Apollo Theater. She had to pay for tickets on the first floor then traipse up the side steps to sit with blacks in the balcony.

“I have cousins and friends who won’t go to the Apollo to this day because of that,” she said. “I say to them, ‘This is 2000-plus! Get out of that mode!’ I’m glad I was raised in New Jersey. I can come back and be as bold as I want to be.”

Segregation wasn’t an issue in New Jersey, she said. “We simply had neighborhood schools. They didn’t take buses like they do here. If you lived in an all-black neighborhood, what was the school going to be?”

Her great grandfather was a farmer and a preacher for the Zion Freewill Baptist Church. Her father was a teacher, a preacher and a bus driver in Charles Town.

Growing up, she thought she wanted to be a nurse. “That was until I found that I had to prick fingers to get blood.” So she settled on teaching.

Her teachers inspired her the same way she would one day inspire her students. “I had an algebra teacher who told me I could be anything I wanted to be. She said I could go to college if I wanted to. I never forgot that.”

She went to Newark State Teachers College and Colorado State College. She graduated in June 1959 and started teaching that September.

She never married, she said, because she wanted freedom to travel. “I’ve been to Paris and Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Spain.”

She used her travels as a teaching tool. “She always sent us postcards and bought us souvenirs from wherever she went,” Jenkins recalled in the book. “Some days, she pulled the globe from the corner of the classroom, gathered us around her and told us stories about places that before were just spots on a map to us.”

“Miss Johnson” hasn’t turned in her traveling shoes yet. “I want to go to Tibet! When I was in school, the Newark Museum had a big exhibit on Tibet! I met the Dalai Lama there. I’m fascinated by their culture. I’m going! I’m saving and trying to figure out how I can get there.”

To contact staff writer Sandy Wells, use e-mail or call 348-5173.

Article Continued | AAUW-West Virginia | Elizabeth Reed

Teachers Make a difference; she's proof by Sandy Wells (cont. from clipping)