J. Chester Johnson Papers

J. Chester Johnson is the author of Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation (Pegasus Books, 2020), as well as several poetry collections and non-fiction works. He was one of two poets (the other being W. H. Auden) on the drafting committee for the retranslated Psalms in The Book of Common Prayer. Johnson also worked in the financial sector as an investment banker and served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U. S. Treasury Department under Jimmy Carter. After the Treasury Department, he started his own consulting firm.

J. Chester Johnson was born on September 28, 1944 in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He grew up in Arkansas and was educated at Harvard College and the University of Arkansas. From 1969 to 1970, during the later part of the civil rights movement, J. Chester Johnson taught in an all-African American public school in Monticello, Arkansas before public school integration occurred. During this time, he also joined the mayoral race of the town but was not elected.

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 the course of 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 discovered that his beloved grandfather had participated in the Massacre. 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. Together, she and Johnson committed themselves to a journey of racial reconciliation and abiding friendship. This journey is the subject of Johnson's book, Damaged Heritage.