In the winter of 1987 I was living in Americus, Georgia and working for Habitat for Humanity. Karen and I had left our jobs in Melbourne, Florida in the summer of 1986 to become a part of this incredibly exciting movement to provide opportunities for the poor to work in partnership with Habitat to build a home for themselves.
We had no children at the time and were passionate about promoting social justice issues. Karen had joined Millard Fuller, the founder of Habitat, in his law firm and was working with low income clients. I was on the staff at Habitat as Development Director, in charge of fundraising, computers, media and PR.
We both wanted to have direct involvement with people in need, so we underwent training as Laubach Literacy Tutors and began working to help people learn to read and write.in our ‘free’ time. Karen began to tutor a 12 year old girl who was struggling at school and I visited a prisoner in the Sumter County Correctional Institute, a medium security prison nearby.
The inmate I tutored was named Johnny Johnson. He was a black man about the same size as me with the physique and leathered skin of someone who worked outside. At our first lesson his beaming smile and friendly demeanor disarmed me and we quickly overcame the awkwardness of inmate and visitor. I visited him twice a week, and our visits soon became a highlight for both of us.
Johnny had a warmth and charisma that is hard to describe. His smile lit up his face and signaled a deep and sincere kindness. He laughed easily and unaffectedly, and his eyes had that twinkle that seems to always be present in truly good-natured people. He was a good-looking man, but exuded humility.
We worked through the Laubach Literacy workbooks methodically, and Johnny made progress, especially in reading. But writing was much more difficult. He had not been completely illiterate before and had acquired writing habits that were very difficult to change.
As the weeks went by we began to share our life stories. Johnny told me about his childhood. His family was very poor and he did farm work from a very early age. Most of the inmates at Sumter were there for non-violent crimes – drugs, theft, fraud and other relatively mild offenses. I discovered that Johnny was unique.
Johnny told me that he had been in prison since 1968 (it was 1986 when I started tutoring him) and that he had a life sentence. I was stunned. Over the next few visits he revealed the details of his story.
On October 25th, 1968, in the small town of Warwick, Georgia, Johnny killed the local police officer, a white man, with a shotgun. He was arrested and held in the local jail, but had to be quickly escorted by the state police to Albany because of the danger of lynching. Johnny was sentenced to death after a very short trial and was put on death row in 1969. I am not sure how close he came to being executed, but the Supreme Court decision in Furman vs Georgia in 1972 came to his rescue and his sentence was automatically commuted to life imprisonment.
After the commutation Johnny stayed at Reidsville, the high security penitentiary, for a couple more years. His good behavior allowed him to be transferred to a medium-security prison for a few more years and then on to Sumter Correctional, a minimum-security facility. By the time I met him, he had already been in prison for 18 years and had been at Sumter for over 10 years.
My weekly visits to Johnny created a strong relationship between the two of us. I soon learned that Johnny was the primary farmer at the facility, which produced much of its own food, and highly regarded by all of the guards. He spent much of each day in the fields unguarded. He was very physically fit and healthy.
I had the opportunity to speak to the warden and he told me that Johnny was one of the best inmates he had ever had in his career and that he sent yearly recommendations for parole to the state parole board. Johnny was also very close to the prison Chaplain and the AA counselor.
As time went on, I discovered that the warden was frustrated by the parole board’s unwillingness to grant parole. He and his wife were both big fans of Johnny’s and both assured me that he deserved his freedom. It was clear that whatever problems Johnny had in his youth were no longer present.
Therefore, as a kind of quixotic quest, I obtained letters from the warden, Chaplain and other authority figures at the facility and then submitted a request to meet with the parole board, thinking it was unlikely anything would come of it.
In the meantime, I used one of my trips to Atlanta to research the case in the state archives. I was astonished at how short the trial was for a death penalty case and how little testimony was made. The victim was the only law officer in Warwick, Georgia. According to Johnny, there was some friction between the two of them. The actual events of the case were murky and poorly described, but Johnny had clearly killed the man. What was not clear were the motives and the detailed circumstances. There was at least some evidence of lack of intention, but the jury, which had only one black member despite a 48% population in the area, was not persuaded.
I was shocked and very pleasantly surprised to receive an appointment with the parole board a few weeks after submitting my letter. I assembled all the details I could about Johnny’s current status and the high regard he was held in by everyone at the correctional facility and then drove up to Atlanta for the meeting.
The board listened respectfully to my arguments for parole, but gave no indication of their thoughts. I met privately with the chairman of the parole board and he indicated to me that there was strong political pressure at play preventing Johnny’s release, so I was not surprised to receive a letter denying my request a week later. However, he said that he thought there might be a better situation within a few years. I had the impression that this would be due to the rotation of one of the members off the board.
My friendship with Johnny continued to deepen. He was allowed to visit his mother and some other family members once each quarter. One of the prison guards would drive him over and sit down with the family for the meal. I joined him for two of those visits and had a great time getting to know his mother and sisters.
After Karen and I left Habitat in 1988 and moved to Atlanta for me to pursue my PhD at Georgia Tech, I continue to drive down once every month or two to visit Johnny. His attitude was always so positive, his smile so infectious.
Finally, in 1991, Johnny was paroled. He spent a few months working almost as a kind of indentured servant for a farmer – sort of a halfway house arrangement. I wasn’t happy about that period as I felt he was being exploited. But soon enough he was on his own, living in Americus in an apartment and performing various tasks in the community to support himself.
We moved into a house in Roswell at the beginning of April, 1992, and Johnny came up on the bus to see us. His bus arrived just in time for the largest snowfall in April in Atlanta history, about 17 inches! He had only ever seen a dusting of snow before, so it was quite an experience for him. He stayed for several days and loved playing with our 2-year-old daughter Caroline and walking in the snow.
Tragically, Johnny’s life of freedom was short-lived. He developed stomach cancer not long after his visit with us and died a year later. I drove down for the funeral. There were a lot of people there to mourn his passing. He had already made many friends in his short time out of prison.
It was always hard for me to imagine Johnny as anything other than a kind and incredibly beautiful human being. He committed a violent crime in his early twenties, but his was clearly a case where rehabilitation had occurred and transformed him. His gentle spirit was evident to all. It was a privilege to have known him and shared a bit of his life.
Beautiful account, Bob.
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