Race

The Badass Black Attorney You Didn’t Learn About in School

I’ve written about my mother’s sister, Minnie Muldrow Johnson, and how she overcame Jim Crow segregation to become one of the first Black women to receive a master’s degree at the University of Arkansas. During a career as an educator that spanned decades, she was also one of Arkansas’s first African American principals of an integrated school.

While remarkable, those achievements are only part of my aunt’s story. She and her husband Roger had a marriage that lasted more than fifty years. But perhaps the most beautiful aspect of their story was how the two of them met.

During the Korean War, my uncle was a cook in a segregated unit of the U.S. Marines. It is unclear whether he was drafted or, as many young men did, he faked his age to serve in the war. Whatever the case, upon returning from his tour, he was eager to complete the final year of his high school education. In an oddity of wartime, Minnie Muldrow, a recent college graduate about the same age, became his twelfth-grade teacher. The school where the pair met was North Little Rock, Arkansas’s Scipio A. Jones High School.