Janice “Jay” Johnson ’61 Has Led an Activist’s Life

By Gina Gallucci-White

U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt once stated, “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena … who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”

When people ask Janice ‘Jay’ Johnson ’61 why she became president last year of People’s Action—a network of three grassroots organizations dedicated to advancing economic, social and racial justice—she cites Roosevelt’s speech as the reason. “I have aspirations to be ‘the woman in the arena’,” she said. “I am with (People’s Action) because I really felt like it was a progressive stream and a hell of a challenge … to bring the cultures of three different organizations together and form a baseline in terms of values and action.”

Whether volunteering her time for the Young Women’s Christian Association, serving as a Girl Scout executive or being president of a national grassroots organization, Johnson has spent her life dedicated to activism—both at the community and national level—to help bring a voice to those who feel they have been ignored.

“(Activism is) important to me because I don’t believe citizenship is a spectator sport,” she said. “I believe unless people take action, things can go quickly awry. I believe that too many people sit silently and watch things happen and think that they can’t do anything about it. We at least need to be able to sit down and reason about what we think is good for this country and for our families and communities. The conversations that everybody says that we need to have, somebody needs to start.”

She has been active in Virginia Organizing for the past two decades. Founded in 1995, Virginia Organizing is a nonpartisan, non-profit community action group that brings people together to address issues that affect the quality of life in their local communities. Johnson has worked with the organization to reform the state’s tax system and push for policy changes in housing and redevelopment.

Over the years, Johnson has served as both chairperson and treasurer for Virginia Organizing. “Jay is an incredibly dynamic person,” said executive director Joe Szakos. “I think one of the real things that Jay brings to an organization like Virginia Organizing is that she can be incredibly thoughtful about big-picture items, but really stays grounded in what has to happen day-to-day in (terms of) what one person can do, what two people can do, what small groups can do and how they can fit into working on long-term change in a broader sense. She lives on both ends of the continuum at the exact same time."

Johnson is now leading People’s Action, a national group founded in June 2016 and formed by a merger of three powerful organizing groups: Alliance for a Just Society, National People’s Action and USAction. The nonprofit’s mission is “nothing less than to create a new people’s politics in America,” according to its webpage. People’s Action’s campaigns take on the issues of social justice, climate change and immigration.

LeeAnn Hall, executive director for the Alliance for a Just Society, said Johnson has heart, compassion and a real desire to fight for the dignity and well-being of poor and working-class families, not only in Virginia but across the country. “She is a natural leader,” Hall said. “She’s really good at listening and reaching out to people and hearing where they are at, and starting a conversation with people.”

While she is praised for both her planning and insight, Johnson also knows when to act. Several years ago, the Center for Community Change was putting together a protest on immigration policy in Washington, D.C. Virginia Organizing at that time was doing a lot of work on behalf of undocumented immigrants. Johnson met a woman who decided to participate in the protest even though she was undocumented. “Understanding what the risk was for her and her family, I felt like if she could do it, then I could do it. So for the first time in my life, I volunteered to be arrested,” she said. Johnson was 70 years old at the time.

The group marched and chanted in front of then-Speaker of the House Rep. John Boehner’s office and about 10 protestors, including Johnson, were arrested by the U. S. Capitol Police. For Johnson, it was worth it. “We were trying to get attention to stop separating (immigrant) families,” she said. “Sometimes you have to take a stand. It can't be all talk. You've got to do some walking along with it.”

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Born and raised in Hampton, Va., Johnson became active with Girl Scouts at the age of 7. She credits being selected as one of two high school-aged girls to represent her home state at an All-States Encampment as one of her reasons for selecting Wilson College. “That was the first time that I even had any thought to go to a college that was not a black college because I met girls from all over the United States,” she said, adding she befriended girls who were from different backgrounds such as Italian, Scandinavian and Native American.

When Johnson returned from the encampment, her high school guidance counselor connected her to the National Negro Scholarship and Service Fund, which was dedicated to helping African-American students in the top 10 percent of their class find integrated colleges. She was given five colleges to choose from and picked Wilson, sight unseen.

“I chose Wilson because the correspondence and other communication from both college and alumna were the warmest and most caring that I received, which led me to believe that I would be in a friendly, supportive environment,” Johnson said.  “Wilson and the friendships I formed there have not disappointed me—even after all these years.”

She earned her bachelor’s degree at Wilson in psychology and after graduation, worked for several years at the welfare department in Baltimore. She later returned to Virginia to be closer to family and get her master's degree in guidance counseling from Hampton Institute (now Hampton University). Her résumé includes time spent in social work, entrepreneurship, Girl Scouts and in the City of Hampton’s youth department. She served as the executive director for both the Northwest Settlement House Early Learning Center in Washington, D.C. and the Western Reserve Girl Scout Council in Ohio, before starting her own real estate business, I. Jay Enterprises, in Hampton.

Then, nearly 20 years ago, a member of Virginia Organizing approached Johnson about starting a chapter in Hampton. “I was too busy and I kept sending her to other people, and she kept coming back to me because other people sent her back to me,” Johnson recalled. The back and forth occurred for about two years until she was invited to a state board meeting with the promise that if she didn’t like it, she would not be asked again. Johnson said she was initially hesitant because she didn’t “want to be part of another organization that meets to meet, meets to greet or meets to eat—or a combination of all of those things.”

Johnson attended the conference and met people from all different educational and racial backgrounds. “These people were for real,” she said. “(They) respected each other and were serious about the issues, but managed to have fun with each other while they were going about the business. I thought, ‘You know what? This might not be too bad.’ ”

From that meeting, Johnson emerged as a leader of the group. Johnson can go from high-level meetings across the country to back home to Newport News, Va., to work on local issues such as voter registration or helping people in flooded neighborhoods, according to Szakos. “They are both important to her,” he said. “Nothing is too big and nothing is too small for Jay Johnson.”

Johnson's first taste of activism actually came when she was attending Wilson. She and several friends had gone to a cafe in Chambersburg to celebrate a classmate’s birthday. After being seated, they watched as table after table were waited on, yet no one came to serve them. Johnson told her friends the service wasn’t slow. They weren’t being served because she, an African-American, was sitting with them. Having never seen racism this close before, one of her friends confronted the waitress. The owner would not let her wait on them.

Growing up in the South, Johnson had experienced segregation from a young age. But since Wilson was north of the Mason Dixon line, “I really did not expect this to happen,” she recalled. She and her friends decided to organize a protest, stage sit-ins and lobby the student government to boycott the restaurant—which did later change its stance on serving African-Americans. The incident was highlighted in a recent exhibit about civil rights at the college’s Hankey Center.

At a Wilson class reunion many decades later, one of her friends told her they participated in the protest because, “The fight became our fight because you were important to us, and it hurt us that this is what your life had been. We needed to do something different as people.”

Looking back on that experience, Johnson wrote on her blog this year: “Our protest was about more than vindicating the right of black and brown people to eat in a restaurant without discrimination. For me, protest was a way to exert my humanity and claim that I am a person exactly like everyone else in our free nation.

“That’s why, at the age of 70, I engaged in civil disobedience to support my friends who need a path to citizenship, and was arrested. I decided to stand with them, just as my friends stood with me,” Johnson wrote. “We all need to do a lot of soul-searching, remember our history lessons and stand together.”