News

Mwalimu Johnson, Prison Reform Advocate and Counselor of Fellow Inmates, Dies at 78

Published

10 years ago

November 20, 2015

By Katy Reckdahl, the Advocate

Mwalimu Johnson, a prison-reform advocate and a sought-after counselor to thousands of fellow inmates, died last Tuesday of kidney failure at his home in New Orleans. He was 78.

“Mwalimu was full of wisdom and knowledge that he gave out like he was handing out candy for Halloween. He will forever be with me,” said Norris Henderson, who got to know Johnson during 27 years Henderson spent at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola on a wrongful murder conviction before he was released in 2003.

During the two decades Johnson served at Angola starting in 1977, he acted almost as the prison’s sage.

“If you needed advice or counsel, you’d go to Ward 2 of the prison hospital and get all the wisdom you needed. All the guys did that,” said Calvin Duncan, who spent 28 years in Angola for a murder he didn’t commit before he was released in 2011.

Johnson stayed in the prison’s hospital because he was paralyzed and in a wheelchair, though few remember the chair slowing him down in any meaningful way. So, to see Johnson, prisoners first had to get a pass to the hospital, Henderson and Duncan said. But Johnson’s reputation for imparting good advice was such that neither one can remember a guard who refused to issue such a pass to a prisoner who requested it.

“That’s the weirdest thing about it,” Duncan said. “The institution knew it.”

Born Leonard Johnson in New Orleans, he was nicknamed “Micey” as a child and spent his early youth using and selling illegal drugs. Then, in 1958, he pleaded guilty to bank robbery and was sentenced to 15 years in Angola, which was then known as perhaps the bloodiest prison in the nation.

“That was part of the reason why he gave of himself as much as he did,” said his daughter, Nicole Hessier, now an investigator for the Orleans Parish Public Defenders Office. “He felt like he owed this debt for the wrong things he did as a younger man who had lacked knowledge or understanding.”

Influenced by their father’s experience, two of Hessier’s sisters also work in criminal justice: Lynthea Johnson Edwards works for the probation office, and Malaika Johnson is a defense attorney. Johnson’s fourth daughter, Mtamu Johnson, is a nurse.

Stories of Johnson’s efforts to establish peace in the prison are legendary — how he hated so much to see the inmates fight one another that he would walk into the middle of a knife fight to stop it. He spoke reasonably to frustrated, angry men who were known as rapists, saving many young men from sexual assaults, fellow prisoners said. “That’s how he earned his reputation, among guys that were gladiators back then,” Duncan said.

It also was then that Johnson, after studying Islam, chose the name Mwalimu, Swahili for “teacher.”

Johnson was released in the late 1960s but still had a mistrust of police. So, when a squad car drove up as he stood in the front yard of a relative’s house in 1975, he ran; he was shot in the back and paralyzed.

He was then sentenced to seven years for assault on the officers who had shot him and to 50 years for an unrelated armed robbery that he said he had nothing to do with.

He would eventually be released for a wrongful sentence, but not until 1997 — more than 20 years later.

Soon afterward, Denny LeBoeuf hired him to answer the phones at the Capital Post-Conviction Project of Louisiana. “He had a magical way of dealing with the guys on death row,” said LeBoeuf, who would marvel to see young men burst into the office, often with families in tow. They would bear-hug Johnson and then tell their families, “This is the man who made my life possible.”

LeBoeuf’s successor, Gary Clements, heard the news about Johnson’s death as he drove to Angola, but many of the inmates already knew, having heard from guards who were equally heartbroken at the news, he said.

Oakland Post

Posts by Oakland Post

Activism

Oakland Post: Week of April 8 – 14, 2026

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of April 8 – 14, 2026

Published

20 hours ago

April 10, 2026

Oakland Post

To enlarge your view of this issue, use the slider, magnifying glass icon or full page icon in the lower right corner of the browser window.

Oakland Post

Posts by Oakland Post

Activism

Oakland Post: Week of April 1 – 7, 2026

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of April 1 – 7, 2026

Published

5 days ago

April 6, 2026

Oakland Post

To enlarge your view of this issue, use the slider, magnifying glass icon or full page icon in the lower right corner of the browser window.

Oakland Post

Posts by Oakland Post

#NNPA BlackPress

Black Artists in America, Installation Three Wraps at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens

TRI-STATE DEFENDER — With 50+ paintings, sculptures and assemblages, the exhibit features artists like Varnette Honeywood from Los Angeles, whose pieces appeared in Bill Coby’s private collection (before they were auctioned off) and on “The Cosby Show.” Also included are works by Alonzo Davis, another Los Angeles artist who opened one of the first galleries there where Black Artists could exhibit.

Published

3 weeks ago

March 24, 2026

admin

By Candace A. Gray | Tri-State Defender

The tulips gleefully greet those who enter the gates at the Dixon Gallery & Gardens on an almost spring day. More than 650,000 bulbs of various hues are currently on display. And they are truly breathtaking.

Inside the gallery, and equally as breathtaking, is the “Black Artists in America, From the Bicentennial to September 11” exhibit, which runs through Sunday, March 29. This is the third installment of a three-part series that started years ago and illustrates part of the Black experience through visual arts in the 20th century.

“This story picks up where part two left off,’’ said Kevin Sharp, the Linda W. and S. Herbert Rhea director for the Dixon. “This era is when we really start to see the emergence of these important Black artists’ agency and freedom shine through. They start to say and express what they want to, and it was a really beautiful time.”

With 50+ paintings, sculptures and assemblages, the exhibit features artists like Varnette Honeywood from Los Angeles, whose pieces appeared in Bill Coby’s private collection (before they were auctioned off) and on “The Cosby Show.” Also included are works by Alonzo Davis, another Los Angeles artist who opened one of the first galleries there where Black Artists could exhibit.

“Though [Davis] was from LA, he actually lived in Memphis for a decade,” said Sharp. “He was a dean at Memphis College of Art, and later opened the first gallery in New York owned and operated by black curators.”

Another featured artist is former NFL player, Ernie Barnes. His work is distinctive. Where have you seen one of his most popular paintings, Sugar Shack? On the end scene and credits of the hit show “Good Times.” His piece Saturday Night, Durham, North Carolina, 1974 is in this collection.

Memphis native James Little’s “The War Baby: The Triptych” is among more than 50 works featured in “Black Artists in America, From the Bicentennial to September 11” at the Dixon Gallery & Gardens, the final installment of a three-part series highlighting the impact and evolution of Black artists through 2011.

The exhibit features other artists with Memphis ties, including abstract painter James Little, who was raised in a segregated Memphis and attended Memphis Academy of Art (before it was Memphis College of Art). He later moved to New York, became a teacher and an internationally acclaimed fixture in the art world in 2022 when he was named a Whitney Biennial selected artist at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Other artists like Romare Bearden, who had a Southern experience but lived up North, were featured in all three installments.

“During this period of time, he was a major figure,” said Sharp. “He wrote one of the first books on the history of African American art during a time when there were more Black academics, art teachers, more Black everything!”

Speaking of Black educators, Sharp said the head curator behind this tri-part series and Dixon’s partner in the arts is Earnestine Jenkins, Ph.D., an art history professor at the University of Memphis, who also earned a Master of Arts degree from Memphis State University (now UofM). “We began working with Dr. Jenkins in 2018,” he said.

Sharp explained that it takes a team of curators, registrars, counterparts at other museums, and more, about three years to assemble an exhibit like this. It came together quite seamlessly, he added. Each room conjured up more jaw-dropping “wows” than the one before it. Each piece worked with the others to tell the story of Black people and their collective experience during this time period.

One of the last artists about whom Sharp shared information was Bettye Saar, who will turn 100 years old this year. She’s been working in Los Angeles for 80 years and is finally getting her due. Her medium is collages or assemblages, and an incredible work of hers is on display. She’s married to an artist and has two daughters, also artists.

The exhibit catalogue bears some of these artists’ stories, among other scholarly information.

The exhibit, presented by the Joe Orgill Family Fund for Exhibitions, is culturally and colorfully rich. It is a must see and admission to the Dixon is free.

Visit https://www.dixon.org/ to learn more.

Fun Facts: An original James Little design lives in the flooring of the basketball court at Tom Lee Park, and he makes and mixes his own paint colors.