Given the current reactionary political firmament, the activist community suffered a serious setback recently with the deaths of Rev. Nelson Napoleon Johnson, 81, in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Marika Sherwood, 86, in England. Johnson was a Black man and Sherwood a white woman, and though geographically separated by an ocean, they shared a stream of revolutionary commitment.
As a Jewish refugee from Budapest living in Australia and working as a young woman in New Guinea, Sherwood was introduced to the concept of racial discrimination. It wasn’t long before she was fully involved in the Aborigines struggle. She was further enlightened when she intervened in a fight between Black and white children. “I had to step in and separate them,” she recounted. “And I told myself the Black kids had to learn of their parents’ contributions…” and told the Black kids, “you have to fight with knowledge and not your fists.”
Sherwood took her own advice and began to delve deeper into Black history in England and throughout the diaspora. Her first book, “Many Struggles: West Indian Workers and Service Personnel in Britain, 1939-1945,” was published in 1985. But it was her “Malcolm X: Visits Abroad, 1964-65,” published in 2011, that gained her a permanent place in the hearts and minds of global freedom fighters.
Related: Most jobs in NYC history? Okay, let’s talk about it.
The book is an indispensable addition to the Malcolm X canon, including almost day-by-day, event-by-event coverage of Malcolm’s presence in France, England, the Middle East, and Africa during his yearlong travel to that part of the world. She, along with Hakim Adi, was the co-founder of Black and Asian Studies Association. Among her many entries in dictionaries and encyclopedias was one on Claudia Jones, the renowned communist and journalist.
For all their commonalities, I doubt whether the two activists ever met, but knowing of Sherwood’s universal interest in the plight of Black people, there’s a good chance she was aware of Rev. Johnson’s fight for Black liberation. His leadership in Greensboro, particularly the march against the KKK in 1979 that led to a massacre, was widely reported. Four people were killed and several wounded when they were attacked by the KKK in protest against the klan and its promotion of white supremacy.
This wasn’t the first time Johnson had been involved in a demonstration that led to someone being killed. A decade before, when he was still a high school student, he led a protest after one of his classmates had won a senior race for class president but was denied the honor, accusing him of being a radical. Violence ensued and one protester, Willie Grimes, was killed. Johnson was arrested.
Unlike the school uprising, Johnson was wounded in 1979, but continued in various organizations to halt the spread of white supremacist ideology. Whether as a member of the Communist Workers Party, Workers Viewpoint Organization, the Greensboro Association for Poor People, or the African Liberation Support Committee, he was a bellwether for social justice. Even after the more radical phase of his fight for equal rights and independence was over, he continued to campaign for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Practically to the end of their lives, these two octogenarians were not stymied by the forces of reaction and adversity, and the legacies they leave, I hope, will inspire a multitude of marchers for freedom and justice, and meet head-on the atrocities fomented by the Trump administration.