Johnson, Kathryn M. (Kathryn Magnolia), 1878-

The daughter of Walter and Lucinda Jane McCown Johnson, Kathryn Johnson was born in Darke County, Ohio. She graduated at the top of her high school class in New Paris, Ohio (1895), and attended Wilberforce University, receiving a teaching certificate and a bachelor's degree. She was a teacher in Ohio, North Carolina, and Kansas City, Kan., and dean of women at Shorter College in Little Rock, Ark. (1906). While in Kansas City, she helped establish a Young Women's Christian Association for African Americans. In 1913 she began to do field work for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, selling Crisis magazine, traveling widely through the South, and organizing branches in Kansas City, Topeka, and in Oklahoma. During World War I, Johnson went to France with the American Expeditionary Forces, an experience she described in Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces (1920), co-authored with Addie D. Hunton. After the war, Johnson traveled widely, lecturing on African-American history. She died in Chicago in 1944 or 1945. A pamphlet by Johnson, The Dark Race in the Dawn, was published in 1948.