Robert L. Johnson papers, 1952-2000.

Creator: Johnson, Robert L. (Robert Leon), 1930-
Collection number: 5362
View finding aid.

Abstract: Robert L. Johnson (Robert L. Johnson Jr.) graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1952. In 1954, he was ordained in the United Methodist Church. The following year, Johnson received a master of divinity degree from the Union Theological School in New York City, N.Y. He also received a master of theology degree from the Harvard Divinity School in 1968. In 1957, Johnson was hired as the director of the Wesley Foundation in Chapel Hill, N.C., where he served for 18 years. The collection includes a scrapbook created by Robert L. Johnson primarily about the Reverend Charles Miles Jones, a Chapel Hill, N.C., minister involved in the civil rights movement. The scrapbook contains articles about Reverend Jones’s removal from the Presbyterian Church of Chapel Hill, N.C., by the Orange Presbytery and other articles pertaining to clergy involved in the desegregation movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The collection also contains a dissertation by Andrew Niles McLean entitled “Collective Identity and Institutional Change in the Campus Ministry 1964-1973: Weaving the Cloak of Righteousness” (UCLA, 2000), which includes a chapter on Chapel Hill, and letters to Johnson, including two from Methodist bishops declining to become involved in the 1963 Speaker Ban debate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Repository: Southern Historical Collection

Collection Highlights: An item of particular interest is a scrapbook created by Robert L. Johnson primarily about the Reverend Charles Miles Jones, a Chapel Hill, N.C., minister involved in the civil rights movement. The scrapbook contains articles about Reverend Jones’s removal from the Presbyterian Church of Chapel Hill, N.C., by the Orange Presbytery and other articles pertaining to clergy involved in the desegregation movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Folder 3 contains a copy of “Dr. Shrader’s Statement to the Congregation” on desegregation, with comments by an unknown person