Dr. Charles Johnson faced challenges from the moment he was hired as the first Black faculty member in the School of Medicine in 1970. At the time, Johnson had been seeing patients at Lincoln Hospital, the hospital for Black patients in Durham.
The ward clerks at Duke were all white females, and they would not speak to him, Johnson recalled in an interview. “I would ask about Patient X, and they would not answer me.” The chief of his division also refused his request to see patients in the all-white private wards.
But changes were gradually made, and one day Johnson looked up to discover that all the ward clerks were Black women. It was during a site visit for a grant review that a delegation from the National Institutes of Health stepped in to help rotate Johnson into the private ward.
His son, Charles D. Johnson, recalled that his father was determined to normalize the sight of a Black doctor. “He told me he would walk the halls and lobbies of the hospital just so people would get accustomed to seeing him,” he said.
Johnson was born in 1927 in Acmar, Alabama, where his father was a coal miner and his mother a domestic worker. After high school, Johnson became a fighter pilot in the Air Force. He attended Howard University on the GI Bill and completed medical school at Howard. He then served his internship at the District of Columbia General Hospital, his residency at Lincoln Hospital in Durham, and a fellowship in endocrinology at Duke.
By the time he retired in 1996, the medical school had minority faculty and staff in every department.
Dr. Johnson died in 2021 at the age of 94.
