SCHOOL SPOTLIGHT: Savannah Mayor Van Johnson visits Benedictine on MLK Day

Benedictine Military School was honored to welcome Savannah Mayor Van Johnson as its guest speaker the morning on Jan. 19 in celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Day. Mayor Johnson visited BC at the request of Benedictine Principal Dr. Jacob Horne.

“Dr. Horne spoke to a couple of friends of mine, and we had a meeting, and he had this idea,” Mayor Johnson said during an interview after giving a speech in BC Gym. “It sounded really good because on King Day people are all over the place, and I’ve never given a King Day message on King Day. It’s great to do it here at BC, at the intersection of religion and education, and the military. I thought it was a really good idea.”

After his speech, Mayor Johnson left BC to go downtown and walk in Savannah’s MLK Day Parade. A number of Benedictine Cadets also marched in the parade. Other Cadets remained at BC and attended theology, English, and social science classes that were tailored with civil rights-centered lessons.

“I’m old enough to be a bridge,” Mayor Johnson, 57, said. “I’m old enough to be a beneficiary, a direct beneficiary, of the Civil Rights Movement but young enough to have not been in the Civil Rights Movement. I think helping people to understand, particularly young people, just the massive sacrifice that Dr. King gave, and the massive sacrifice for his family … I mean; to put it another way, you have four kids who lost their dad at 39 years old. Never saw them grow up. Never saw them be married or have children. You had a wife who lost her husband. He never reached 40. There is a personal side of this as well. When people think of the man, they don’t think of the family man. Hopefully, young people will take the challenge to be the ‘Kings’ in their lives and their own situations. You don’t have to be elected to help to make big change, to make significant change. You don’t have to be. You can do it from a religious standpoint. You can do it from a community standpoint. The best change in the world was always by people who were not elected.”

“Dr. King, this year, will have been gone 58 years. He has been gone longer than he was alive. He only lived 39 years. He’s been gone 58 years. I was fortunate to be born in the same year that Dr. King died. We weren’t on Earth at the same time but at least I have the residual effect of his legacy, and people whose parents knew him, and of him, and heard his voice, and knew what life was like around the world and in Savannah before my time. And so, the question is why? And I think it goes to, ultimately, where I think you will end up and where you will be in your life. Because great men of the world were never great men unless they were able to distinguish themselves from the crowd. They were never great because of their position. They were great for what they did. You have this young man who grew up in a time where America was much different than it is now. It was a time that several of your great-grandparents might remember, where our world was not equal, where our country was not equal. When we celebrate the 250^th anniversary of our nation’s founding, we say that we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We say all men, but we weren’t talking about all men. We were talking about separate men. And women weren’t even part of the equation. And everybody already knows that women are smarter than men are. Gentlemen, always defer to the women. They’re always smarter. But, again, we had this situation where people were being treated unequally. You had people of one ethnicity being treated and viewed one way, and you had people of another ethnicity being treated and viewed another way. We have seen this throughout history. We have seen it around the world, where individuals were treated differently by things that either they did not choose or they could not control. The greatest people in history were those that challenged that status quo, that believed that we are all equal. Although, in this country, we may not all enjoy the same success, we should all have the same opportunity to achieve that success. And so, this young boy rose up in this segregated country in which people were treated differently. And I’m sure you’ve seen historical tapes, and it’s almost hard to imagine that this was America, this country that we love.”

“To treat another person differently, a person with a brain, a person with a heart, a person with a spirit, goes against the teachings of Jesus Christ. And yet people did it. And some of them did it in the name of religion.”

“And so, this young man who grew up in this space knew that the way for him to get through it was education. His daddy was a pastor. His grandaddy was a pastor. And so, he went into the family business. He became a pastor. Highly educated. Graduated at 19 from college; Morehouse, I believe it was. Entered the seminary. Earned his doctorate. And could have lived a very, very comfortable life being a preacher, a well-thought of, well-in demand, well-spoken of preacher and pastor. But there are times in your life when you will find that your destiny calls you to do something else. It calls you to do something bigger. Some of you might already know that pull. Some of you already know not where you want to go but where you have to be. And I believe that God puts those seeds in you. And you feel them germinating. And although you might fight against what your nature says you want to do, you go with what you are destined to do. And so, as life had it, he’s a young pastor and enjoying a young wife and a young family, was pastoring. And there were issues of civil unrest. And he was asked to become the leader of a movement that dealt with the issues about bussing and a bus boycott, the Montgomery (Ala.) bus boycott. Today, you would think if you got on a Chatham Area Transit bus you could go sit where you wanted to but no. There was a time when you could not sit where you wanted to sit. There was a time in Savannah where you could not go where you wanted to go. There was a time in Savannah on Broughton Street, you could go into a store, and you could not sit at the lunch counter with your friends. There was a time here in Savannah where there were water fountains that said ‘White’ and ‘Colored.’ You couldn’t use the same bathrooms. You couldn’t receive the same quality of education. Even if you had the merit. Imagine how you would feel. And we’re past that because we are standing on the shoulders of those who helped make things better for us.”

“As life would have it, he made progress in his faith, followed his destiny, and he encountered haters. And you will find in life that when you are pursuing your God-given destiny, when you are on your mission to fulfill your self-actualization of where you are supposed to be, you are going to encounter haters. If you don’t then you’re probably doing the wrong thing. These haters, these individuals of both races, white folks thought he was doing too much, Black folks thought he was not doing enough. There were some Black folks that said, ‘You know what? Everything is alright. Just, just stop. Stop agitating. Stop, stop pushing this issue.’ Because it became an issue. And all around the country there were issues of individuals and government getting all involved.”

“He gets to a point where he receives the Nobel Peace Prize. He is now known around the world. He survives a couple of assassination attempts. He was signing a book and he survives when a lady plunges a letter opener into his chest. He was the recipient of death threats. People called him and threatened to harm his home, and harm his wife, and harm his children. But in his mission-purposed life, he continued doing what he was doing, what he was called to do. One of his most famous speeches, and I’m sure you’ve heard it before, in 1963 on Aug. 28, at the time they had a march on Washington for jobs and justice, I believe it was called, and thousands of people came out, in which he gave his famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, that one day his four little children would grow up in a world where they would not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Not by how they are seen but by what they do, by who they are. Fast forward, President John F. Kennedy is assassinated. His brother, Robert, is assassinated. And in 1968, at 39 years old, he is in Memphis, Tenn., because the right thing is always the right thing to do. And he’s working, he’s walking with trash truck drivers to try to help them get better wages. The night of April 3, 1968, he gives a speech that now, in retrospect, foretells his own death. Literally, less than 24 hours later, he would be assassinated. And he says something to the effect that he doesn’t know what might happen, that he might want to live a long life, that longevity has its place, that he’s been to the mountaintop, and he’s seen the Promised Land. And he ends that speech by saying he doesn’t fear any man because his eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. And at 6 or so central standard time in Memphis, he was shot and killed. He was 39 years old … 39, with a wife and four children.”

“Since then, or around that time, the civil rights movement and a variety of other things allows us to be in this space now. There were a lot of other people who played their parts. This man died so that we can have the friends whom we choose, that we can be around whomever we choose. And our strength is who we are together, not who we are apart. We come together to celebrate his birth, and we didn’t always do that. Savannah was well ahead of the rest of the country because we recognized that although we had great presidents and we had great leaders, this was someone who was unelected, who never ran for office but gave his life for service. He used it as an instrument of peace. He used it as an instrument of social action. He used it as an instrument to help those that were hurting: the least, the last, the lost.”