Born: 1902

Died: 1973

Area of Expertise: Poet and Writer

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Inducted into Hall of Fame: 2018

Presentation Prepared by Vivian Fisher (PDF)

Dr. Clifton H. Johnson, founder and executive director of the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University in New Orleans LA.  Amistad is the leading archive and research center documenting the history and culture of Africans, African Americans, and America’s minority populations.  Some stats on Amistad’s collection include over 250,000 photographs, the library has of over 30,000 books, 2000 serials, and 800+ manuscript and personal papers that numbers over 15 million documents. Amistad also has the premiere art collection of Black artists in the deep south.

Dr. Johnson was a founding member of the Greater New Orleans Archivists and worked tirelessly on behalf of the archival and library community. 

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He retired to Oregon in 2002 and passed, May 21, 2008.

Dr. Johnson received his Ph.D. at the University of NC, 1959, during that time he was an archivist at Fisk University, but he also taught at two other HBCUs, LeMoyne College and East Carolina College. After processing the papers of the American Missionary Association (AMA) of more than 300,000 documents, he developed a proposal to form the Amistad Research Center as an archive to house the papers of African Americans, African, and other underrepresented groups that were part of the AMA legacy of educating minority populations. Amistad Research Center is housed on Tulane University’s campus as an independent research collection and open to the public. Amistad has digital manuscript, photographs, and educational materials available online and through other collaborative entities such as Louisiana State University, Tulane Univeristy, and vendors such Scholarly Resources and Adam Matthew.

Publications written by Bontemps

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•God Sends Sunday (1931)

•Popo and Fifina, Children of Haiti (1932) [w/ Langston Hughes]

•You Can’t Pet a Possum (1934)

•Black Thunder: Gabriel’s Revolt: Virginia 1800 (1936)

•Sad-Faced Boy (1937)

•Drums at Dusk (1939)

•Golden Slippers: An Anthology of Negro Poetry for Young Readers (1941) compiled by Bontemps

•The Fast Sooner-Hound

•Chariot of the Sky: a Story of the Jubilee Singers

•The Harlem Renaissance Remembered

•Bubber Goes to Heaven

•Anywhere but Here

•Father of the Blues: An Autobiography

•Boy of the Border

•Lonesome Boy

•Frederick Douglass: Slave – Fighter – Freeman

•100 Years of Negro Freedom