Born: September 13, 1921

Died: May 21, 2008

Area of Expertise: Historian of Africanca and Christin Religion 

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Inducted into Hall of Fame: 2018

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.

Selected Publications written about the collection

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1. Manuscript Holding s about Twentieth-/century Civil Rights Activities, 1981.

2. Guide to United Church of Christ Archives, Manuscripts and Related Holdings 1999.

3. Terms of Endurance: Living Legends in African-American Art, 1995.

4. Beyond the Blues: Reflections of African America in the Fine Arts Collection of the Amistad Research Center, 2010.

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Selected publications by Johnson

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1. American Missionary Association Archives as a Source for the Study of American History, 1966.

2. Author and added entry catalog of the American Missionary Association archives, 1970.

3. “Abolitionist Missionary Activities in North Carolina.” The Crisis, Volume LXXVII (March 1972).

4. “African Missionaries to the U.S. Freedmen.” The Crisis, 1972.

5. God Struck Me Dead: Voices of Ex-slaves, 1969.

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Selected research developed using the Amistad collection

1. Elliot, Mark Emory.  Color-blind justice: Albion Tourgée and the quest for racial equality from the civil war to Plessy v. Ferguson.  New York : Oxford University Press, 2006.

2. Germany, Kent B.  New Orleans after the promises: poverty, citizenship, and the search for the Great Society.  Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007.

3. Hall, Stephen Gilroy.  Alrutheus Ambush Taylor:  Pioneering Revisionist Historian of the Reconstruction, 1893-1954.  Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin, 1993.

4. Hankins, Rebecca.  “Marguerite Cartwright” in African American National Biography edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.  Volume 2 (pp. 201-203) Oxford University Press, 2008.  

5. Jones, Howard.  “Cinque of the Amistad: a Slave Trader?  Perpetuating a Myth.”  Organization of American Historians, Vol. 87, No. 3 (Dec., 2000).