Sit-ins activist bitter about past

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Sit-ins activist
bitter about past
Ralph Johns says he wants a thank-you
By GARRY ABRAMS
L.A. Times-Washington Post News Service
LOS ANGELES — Nearly 30
years ago, Ralph Johns reached out
and touched history. It was a fleeting caress but he cannot forget the
texture of the moment when he — a
white merchant with a maverick
streak wider than a freeway —
helped four young black men walk
into a Woolworth store in Greensboro and sit down at the whites-only
lunch counter.
Today, few know what Johns did
in helping open a new front in the
struggle for civil rights. Now in his
later years, Johns — who went
broke, lost his first wife and was
separated from his daughters for 13
years because he stood against the
crowd — often expresses bitterness
that the fame, glory, success and
satisfaction that went to others in
the movement have eluded him.
"I just want somebody to say,
'Hey, Ralph, thanks a hell of a lot
for What you've done,' " he said the
other day as he thumbed through
says he was once banned from
Greensboro's golf courses for trying
to integrate them.)
Nor is there anything to telegraph immediately that Johns, who
has worked for the past 17 years as
associate publisher of a Beverly
Hills, Calif, weekly, is such a complicated, contradictory mix of selflessness, generosity, idealism, religious faith, emotional vulnerability,
self-indulgence and ego. Or that he
has led such an impulsive, colorful,
star-crossed life.
The pictures on the wall of the
living room and the voluminous
scrapbooks quickly change first impressions, however. Pride of place
is given to a large framed photo of
Johns and a group of Greensboro's
black leaders with the Rev. Martin
Luther King Jr. about the time of
the sit-ins. The scrapbooks contain
clippings from local newspapers, letters and hundreds of photos dating
to Johns' early youth. But Johns
doesn't need the yellowing scraps of
paper to prompt his memory of that
day when actions became so much
louder than words. He is accustomed to delving into the past, of
reliving the moments that in retrospect are saturated with might-
have-beens.
his carefully tended scrapbooks, archives of an impulsive, episodic, improbable life.
Johns, 73, a former bit actor who
came to Southern California after
his Greensboro business failed, also
worries that his unforgettable moment will be forgotten, that his
modest bid for immortality will be
trumped by collective amnesia.
"Seldom do people get up and say
Ralph Johns was a stalwart in the
civil rights movement," said John
Kilimanjaro, editor and publisher of
the Carolina Peacemaker, a black
weekly newspaper in Greensboro.
"I personally don't feel he's been
fully appreciated," Kilimanjaro added in a telephone interview. "Ralph
is an individual who has paid his
dues in full — and the dues of a
hundred others."
Dr. George Simkins, president of
the Greensboro chapter of the
NAACP for 25 years, said flatly:
"He was the sit-in. There's no question about it, it was his idea."
A jowly  man  who  wears  big-
When the four young men
stopped by his store on the afternoon of Feb. 1, 1960, and told him
they were going to Woolworth's,
Johns was surprised, he said. He
had been proselytizing students
from N.C. A&T College and others
about staging a sit-in for about 10
years. There had never been any
takers and then, suddenly, he had
the recruits he had sought for so
long.
Most accounts of the American
civil rights struggle cover the
Greensboro sit-ins. Often they list
the names of the four A&T students
— Ezell Blair Jr., Franklin McCain,
Joseph McNeil and David Richmond
— who discovered a fresh rallying
point for the movement. The
Greensboro protest rapidly became
the impetus for many other such
actions in the weeks and years
ahead. (Sit-ins had been used previously in other states, but somehow
the chemistry was right in Greensboro.) Yet apparently only one
book, long out of print, mentions
Ralph Johns.
Ralph Johns
Boosted four A&T students
framed glasses, Johns lives with his
wife of five years, Norma, in a trailer park in the Los Angeles sprawl,
surrounded by scores of other neat
double-wide mobile homes and not
far from the park's ample clubhouse
and swimming pool. It is an unlikely
home for a social rebel, yet Johns
seems to fit. He has a settled, country-club air, thanks to an affable,
assured manner and clothes that
smack of the golf course. (In fact, he
(See Ralph Johns, E6)
Johns' obscurity seems to stem
from a number of factors. Perhaps
most important, he chose to remain
in the background at the time of the
sit-ins, fearing that his involvement
would endanger his family. It was
an unusual move for Johns, who
started seeking publicity early in
life, gaining a name for himself in
the 1930s as the kid who crashed
big-time prize fights, getting his
smiling, truant mug in the newspapers standing boldly in the ring as a
new champion was crowned.
And Johns, a hefty former football player, was a tempting target
three decades ago in Greensboro —
a man with the gall to fight bigotry
by putting signs such as "Special
This Week: Love Thy Neighbor"
and "God Hates Segregation" in
front of his store. He also wrote a
column for the local black newspaper, the Champion, trumpeting his
ideas about equal rights. He had
come to the South and met and married a local woman after being discharged from the Army in Greensboro. His wife's family helped set
him up in business there. But he
seems never to have fit in with the
norms and mores of the textile mill
city.
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