Five years after renaming itself after Lulu Merle Johnson, Johnson County is dedicating a new space specifically in her honor.
The southeast corner of the county administrative building will become Dr. Lulu Merle Johnson Plaza, featuring a bronze statue of Johnson alongside plaques celebrating Black Iowans in Iowa City. An unveiling ceremony will start at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday in the lobby at 913 S. Dubuque St.
Johnson was the first Black woman in the state, as well as at what is now the University of Iowa, to earn a doctorate. She built a career as a professor and historian across several historically Black colleges and universities. She created a course she named “The Negro in American Life,” which helped catapult the Black Studies discipline in academia.
On IPR’s Talk of Iowa, Johnson’s great niece Sonya Jackson said she has been trying for decades to bring Johnson more recognition.
“I knew that she had accomplished something very awesome and powerful,” Jackson said. “But I also was struggling with talking to people who weren't hearing me and who weren't willing to name a building after her, or a statue, or a plaza, or some of the things that are happening now.”
Jackson admired her great aunt long before she realized all that Johnson accomplished.
“She would call my dad and she would often say, ‘John, I'd like for you to come so we can speak of fools and kings and cabbages and things,’” Jackson said. “That's from Alice in Wonderland, if you know your stories. And that would be sort of the trigger to come to visit.”
Johnson’s knack for storytelling, inexhaustible vocabulary and mean poker hand convinced Jackson she had a special great aunt.
“She was just quirky and funny, and she called me doll, and she cooked for me and taught me how to cook,” Jackson said. “I didn't really understand the magnitude, though, of who she was and what she had accomplished because she didn't wear that like a badge.”
Rebecca Conard, emeritus professor of history at Middle Tennessee State University and the project historian who helped plan the plaza with Jackson, has not had trouble grasping the magnitude of who Johnson was.
“Among her possessions that came to the Jackson family was a course notebook for ‘The Negro in American Life,’” Conard said. “On the front of that, there's information that she developed it because there wasn't anything, there was no textbook that existed to teach the course that she wanted to teach. And I remember Sonya bringing this to my attention and me thinking, ‘Oh my God, I don't have my white gloves.’ Because I knew when I saw it, I knew how important it was.”
The plaza will contain narratives of Johnson’s life and the lives of other Black families in Iowa City who challenged segregation.
“Exactly two blocks from where her statue resides, there's the house where my dad grew up,” Jackson said. “It’s the home that my great aunt, Aunt Lulu's older sister, purchased so that Aunt Lulu would have a place to come home to during her studies at the University of Iowa, because at the time, Blacks couldn't live on campus … At the time, there were only five Black families in Iowa City, and they were supportive of each other.”
Conard hopes the plaza will offer insight to passersby who might not stop to read the plaques.
“If they take away only a visual understanding that Iowa is not this all-white place, and it never has been, if they can take that away, I think that's really important,” she said.
Jackson said she’s relieved that after decades of waiting, Johnson’s story is being celebrated, elevated and memorialized.
“I want people to just sort of stand in her wake and take in the accomplishment,” Jackson said. “I don’t know how many statues of Black people there are in this country, but I think she’s one of few. I think that’s powerful.”
