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BOOKS
PROFILES IN PROGRESS
Dorothy Inman-Johnson’s fourth book contains dozens of profiles of Black difference-makers who established precedents and milestones in Tallahassee. She hopes her book fosters appreciation in young people for the struggles of earlier generations.
Book documents milestones achieved by Black residents of Tallahassee by EMILEE MAE STRUSS
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orothy Inman-Johnson is a preservationist, not of the world as it is, but of the world as it has been. Encouraged by Dr. Clinita Ford, a one-time teacher of the year at Florida A&M University and a member of the National Black College Hall of Fame, InmanJohnson undertook the writing of Tallahassee’s Black History Firsts, Post-Reconstruction Era, her fourth book. In it, she documents the contributions made by 60 pioneering Black residents of Florida’s capital city. Ford kept after Inman-Johnson about writing the book after attending a Tallahassee’s Black History Firsts dinner. The event, hosted by the Loved by Jesus Family Church, benefits a nonprofit created to assist low-income children living in the Orange Avenue area. Inman-Johnson and her husband, Rev. Lee Johnson, established the event and founded the church and nonprofit. For Inman-Johnson, it is important to document the milestones for posterity, including recent ones achieved by Blacks in the cultural arenas and fields of arts and media, business, civil rights, religion, education, government, law, medicine and sports. “I feel we’re at a point in this country and state where we’re simply afraid to talk about the lives of Black people and their history,” Inman-Johnson said. “And that’s a problem.” Her subjects include headline makers and people far less familiar. So it is that the profiles include longtime elected official Al Lawson, Tallahassee’s first Black legislator and congressman, and
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Benjamin Crump, whom InmanJohnson credits with being the first nationally and internationally known Black lawyer from Tallahassee. But they also include Yvonne and Curtis Tucker, the creators of Afro-Raku ceramic techniques; James Nelson Tookes, the first Black owner of a Tallahassee real estate agency; and Jack Gant, the first Black dean at Florida State University’s College of Education. “Young people today don’t understand how things have changed over decades,” Inman-Johnson said. “They don’t know what it took for Black people to get to where they are today — it’s these individuals whose shoulders young people are standing on today,
and I think newer generations should know who’s holding them up.” Inman-Johnson has set important precedents of her own as the first Black woman elected to the City Commission and Tallahassee’s first Black female mayor. She moved to Tallahassee in December 1971. “Some of these people I’ve known for decades,” she said. “But then I started digging into their lives and discovered I really didn’t know all they had accomplished — I was blown away by what these individuals have done.” Most were born in the 1930s and ’40s, making them witnesses to the events of the civil rights era, and grew up in segregated rural areas. photography by THE WORKMANS