Percy Edward Johnston (May 18, 1930 – March 20, 1993) was an African-American poet, playwright, and professor. He was also a founder of the Howard Poets and publisher of Dasein literary journal.
Life and career
Johnston was born in New York City, son of a jazz drummer and a concert harpist and grandson of a concert singer. Johnston chose not to pursue a career in music, but the influence of his background can be seen in some of his titles such as Concerto for a Girl and Convertible and “Round about Midnight, Opus# 6.” He was educated in New York City, Washington, DC, and Richmond, Virginia. Before college, Johnston held a number of odd jobs as a florist, a policeman, and a member of the United States Air Force. He attended Howard University where he majored in philosophy and became a founding member of the Howard Poets in 1958. He continued into Howard's graduate English program, also working as a teaching assistant in that department.
Washington, DC, remained Johnston's home until 1968, when he relocated permanently to New York until his death. Johnston became a philosophy professor at Montclair State University and founded the Afro-American Association of Philosophy. His two scholarly monographs explore black philosophical traditions in literature and other intellectual works. During his later years, Johnston also operated Studio Tangerine, a small theatre in Greenwich Village, where he staged a few of his own and others' plays.
Howard Poets
The Howard Poets served as Johnston's vehicle into the world of professional poetry. These writers were a community of young poets enrolled at Howard University between the late 1950s to early 1960s. Though some critics often confuse them with the Dasein poets, who later evolved from this initial group, the eight names most commonly associated with the Howard Poets are: Johnston, Walter DeLegall, Alfred Fraser, Osward Govan, Lance Jeffers, Nathan Richards, Leroy Stone, and Joseph White. Johnston grew to become one of the most widely published poets from this cohort. While students at Howard, they had access to influential intellectuals such as Sterling Brown, Owen Dodson, John Hope Franklin, E. Franklin Frazier and Eugene Holmes. Toni Morrison, who at that time was known as Antonia Wofford, a young instructor in the English department, also worked closely with the group and attended some of their functions.
In addition to their engagements with these academic mentors, a shared interest in philosophy also served as an organizing force for the Howard Poets. Johnston's undergraduate major was in that department, and four of the other members (DeLegall, Fraser, Govan and Stone) were also philosophy minors. These courses exposed these young poets to the various philosophical schools and histories. Writing just before the onset of the Black Arts Movement, the Howard Poets remained distinct from this later generation because of their emphasis on aesthetics over nationalism, which was derived in part perhaps from their training in phenomenology, cultural relativism and other philosophical principles. Many of the Howard Poets were also raised during the bebop era and were influenced by the free-form styles of popular jazz musicians.
Against this background, Johnston and Oswald Govan orchestrated a series of poetry readings on Howard's campus beginning in 1958, and both students and community members enthusiastically received their performances. The writings of the Howard Poets', as they came to be called, often mingled current civil rights issues with various poetic trends like beat and jazz lyrics. The Howard Poets initially only circulated at events on campus, but they eventually were invited to read at the Library of Congress. The poets also reached an international readership through their inclusion in Rosey E. Pool's 1962 European anthology Beyond the Blues: New Poems by American Negroes. The group's demise began in 1960 when Johnston and Leroy Stone agreed to a solo reading with an on-campus organization, a performance where they did not include nor inform the other Howard Poets. The campus newspaper declared this reading as Johnston's and Stone's "professional debut" and their rogue venture created tension within the group. After this engagement, the Howard Poets only appeared together in print.