Kathryn M. (Kathryn Magnolia) Johnson

Born in Darke County, Ohio, in 1878, Kathryn Magnolia Johnson studied at Wilberforce University and began her career in education, teaching in several states before serving as Dean of Women at Shorter College in Arkansas. Her work in schools soon widened into public activism.

Johnson was among the early members of the NAACP and helped organize branches across the South while also working as a sales representative for The Crisis. Later, after criticizing the lack of Black leadership in the organization, she continued her work through the YMCA, which sent her to France during World War I to observe conditions affecting Black soldiers.

That experience led to her most widely known book, Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces (1920), written with Addie Waites Hunton. The book remains an important record of wartime service and racial inequality, and it reflects Johnson’s lifelong commitment to civil rights and African American advocacy.