Damaged Heritage

Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and a Story of Reconciliation is a 2020 memoir by renowned poet and essayist J. Chester Johnson. Published by Pegasus Books, Damaged Heritage relays Johnson’s discovery of his own white family’s connections to the Elaine Massacre of 1919 and his efforts to connect with Sheila L. Walker, the African American descendant of one of the victims of the massacre (and author of the book’s foreword). The book received significant praise, with the American Book Review calling it “a model for calling on our better selves.” 

Johnson’s memoir does not follow a strict chronological order of events but rather explores certain dominant themes in his life. Following his father’s death when he was two years old, he went to live for about three years with his maternal grandparents, Alonzo (Lonnie) Birch and Hattie Birch, in Little Rock (Pulaski County) before reuniting with his mother and older brother in Monticello (Drew County), where Johnson grew up. There, they lived “in a more undesirable part of town where houses were smaller or more dilapidated or too close to African-Americans.” Johnson succeeded in being appointed a page for the U.S. House of Representatives at age fourteen due to the intervention of an unnamed congressman, apparently William Frank Norrell, who was a family friend. The author was accepted to Harvard but returned to the South during the Freedom Summer of 1964. He later returned to Monticello as a teacher and unsuccessfully ran for mayor before leaving once again. 

Johnson does not cover much of his career, which included several years with J. P. Morgan and serving as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury Department in the administration of President Jimmy Carter. Instead, he notes that, in 2008, while living in New York City and researching the legacy of slavery as part of his work for the Episcopal Church, he encountered Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s 1920 pamphlet “The Arkansas Race Riot,” which outlines her investigation into the Elaine Massacre. Growing up, Johnson had heard stories about his grandfather’s involvement in some kind of “race riot” while he was working in McGehee (Desha County) for the Missouri Pacific Railroad, and this pamphlet seemed to provide the background for those rumors. Johnson’s efforts to reconcile this history with his own experience of his grandfather as a loving human being proved daunting: “My grandfather, my constant companion during the earliest years of my life, remained a singularly adoring and devoted figure. The image of a killer and the flood of emotions I felt for him could not coalesce; the two images were all askew and detached from one another.”  

More research into the event led Johnson to connecting with Robert Whitaker, author of the 2008 history On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice That Remade a Nation. Whitaker connected Johnson to Sheila L. Walker, and the two, who met in 2014, began a dialogue on the nature of racial reconciliation. Johnson later in the book addresses his grandfather directly, writing, “I have often speculated that your rescue and attentive treatment of me so long ago may have possibly somehow been part of a search by you toward atonement for your role in the Massacre.” The volume closes with a poem Johnson read in 2019 at the dedication of the Elaine Massacre Memorial in downtown Helena-West Helena (Phillips County).  

For additional information:
Chester Johnson. https://jchesterjohnson.com/ (accessed October 3, 2024).

Johnson, J. Chester. Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and a Story of Reconciliation. New York: Pegasus Books, 2020. 

Lancaster, Guy. “More Meditation than Memoir: A Review of J. Chester Johnson’s ‘Damaged Heritage.” Arkansas Times, July 24, 2020. https://arktimes.com/entertainment/2020/07/24/more-meditation-than-memoir-a-review-of-j-chester-johnsons-damaged-heritage (accessed October 3, 2024). 

Schnedler, Jack. “J. Chester Johnson.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, November 8, 2020, pp. 1D, 5D. Online at https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2020/nov/08/j-chester-johnson/ (accessed October 3, 2024). 

Staff of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas