By Peter Cox

MPR News/90.1 FM

The University of Minnesota is establishing a fellowship in the name of one of the state’s foremost civil rights leaders.

The Josie Robinson Johnson fellowship will go to graduate students at the Humphrey School for Public Affairs who have specific interest in addressing racial inequities and injustices.

In an interview before an event honoring her work, Johnson sounded an alarm.

“I feel sometimes, having been working in the field since I was a young teen to the age of 88, that you wonder what it has been for?”

In 1940s Houston, she gathered signatures on an anti-poll tax petition. She continued fighting for civil rights and equality in Minnesota, and across the country. But now, Johnson said she’s concerned, among other things, about challenges to affirmative action in college admissions and the state of Georgia’s questioning of thousands of voter registrations, the majority of which are African-American, according to an analysis by The Associated Press.

Over Johnson’s lifetime of activism, she led Minnesota’s delegation in the March on Washington and headed the Minneapolis Urban League. She also became one of the first faculty members in the U of M’s African-American studies department and, later, the first African-American on the school’s board of regents.

“Whatever success I may have had, I owe in part to Josie Johnson — her loyalty, her friendship, her counsel, her commitment,” said Vernon Jordan, former president of the National Urban League, a close adviser to former President Bill Clinton, and who sued to desegregate the University of Georgia in 1961.

“Our present is an extension of our history of that ancestral struggle for freedom and because we have been here before, we know what we need and we need more Josie Johnsons,” Jordan said.

Former Vice President Walter Mondale says the problems may be daunting, but “it’s very important to give these young people a chance to try, but also be inspired by her example, and I think [the fellowship] will help a lot.”

Johnson hopes the fellowship will encourage students to take risks, to deeply study and try new ideas.

“I just think it’s important for our children to feel that things are possible.”