‘Dr. Johnson was a beacon.’ The first Black physician on Duke’s faculty dies at 94
Dr. Charles Johnson, a pioneering Durham physician who became the first Black doctor at Duke University and spent his career helping to diversify its medical faculty, has died at 94.
He came to Durham in the mid-1960s, fresh from medical school at Howard University, and worked as an internist at Lincoln Hospital, then the city’s hospital for Black patients. At the time, Black doctors could not get residency at white hospitals.
Recruited to Duke in 1970, Johnson came to campus at a time when segregation had ended as an official policy but remained as a de facto custom.
But by the time he retired in 1996, the medical school had minority faculty and staff in every clinical department.
“Dr. Johnson was a beacon,” said Dr. Joanna Wilson, Duke gastroenterologist and the only Black student in her 1973 medical school class. “Just to know that there were African-American physicians in high places and you could do that.”
Seeing a great need
Born in Alabama in 1927, Johnson spent his early years in a coal camp outside Birmingham, where his father worked the mines and his mother did domestic work for the company doctor.
Early on, he realized how little medical care was available for poor Black families — an imprint that lasted a lifetime, said his son Charles Johnson, a history professor at N.C. Central University in Durham.
With his family strapped, Johnson dropped out of high school and joined the Army to support them, dreaming of being a Tuskegee Airman. But the Army had him finish school first, then sent him to Guam, where he experienced a wider world and first dreamed of college.
He applied to both Harvard and Howard universities — “Harvard was polite,” his son said — and after Johnson did some foreign language tutoring in the military, Howard accepted him in 1949.
Once he finished with a physics degree, Johnson still had a military obligation, and he got called up by the Air Force, where he earned the rank of captain and served as a fighter pilot.
He flew reconnaissance missions over Korea and the then-Soviet Union, his son said, noting that his father declined to speak of their top-secret nature even decades later.
Medical school followed, and he came to Durham as a young endocrinologist. Early on, he focused on health disparities in Durham, treating diabetes as a condition that disproportionately struck Black patients. Decades later, patients would recall Johnson making house calls with a medical bag.
‘If they’ll come, I’ll come’
His recruitment to Duke came from Dr. Eugene Stead, Duke’s medical department chair, at a time when the university was feeling pressure to bring in Black doctors, his son said.
“You know,” Johnson said, according to his son, “Duke’ s relationship to the African-American community has been one that there’s a lot of hurt. I’ll have to talk to my patients because many of them don’t like Duke. If they’ll come, I’ll come.”
But shortly after arriving, Johnson pointed out that he could not see patients at Duke’s private diagnostic clinic, his son said. Sometimes, staff around Duke refused to speak with him — a reality he also made clear.
“You can imagine when all these senior white physicians who are extremely well established when my father reveals the truth about what was going on,” his son said. “My father picked his battles very wisely.”
He rode a line between academic and clinical work throughout his career, seeing thousands of patients though he was also a university professor.
He advocated for his patients to get the best care at Duke, Wilson said, even if they didn’t necessarily have the best insurance.
“He was very grateful for any kind of attention and acclaim that he got,” Wilson said. “One of the messages I got is ‘The job’s not done.’ ... We still have work to do, and he did really as much as he could.”
Flags at Duke will be lowered Friday in Johnson’s honor.
This story was originally published December 17, 2021 at 1:04 PM with the headline "‘Dr. Johnson was a beacon.’ The first Black physician on Duke’s faculty dies at 94."