“For years I told stories about my grandmother and about my mother, and it was D. Soyini Madison who said to me, ‘You should be writing about your grandmother,’” Johnson recalls. “For my dissertation, I focused on my grandmother’s oral history as a live-in domestic for 18 years with the same family. I decided to go live with her over several summers and collect her oral history. I framed it in the context of Black feminism, because it was from my grandmother that I learned strategies about how to survive being a Black person in the United States, but she also gave me strategies for how to be a better person, how to be humble, and how to be a scholar.

“She taught me how to focus on discernment and discern­ing a situation, which is the key to being an ethnographer—not being the center of focus, but actually sitting back and observ­ing, watching, trying to understand people, listening carefully to others. And my grandmother was a master at that because she had to be as a woman of her generation. She was born in 1914 and was raised by her grandfather, who had been enslaved, and she understood what it was going to take to survive being who she was in the world. She understood that sometimes you have to be quiet, pay attention, observe, and then make your move, as opposed to reacting constantly.”

Before earning his doctorate in 1996, Johnson received a dissertation fellowship at Amherst College that eventually led to a tenure-track position in the English department. But in 2000 he moved to Northwestern and its performance studies department, the wellspring of his college mentorships and what would become his scholarly home. In 2003 he earned tenure and a joint appointment in the African American studies department in Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and was named director of graduate studies for performance studies. In 2006 he became the latter department’s chair, and in 2012 he launched the Black Arts Initiative (now the Black Arts Consortium), his interdisciplinary collective of Black Northwestern scholars and artists.

“One of the reasons I’ve stayed at Northwestern over these last 21 years is because of the community that I have. I could not be who I am today without working in community,” he says. “What’s exciting for me in this role as dean is that I get to use this wonderful platform to build community and make it even stronger, through such actions as an investment in collaborative learning.”

His community-building and collaboration started much earlier, though, through his research. In 2003 Johnson published the first of many books, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity, winner of both the Lilla A. Heston and Errol Hill Awards. In 2008 he published Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History, which would become his flagship, multimodal research and per­formance enterprise. The idea came to him in 1995, when he attended a cookout in Washington, DC, for an outreach group dedicated to Black men living with HIV and AIDS. After talking with them, he realized their stories had been a largely ignored part of the American narrative. Johnson homed in on these Southern voices and documented their triumphs and struggles in a 600-page volume, which was recognized as a Stonewall Book Award Honor Book by the LGBT Roundtable of the American Library Association. Nonetheless, he knew that so much of the power and vulnerability of these men came through their cadences, verbal tics, and body language, which couldn’t be fully expressed on the page. The project evolved into Pouring Tea, a performance piece that Johnson has pre­sented at colleges and for communities more than 150 times. In 2009 it took yet another form—the full-length Sweet Tea— The Play, which won the Black Theatre Alliance Award for best solo performance.

Last year Johnson, with Stephen Lewis, his husband and partner of 22 years, and codirector John L. Jackson (see page 13), released the documentary Making Sweet Tea, which follows Johnson as he reconnects with some of the men and performs their own stories for them. Johnson calls the process a labor of love but also a necessary step in understanding an important element of the American experience—and Johnson’s own expe­rience as well.

“My impulse was always to run in the other direction from that, because as a scholar I wanted the focus to be on my interlocutors, not me,” he says. “But everyone said to me, ‘What’s interesting is the relationship of the men’s stories to you. You are a Southern, Black, gay man, and your relationship with these men is important—and also your story.’ But I went kicking and screaming.”

Making Sweet Tea has picked up multiple awards on the festival circuit, and its producers are looking into streaming options. Johnson has written numerous other books, chapters, and scholarly articles, all pinpointing and elevating popu­lations otherwise ignored or misunderstood, such as Black, queer, Southern women. His successes in these endeavors have earned him myriad accolades, including induction in 2020 into the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences. And his desire to seek out historically silenced voices has in fact become his top priority for strengthening the School of Communication.

“Northwestern has a history of valuing creative scholarship, collaboration, and engagement, so the bones are good, so to speak,” he says. “But my intention for the school is to foster equitable access and achievement, diversity of background and thought, a foot in the door, and a seat at the table. I feel an obligation to make sure that I’m not the last person of color or queer or first-generation college student to sit in this role. And I will lay any kind of groundwork to ensure that is the case. I’m here to listen and to lead.”