When Joy Johnson moved into Westhaven, the City expected public housing residents to follow the rules, not help make them. With little else besides willpower and her own commanding voice, she has given residents unprecedented influence in the notoriously raucous world of Charlottesville housing politics. As an activist, Johnson has relished her role in the mix, but as a mother, she is ambivalent about the challenges her family has faced as a result.
Charlottesville’s City Councilors, like most politicians, usually conceal their emotions. Aware that TV cameras and an audience are looking on, the Councilors sometimes can be seen struggling to suppress eye rolls when they hear something they regard as rubbish. Joy Johnson does not cultivate that skill.
On May 5, she stood in the back of City Council chambers, her arms folded across a red flowered dress, glaring at the five Councilors and City Planner Satyendra Huja. The official faces were stoic as Prospect Avenue resident Yvonne Shackleford commented on the City’s plan to purchase, refurbish and resell rental homes on the 700 block of her street. Shackleford wondered why, when Council says it welcomes citizen participation, no one bothered to tell Prospect neighbors about the plan or the meeting. Also, Shackleford was angry about language in Huja’s report that implied it was renters on Prospect, like her, who sold drugs.
“I am a 66-year-old female who continues to be employed,” Shackleford said, giving voice to the decades-old frustration felt by many of the City’s low-income residents. “I also have a 66-year-old husband who is disabled. Does this sound like someone who causes trouble in the community? Why should blacks continue to be uprooted to allow housing for the median income? Will this again be another Vinegar Hill?”
Others had signed up to speak about Prospect at the beginning of the meeting, which is typically devoted to public comment, but Mayor Maurice Cox closed the public comment period when Shackleford finished.
Johnson, like other housing activists and Prospect residents, had come to hear Council discuss Huja’s report. Between the public hearing and the Prospect report, however, three other agenda items consumed two-and-a-half hours. Johnson, a single mother who raised her four children in public housing, withstood the tedium of bond refinancing and cable TV franchise agreements, breaking her glare only to make funny faces at an infant a few rows ahead of her.
Huja’s report outlined his plan to extend the City’s housing strategy to Prospect Avenue. The City partners with the Piedmont Housing Alliance, a non-profit funded largely by anonymous “interested parties,” according to the report. The City and PHA buy homes in poor neighborhoods, evict the renters who live there, then refurbish the homes for resale to middle-income homebuyers. Council unanimously approved the plan for Prospect’s 700 block.
“That was some bull,” Johnson said after the meeting. “Maurice knew people were there to hear about Prospect. He could have moved it up on the agenda…he’s done it before, with stuff he likes.”
When City Council talks about its “housing strategy,” Johnson says, many people still think of its first such strategy––the bulldozing in the 1970s of black-owned homes and businesses to make room for commercial development in a neighborhood known as Vinegar Hill. When PHA moves into black neighborhoods, Johnson sees the same old racist agenda.
“One thing I’ve learned is that the situation doesn’t change,” she says. “Who is it that they want out of Charlottesville? Poor people.”
Johnson has spent the past 20 years fighting “them” in what she casts as the neverending struggle between the poor and the powerful. With no weapons at her disposal except her own voice and a will to learn the terms of battle, she’s given low-income residents a significant influence in City Hall. In the political arena, Johnson has been successful drawing lines between “us” and “them” and attacking the enemy with the full force of her giant personality.
But the struggles of single motherhood have been harder to vanquish. Indeed, Johnson’s recent challenges as a parent, played out in daily newspaper headlines and meeting rooms, have earned her as much notice as her advocacy work ever did.
Like water, Joy Johnson’s voice expands to fit the room. Her voice can be soft and punctuated by her distinctive chuckle, or it can deliver unmistakable anger and the occasional expletive. Her speech is still spiced with the Jamaican accent of her homeland.
When Johnson was very young, her mother left the island for New York City. Johnson divided her time between grandparents, living sometimes in the Jamaican countryside and sometimes in a Kingston tenement. To this day, she hates cold weather and refuses to drink coffee because she picked so many beans in her youth. But her fondness for tenement life never subsided.
“I didn’t appreciate it then, but when I grew up there were always family members around,” she says. “There was no such thing as living in a neighborhood by yourself. I think that’s why I have a strong connection to public housing. That’s where my roots are.”
Johnson’s first experience with racism’s “us” and “them” came when she moved to the United States at 13. She stayed briefly with her mother in New York before moving to Charlottesville to live with her aunt, Ruby White. “New York was O.K., but Charlottesville was the pits,” she says, recalling her reaction to the town’s racial segregation.
Somehow her aunt maintained a positive outlook—and inspired her niece with that attitude. Johnson still gets teary thinking of White. “Aunt Ruby was my rock,” she says. “Her gift was seeing the good in everybody. I wish I could be that way, but I’m not there yet.”
Johnson dropped out of high school during her junior year (she later earned a G.E.D.) She trained as a nurse’s aid in 1977, when, at 19, she became pregnant with her first child, a boy she named Adrian. Three years later, she had twins, a boy, Jamie, and a girl, Janie. Another daughter, Eva, was born in 1983. That year, Johnson moved into the Westhaven public housing complex on Hardy Drive.
“If there was a statistic, I was in it,” she says. “Poor, black, single mother. I was in an abusive relationship.”
Yet Johnson didn’t behave like a statistic. When the City’s Housing Authority raised its deposit requirement to $100, it asked longtime residents––some who had paid deposits of as little as $15––to pony up the difference. Johnson saw this as unfair to her neighbors, so she joined the Westhaven Tenants Association and successfully fought the Authority’s attempt to collect back deposits.
At about the same time—the mid-1980s—UVA and the City started talking about “redevelopment” after a UVA professor was killed in the 10th and Page neighborhood adjoining Westhaven. Many neighborhood residents feared UVA would initiate a second Vinegar Hill by wiping out low-income neighborhoods to build a basketball arena in central Charlottesville.
“It was a real fear,” says Jay King, president of the Charlottesville Foundation of Neighborhood Associations. The group’s goal at that time was to organize neighborhood associations against the mighty UVA and persuade City Council to direct Federal money into neighborhood improvement instead of commercial development. Joy Johnson became the group’s vice president.
“We wanted a network that wasn’t Democrat or Republican, that was committed to the collective interests of the neighborhoods,” says King. “Joy was a major leader in that.”
Johnson’s political education took a leap forward around 1990. Thirteen-year-old Adrian was extremely bright but doing poorly in school, she says. Rick Turner and William Harris, black UVA professors known for their local activism, organized a Saturday school for black students.
“At the time, 80 percent of youngsters in Westhaven had been labeled for special education,” says Harris, who now teaches at Jackson State University in Mississippi. “In a short time, we had them able to handle physics and abstract algebra with substantial improvements in reading and writing. They had been relegated to special education because of their address, not their abilities.”
Harris noticed Adrian’s talent for numbers and drawing and encouraged the boy to pursue engineering. He also appreciated Johnson’s willingness to do what few others do––speak fearlessly to City leaders on behalf of low-income people.
“There’s no woman, black or white, in Charlottesville who has her courage,” Harris says.
Johnson was earning a reputation as a tough and effective advocate for poor people. “I learned that if you go to the meeting, you have to speak out,” she says. “If you don’t say anything, then you’re just a quota.”
The Monticello Area Community Action Agency (MACCA) sent her to national conferences where she learned about poverty issues in the company of other activists. On her own, she religiously studied the Federal manual on public housing published by the department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
Johnson was getting a rep around Westhaven, too. Her daughter Eva remembers that even classmates knew of her mother. “If kids were teasing me or whatever,” says Eva, “then others would say, ‘You better watch out, her mom is Joy Johnson.’”
Johnson stumbled across an age-old principle of rising celebrity––your own people turn on you first. Some public housing residents began to see Johnson as a self-promoter with friends in high places.
“They started to see me as the Housing Authority, not as a resident,” Johnson says.
Never one to shy away from a fight, Johnson met these challenges with characteristic fervor. Once, in a political argument with another Westhaven resident, Johnson threw a bottle at the woman’s car. The outburst earned her a stint at court-ordered community service.
“That was dumb, dumb dumb,” says Harris. In what would become a familiar scenario, Johnson’s opponents used the occasion to criticize, while her supporters defended her.
Her growing activism and self-sufficiency was, ironically, taking a toll on her personal life at about that time. Partly in response to burgeoning awareness of the conditions affecting Charlottesville’s poor—awareness that Johnson fomented—UVA in the early ’90s initiated a program offering City residents jobs at the Medical Center. Johnson worked nights in the records office, which left her days free to volunteer for community work. Almost simultaneously, Adrian and Jamie were becoming rebellious teenagers.
“That’s when I lost control of my sons,” she says.
Charlottesville’s political class is fond of saying that democracy is in the hands of “whoever is in the room” for the debate. Johnson became a familiar figure in the room, often chastising a City Councilor or waving a dog-eared copy of public housing regulations at a Housing Authority commissioner. What she discovered, she says, is that while City leaders call for public participation in government, they’re not always comfortable when poor people challenge the status quo.
“I was raw,” says Johnson. “If there was a curse word in there, it would come out. I’m still raw, but I do my homework now.”
Johnson was earning reputation in City Hall as a formidable and knowledgeable activist. When Alex Gulotta arrived in Charlottesville to direct the Legal Aid Society in 1994, he says, Joy Johnson was on the top of his “people-to-meet” list: “At the time she was the most visible and vocal advocate for low-income housing in the community.”
At that time, each of eight public housing sites in Charlottesville had its own tenants’ association, and Gulotta says, the Housing Authority knew how to play one site against the other. The Authority would tell Westhaven, for instance, that there was no money to fix the sidewalk because South First Street just had received a new playground.
“Joy could see the structure pitted one low-income community against another,” Gulotta says. “She knew the solution was to connect people in their common interests. It was crystal clear to everyone that she was right, but it didn’t happen until she put energy into it.”
In 1998 Johnson organized the Public Housing Association of Residents (PHAR) with the goal of empowering low-income residents to protect and improve their communities through collective action. PHAR brought a resident’s perspective to a Housing Authority accustomed to making policy without consulting the very people who would have to live with it.
Now PHAR members help new public housing residents understand their lease agreements, survey residents to learn about their concerns and lobbies City Council on affordable housing and other low-income issues. PHAR developed a program to hire public housing residents as interns, training them in community activism. One of the graduates includes Johnson’s daughter Janie.
“It’s one of the more successful organizing tools I’ve ever seen,” Gulotta says.
Last year, PHAR received a $100,000 grant from HUD to partner with Piedmont Virginia Community College to create a program called Connecting People to Jobs. It’s designed to move public housing residents into higher-wage jobs by connecting them with job training, education and support services.
“I think PHAR has really shaped the way the City treats low-income people,” Gulotta says. “Now there’s not a substantial Housing Authority policy residents don’t have a say on, because they’ve been able to demand it through PHAR. That’s definitely a product of Joy Johnson’s vision.”
PHAR became the megaphone allowing Johnson to make an even louder ruckus in housing politics. While the organization helped inject the views of the poor into City politics, PHAR was not without its own internal strife. In April 2002, a mediation group surveyed public housing residents as well as PHAR and Housing Authority employees. Many of the respondents said they perceived PHAR as too “strident, confrontational and reactive,” in the words of the resulting report, and that its “leadership is suffering due to personal problems and internal turmoil.”
Indeed, there has been a high turnover rate among PHAR employees. Current and former PHAR staff, as well as Executive Director Audrey Oliver, would not comment on whether Johnson’s personality has contributed to PHAR’s internal problems.
“We don’t always agree,” says Oliver, a childhood friend of Johnson’s. “But Joy is always there for me, when I get in a bind.” In 2000, Oliver was elected to chair the board of the Charlottesville Housing and Redevelopment Authority. She credits Johnson with getting her involved in politics.
“She said she’d always be there for me,” Oliver says, “and if we didn’t have that agreement, I wouldn’t have taken that seat.”
In November 2001, police arrested Johnson’s eldest child, Adrian, after he twice sold crack in the presence of an undercover witness four months earlier.
Then, last June 28, officers from the Jefferson Area Drug Enforcement Task Force (JADE) executed a Federal search warrant on Johnson’s Westhaven apartment. The warrant was based on tips from informants that 21-year-old Jamie was selling crack cocaine and in possession of an illegal gun. Agents recovered a .25-caliber Beretta handgun and crack cocaine from Jamie’s room. At that time, both Adrian and Jamie had been banned from Westhaven for prior offenses.
Police conducted a second raid on Johnson’s apartment on August 7. Officers found Adrian and Jamie again at the apartment this time with marijuana and fake cocaine.
After the arrest, the Housing Authority initiated eviction proceedings against Johnson, her two daughters and granddaughter who all lived together at 842 Hardy Dr. PHAR’s lawyer, Legal Aid attorney Claire Curry, helped Johnson battle the eviction proceeding. Through the course of the high-profile drama, the Housing Authority’s “one strike and you’re out” policy came under scrutiny. Johnson had supported the policy as a Board member in 1999.
The heart of Johnson’s argument against eviction was another Housing Authority policy that requires the Authority, once it begins eviction proceedings, to notify residents that the proceedings remain ongoing every time the resident pays rent.
Yet again, Johnson became a polarizing figure. Her detractors, including many in public housing, said she should be evicted because many other residents had been evicted under similar or exact circumstances. Her supporters, however, believed Johnson had been targeted because of her high-profile activism. The Housing Authority dismissed Johnson’s case on a technicality, letting her and what remains of her family keep their residence. But that positive outcome was not without a price. Johnson was eventually forced off the Housing Authority board.
And Johnson’s case leaves a bitter—and familiar—taste in the mouths of those who suspect the powers-that-be don’t like a loud-mouthed black woman calling them to task.
“I believe it was political retribution,” says Harris. “No person should get away with violation of the law, but it would take a perfect fool or a racist to think that was the only drug-related criminal activity going on in Westhaven at the time.”
Ed Wayland, former director of Legal Aid, doesn’t buy the conspiracy theory. “It would be uncharacteristically effective of the Housing Authority,” he says.
“Luck, chance and incompetence are much more common ways for things to happen than orchestrated conspiracy.”
Gulotta says he has no evidence that Housing Authority officials tipped off JADE about the presence of Johnson’s banned sons. Still, he allows that Johnson was a being watched carefully by the Authority.
“I interviewed an ex-employee of the Housing Authority who said that once she caught Joy in a violation and brought it to [then director] Del Harvey saying ‘Have I got a present for you.’ That speaks to the mentality around there,” he says. Harvey declined to comment for this article.
On Tuesday, May 6, Johnson was sitting in her apartment mulling her prospects as an activist and mother with an interviewer. She had just spent the morning working in the Westhaven computer lab and was eating lunch before going to the Westhaven nursing clinic, which she helped keep open after UVA pulled its support three years ago. Her daughter Janie was leaving for a PVCC class with an armload of books. Her granddaughter, 2-year-old Ajayla, scampered down the stairs in her underpants as her mother, Eva, chased behind.
Johnson’s wall is covered with pictures of her family––one of her favorites is a large double portrait of Jamie and Adrian. She muses on the personal cost of her activism. While in 20 years her work has brought new opportunities for political involvement for low-income people in Charlottesville, it has taken a high personal toll on Johnson herself. Maybe the activism took up time she could have used to finally get out of public housing; maybe if she hadn’t worked so hard for others, her sons wouldn’t be in jail.
“Looking back on it, I’m not sorry that I did it,” she says, in an uncharacteristically quiet tone. “I didn’t see it as taking away from them. I saw it as doing the right thing. If I could do it over again, though, I’d find a way to get a handle on that peer pressure. It whipped my behind.”
Eva says she no longer discourages her mother from attending meetings and speaking to City Council.
“I realize that if you’re not paying attention, if you’re not getting heard, then nobody will know you’re out there,” she says. “If she hadn’t been going though all that, we might be out on the streets right now.”
Public housing has been Johnson’s life and source of community for the past two decades. But she says she’d rather live quietly with her family now.
“If I could find something I could afford, I’d probably go away” she says, “and the City would never hear from me again.”
She didn’t appreciate Jamaican tenement life as a child, Johnson says, but now she realizes “there were always family members around. There was no such thing as living in a neighborhood by yourself. I think that’s why I have a strong connection to public housing. That’s where my roots are.”
“If there was a statistic, I was in it,” Johnson says of her early years at Westhaven. “Poor, black, single mother.”
“There’s no woman, black or white, in Charlottesville who has her courage,” says one admirer.
“I think PHAR has really shaped the way the City treats low-income people,” Legal Aid’s Gulotta says. “Now there’s not a substantial Housing Authority policy residents don’t have a say on. That’s definitely a product of Joy Johnson’s vision.”
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