Homeland Security chief seeks help from American Muslims — with a searing personal story
Brian Bennett in the Los Angeles Times tells a fascinating story about Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson. His grandfather Charles S. Johnson was a distinguished sociologist who was president of Fisk University after World War II, when it was a haven for black intellectuals.
While in Nashville on business, Johnson visited his grandfather’s grave in Greenwood Cemetery, a nearly all-black burial ground that remains a vestige of the city’s color line.
According to the story, Johnson’s grandfather “has become a powerful personal touchstone for him as he juggles competing demands for national security and personal privacy, for government surveillance and civil liberties. Johnson’s grandfather was a target of the communist witch hunts of the postwar era. In 1949 he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which investigated allegations of disloyalty and subversive activities. The black college president was asked if he was then or had ever been a member of the Communist Party. He wasn’t and he hadn’t. The FBI investigated him but found nothing. The family kept silent for decades about how the humiliations of the Red Scare touched them. Jeh Johnson only learned of his grandfather’s tribulation last fall while researching a speech.” “Basically in the late ’40s and early ’50s, if you were a black intellectual with a PhD, you were also suspected of being a communist,” Johnson said.
ohnson sees uncomfortable parallels to the animus and distrust that many Muslim Americans face for the terrorist actions of a few. “We always risk a fundamental misunderstanding of who is an individual of suspicion and who should be subject to government surveillance,” Johnson said. Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, has made suspicion of Muslims a centerpiece of his campaign.
Johnson regularly meets Muslim leaders around the country. He asks them to help authorities identify potential threats in their communities, and he often describes his grandfather’s torment to show he understands how innocent people can be harmed when fear, fueled by politics, sweeps the nation.
KJ