Texas, however, appealed the case to the high court. “I thought it was important to fight it,” Johnson told me. But he was the only one who returned to Dallas for trial. Johnson was among nearly 100 people arrested for desecrating the flag. At the time, no one could have grasped the historic ramifications of his deliberate act of provocation. There was, he felt, “a need to puncture that.”īurning the flag, however, was a spontaneous act of protest. In Dallas, Johnson said, he was blown away by the jingoistic atmosphere: the patriotic themes, the slogans, the abundant American flags. People want to know the antecedents: How did we get to where millions of people in Central America have to flee their homelands and come here for a better life? Avakian says, ‘I’ll tell you why: It’s because you up the rest of the world gaining your riches and glory.’” “Reagan was backing all these death squads in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras. By then, Johnson, who was 27 years old, was a committed revolutionary.
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While working on ships between Florida and the Mississippi, he saw what he called “the apartheid-like stratification of the labor force.”Ī few years later, in 1984, President Reagan was about to be nominated for a second term at the Republican National Convention in Dallas. He spent some time at the University of South Florida in Tampa and joined the Merchant Marine to pay for health insurance for his mother, who was ill. “And these people - the Panthers - were all about revolution.” “It kinda blew my mind, because I was living in the South and all you heard about was Martin Luther King,” said Johnson. Lieutenants would cut off the fist part and hand it back to them.”īack in the States, in 10th grade, he discovered a copy of “Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson.” Some Black soldiers had Afro picks with the Black fist, he remembered. “There was a lot of ‘I don’t want anything to do with it.’ They were counting down the days they had left in the military.
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“We used to talk a lot about the war and their sentiments,” he said. That, he says, was the start of his political awakening.
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In 1969, when he was 12 years old, he sold the Stars and Stripes newspaper to soldiers on a U.S. Johnson was an Army brat who grew up in Germany and across the South. If you plan to burn a flag, by the way, it’s strictly BYO. (“If you want to see NO fundamental change,” wrote Avakian last month, “go vote.”) It’s hard for me to understand, exactly, especially since the party condemns voting. The party, which is organized in “Revolution Clubs,” is dedicated to replacing our system of capitalism, patriarchy, exploitation, imperialism and environmental devastation with … something better. He is a committed member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, founded in 1975 by Bob Avakian, the group’s 77-year-old chairman and theoretician. Johnson, 63, was more interested in talking about politics and revolution. On Monday morning, we met in Santa Monica’s Tongva Park, in masks, to talk about his role in the famous case.Īctually, that’s what I wanted to talk about. Johnson, in which the court ruled that burning an American flag, however odious or offensive, is a constitutionally protected form of speech. Would I be interested in talking to him? He was the defendant in the landmark 1989 Supreme Court case, Texas vs. Last week, after I wrote about President Trump’s cynical demand to outlaw flag burning, Johnson got in touch. In all likelihood, he will also burn an American flag. Gregory “Joey” Johnson is not willing to say where he will be on July 4 - “It’s a big country, so who knows?” - but he will definitely be somewhere in the public square, advocating an end to white supremacy, institutionalized racism and police brutality.