Kathryn Johnson was one of the few women reporters to cover civil rights

And the time she was allowed into Coretta Scott King's home on the morning of her husband's funeral. Trying to blend in, she donned an apron to cook breakfast for the family and looked up to see Jacqueline Kennedy offering her hand.

Johnson has had plenty of opportunities to tell her stories lately. The retired reporter, who covered the civil rights movement for the Atlanta bureau of The Associated Press, figures prominently in a new history of the wire service, "Breaking News" (Princeton Architectural Press). The book, which traces the world's largest news organization from the Civil War to the war in Iraq, devotes a chapter to the rights struggle of the 1950s and '60s. Johnson practically jumps off the pages.

Though she hasn't worked for the AP in 30 years, it has given her quite a few assignments recently. She was summoned to New York for an oral history session. She appeared on a National Press Club panel that was broadcast on C-SPAN's Book TV. She was invited to be on the program at the 50th anniversary of the Little Rock desegregation crisis next month, even though she had nothing to do with that story.

"They're treating me like a celebrity," she says, laughing. "They sure didn't treat me like that when I worked for them."

Johnson may not be a celebrity, but her early career was noteworthy in at least one respect: her gender. In a reflection of the times, almost all the journalists who wrote about civil rights were men.

"Kathryn is the only woman I remember seeing out in the field on a regular basis. She was a very good, aggressive reporter," says Gene Roberts, who covered civil rights for The New York Times.

Roberts can think of only two female editors involved in the story who are mentioned in "The Race Beat," the Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the media and the movement that he wrote with Hank Klibanoff, the AJC's managing editor for enterprise. Johnson is not one of them.

"Kathryn's a little bitty woman, and she always managed to fly under cover," says political commentator Bill Shipp, who covered the beat for The Atlanta Constitution and still chuckles over Johnson's passing as a student at UGA.

Credit: Rich Addicks

Credit: Rich Addicks

Hot grits and outrage  

When Johnson became a reporter for the AP in 1959, she was the only woman in the Atlanta bureau.

"I got civil rights stories because the experienced staffers didn't want them in the beginning," she says. "They were traditional Southerners, and most of them didn't want to cover black demonstrations."

Johnson is sitting on the screened porch at her house in Morningside, the Atlanta neighborhood where she has lived for more than half a century. She still has the metabolism of a reporter, with an air of nervous energy that suggests a fast-approaching deadline. She has a pronounced Southern drawl but talks rapidly, as if she's afraid she might omit a name or telling detail.

Born in Columbus, the daughter of a Greek immigrant father, Johnson never questioned segregation when she was growing up. "It was just the way things were," she says.

After graduating from Agnes Scott College in the late '40s, she started as a secretary at the AP and grew fascinated with the movement for equal rights that was beginning to stir in the South.

But she didn't fully grasp its meaning until she became a reporter and covered an early sit-in at a Krystal restaurant in downtown Atlanta. As she watched, two white countermen refused service to several black students and then poured hot grits over their heads.

"I was just outraged," she says. "Seeing things like that changed me."

Civil rights assignments came fast and furious after that. She was tear-gassed during the riot that followed the desegregation of UGA. She was threatened with a lead pipe when a mob swarmed around the Freedom Riders in Montgomery. She parachuted into Birmingham, the Albany movement, the second voting rights march in Selma, Ala.

"She covered a lot of things on her own and didn't put in for overtime," says retired AP photographer Charlie Kelly.

"She was afraid they'd take her off civil rights if they knew how many hours she was really working."

With the Kings  

Johnson had encountered the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. several times, but she didn't get to know him until he led a strike at Scripto, an Atlanta pen manufacturer. As a demonstration ended late one night in 1964, King offered to walk her to her car, and she offered to drive him home. Coretta King invited her in for coffee and cake, and the three of them talked for an hour.

Not long after that, Mrs. King phoned to see whether Johnson could get them tickets to see Leontyne Price sing at the Fox Theatre. An opera subscriber, Johnson gave them hers. She soon found herself being invited to the King home for dinner.

"She was one of the few reporters everybody trusted," recalls former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, one of King's lieutenants. "She became very close to Coretta."

When Johnson heard over the radio that King had been shot in 1968, she headed for his home. A police officer told her no media were allowed inside. Just then the door opened and she spotted Mrs. King in a long rose-pink nightgown. "Let Kathryn in," she instructed.

Johnson spent the rest of the evening in Mrs. King's bedroom as they watched TV news clips of her husband's last speech, in which he seemed to foretell his death by proclaiming that he had been to the mountaintop and seen the Promised Land. Propped in her bed, Mrs. King confided that he had sent her plastic flowers recently, the better to remember him by.

"It was eerie, being there like that," Johnson remembers.

Mrs. King let her into the house for the rest of the week, as family members and civil rights leaders came and went, making funeral plans and consoling each other. The home was particularly crowded on the morning of the service. Johnson worried that someone might tell her to leave, so she began cooking breakfast for the family.

She had a story ready to file about the expected visit of another famous widow, Jackie Kennedy. When Kennedy arrived, she saw Johnson standing there in an apron and walked over to meet her first.

"To this day," Johnson says, "I think she assumed I was the King family's white maid."

 A woman's place 

Johnson continued to write about civil rights after King's death, but her focus shifted to other stories: POW families, the court-martial of Lt. William Calley, the rise of Jimmy Carter. In 1976, she won a prestigious Nieman journalism fellowship to study at Harvard University. She was soon hired by U.S. News & World Report and moved to Washington to cover Congress. She returned to Atlanta in the late 1980s to care for her mother and took a newswriting job at CNN.

For the past several years, Johnson has been working on a memoir in her cluttered upstairs study. "I'm up to 94 chapters," she says. "I think I need an editor."

One of those chapters has to do with the 1964 murder of Lemuel Penn, a black Army reservist who was shot to death in northeast Georgia as he drove home from summer training at Fort Benning. Two Klansmen were charged in the drive-by killing. Johnson was assigned to cover their trial in Danielsville. It was one of the few times anyone made her feel uncomfortable because of her gender.

A law enforcement officer checking credentials at the courthouse door told her she ought to be at home like other women. He then directed her upstairs to the balcony, where, in a scene out of "To Kill a Mockingbird," she found 20 black men in overalls. She noticed the male reporters and white spectators sitting downstairs.

"I figured blacks weren't the only ones being discriminated against," she says.

Johnson started to protest but decided not to because she didn't want to get thrown out. So she leaned over the balcony rail and listened as the lawyers exhorted the all-white jury, pinging tobacco juice into polished spittoons. She reported the inevitable not-guilty verdict. And when it was all over, she had another story to tell about how a woman born and bred in the Deep South was there to witness the death throes of its gravest shortcoming.

ON THE SHELVES

"Breaking News: How The Associated Press Has Covered War, Peace, and Everything Else" by The Associated Press. 432 pages.