The occasion was a ceremony recognizing brothers Livingstone and Justin Johnson's induction into Wilkinsburg High School's Wall of Fame. But then the conversation quickly switched to the changes seen in the Pittsburgh area over the years, especially for the Black community. The other members of this first class of inductees at Wilkinsburg are his elder brother, Judge Livingstone Johnson, 82; Wilkinsburg Mayor John Thompson; Carnegie Mellon University music professor Thomas Douglas; Valerie McDonald Roberts, manager of Allegheny County's Department of Real Estate; and James Richard, Wilkinsburg's tax collector from 1954 to 1986.
Judge Justin Johnson, 76, served on Pennsylvania Superior Court from 1980 to 2007. He received his doctorate from the University of Chicago and achieved the rank of major during his service in the U.S. Air Force, from 1956 to 1959 and 1963 to 1973. He graduated from Wilkinsburg High in 1951.
Back then, he was one of only three black students in the school; when Livingstone Johnson graduated in 1945, he was the only black student.
Livingstone Johnson, who served on the Court of Common Pleas from 1982 to 2007, said his parents, Oliver Livingstone and Irene Marsh Johnson, had to use a third-party buyer, or "straw man," to purchase their home on Ross Avenue in Wilkinsburg.
"The KKK had marches in front of the house when they found out," he said, adding that a group of his father's friends would stand armed guard on the ground floor so that his parents could get some sleep.
Livingstone Johnson graduated from the University of Michigan Law School in 1957 and received the Distinguished Flying Cross for flying 58 combat missions over Korea.
He noted that when his father became Allegheny County's first black district attorney in 1942, he also became its first black prosecuting attorney, a distinction that was important at that time.
"It was thought unseemly for a black man to be permitted to go into court and prosecute both black and white," Livingstone Johnson said, adding that some people were uncomfortable with a black man questioning white women on the stand, especially in cases involving sexual assault.
Livingstone Johnson pointed out that his father, who graduated from Braddock High School in 1916, attended Harvard Law School but was drafted to fight in World War I and finished his law degree at the University of Pittsburgh. He died in 1971.
Livingstone Johnson said he will always remember what one of his history teachers once told his class.
"He said that black people ought to be grateful for slavery, since they were fed and supported all that time," he said. "When I told my mother what he'd said, she said he was wrong, that I couldn't listen to things like that."
In the six decades since the brothers attended Wilkinsburg High, they agree that a lot has changed.
The story continues...