Marjorie Witt Johnson
Pioneering Dance Educator
1910–2007

Marjorie Witt Johnson is a social service group worker, educator, and arts advocate who uses modern dance and African-American culture as tools to inspire black youth. Earlier this year she received a Governor’s Award for the Arts in Ohio for her pioneering development of dynamic dance-education techniques. Her 50-plus years of leadership in the field of arts education have also been recognized by Cleveland State University, the Cleveland Music School Settlement, the National Association of Social Workers, and the National Black Storytellers Association, which gave her its prestigious Sankofa Award in 1997.

Born 88 years ago in Cheyenne, Wyoming, the daughter of a Buffalo Soldier, Johnson applied to Oberlin College at the suggestion of a high school teacher; there she pursued a degree in sociology, which was followed by a master’s in social work from Western Reserve University. At Oberlin she also gained a stronger sense of herself through the mastery of modern dance.

She drew upon both disciplines when she came to Cleveland in 1935 to work in the settlement house now known as Karamu House. Entrusted with a group of energetic but unfocused teenage girls from the neighborhood, she transformed them into the Karamu Dancers. The troupe traveled to the New York World’s Fair in 1940, where they performed Johnson’s Sermon, a dance that drew on spirituals and black poetry as a way to instill an appreciation of African-American culture in her young dancers. The troupe’s New York performances were seen and praised by dance greats Ruth St. Denis and Martha Graham.

Since then, Johnson has applied her special blend of “social group process and the creative arts,” as she calls it, to learners of all ages, races, and socioeconomic backgrounds. She has worked at Hull House in Chicago, in the public schools of Charlotte, North Carolina, and as a professor in the Atlanta University School of Social Work. Returning to Cleveland in 1978, she organized an oral history and song project with seniors at the Eliza Byrant Home and a “Rap” project with at-risk male teens and used song and storytelling to support the academic success of Cleveland Public Schools elementary students.

In recent years Johnson has consulted at the Kenneth Clement and Mary M. Bethune schools and is currently working on a book on her life titled Moving Images of Courage: A Legacy of Dance and Groups.