At Johnson Middle School, a great legacy inspires sixth-grade student

Eleven-year-old Amari Crockett feels a strong weight on her shoulders — one that drives and inspires her as she moves through her education.

Every day, the 11-year-old sixth-grade student a Louise R. Johnson Middle School is walking through hallways named after her great-grandmother, a woman Amari never met but one who made great changes in Manatee County while alive. Johnson was the first black woman to be appointed to the Manatee County School Board.

“She was so heroic and very important to so many people now,” Amari said from inside the media center at Johnson on Friday, after her first full week at the school, the district’s only International Baccalaureate middle school. “I want to be able to be just as successful as she was.”

It’s a long list to live up to. Johnson finished high school at Bethune-Cookman in Daytona Beach because at the time, the school she was attending didn’t offer education past the eighth grade for black students. She attended Florida A&M to earn her teaching degree while raising six children. Johnson taught for 42 years, 36 of them in Manatee County, before being appointed to the school board in 1977.

She started a number of programs to help black youths in the county, including the first 4-H club for black students. She was named Florida’s Most Outstanding Woman in 1975. In 1977, she was appointed to the school board and served until she retired in 1986. She died in 1992 at the age of 81, and the school at 2121 26th Ave. E., Bradenton, was named in her honor in 1994.

And even though Amari is aware of these achievements, she hasn’t seen firsthand what her mother, Michele Crockett, Johnson’s granddaughter, saw. For the first eight years of her life, Crockett lived with Johnson, and she remembers hearing her grandmother, at 6:30 in the morning, typing out notes on the typewriter in advance of a school board meeting while cooking breakfast.

Some mornings, both breakfast and dinner were prepared by 7 a.m. because Johnson had a slammed schedule for the day.

“My grandmother gave so much of herself,” Crockett said. “I felt it was important for us to embrace and support her namesake.”

Amari is the youngest of Crockett’s four children, and Crockett said it was important for her children to know exactly who their great-grandmother was and what she did, even if the effects she had on the county don’t fully sink in until the children are older. Even as she was there and saw what her grandmother was doing, Crockett said she didn’t realize the reality of her grandmother’s work until she was a young adult.

“Sometimes I think I live in a bubble. I was aware but I was not socially conscious about what was going on,” Crockett said. “I’ve come to embrace it in my latter years, as we do as we get older, we have much more of an appreciation of what we took for granted in our younger years.”

And coincidentally enough, Johnson Middle isn’t the only school with that connection. G.D. Rogers Garden-Bullock Elementary School is named after Johnson’s father.

This story was originally published August 19, 2016 at 4:08 PM with the headline "At Johnson Middle School, a great legacy inspires sixth-grade student."