Leader. Champion. Change agent. Political activist. Community organizer. Freedom fighter. These words only begin to capture the spirit of Calvin “Omar” Johnson, the veteran economic justice strategist whose passing on June 16 marks the loss of a living testament to Black resilience, self-determination, and resistance. His time among the living was not merely spent—it was invested in the long, unfinished struggle for equity, dignity, and liberation for Black communities, both in Chicago and across the nation.
Johnson died in Loyola Hospital after a lengthy illness at the age of 67. Family and friends will hold a memorial service in his honor on July 19 at 1 p.m. at JLM Community Center, 2622 W. Jackson, in the East Garfield Park neighborhood.
Calvin Johnson, often referred to by his chosen name of “Omar,” is best remembered as the militant, hard-hat wearing general who led scores of Black men onto the northbound lanes of the Adlai E. Stevenson Expressway several times in the spring of 2000 to disrupt trade and distribution routes, in protest of the lack of Black contracts and employment on a $567 million I-55 rebuilding project. In one incident, the blockade included placing a massive truck across several lanes blocking traffic, leading to his arrest for civil disobedience.
His Work-Ship Coalition protesters often held picket signs that read, “If we don’t work, nobody works,” and “I am a man,” and surrounded construction sites throughout the West Side to call attention to the vast discrimination and employment disparities.
The Chicago Reader dubbed him “the Bulldozer” for “shutting down the Stevenson to make contractors listen.” Some elected officials feared his presence, knowing that the imposing and outspoken leader would challenge any misinformation or lies, because the “mind only works on truth,” he often told his children.
His highway demonstrations sparked similar demonstrations on the Dan Ryan Expressway and other major roadways.
Johnson’s legacy was sown on West Side streets where hope was often tramped and the fight for justice demanded both strategy and sacrifice. He worked to make construction sites into pipelines for Black opportunity.
“My father will be remembered as a man of wisdom, strength, and a champion for his community and the people in his community,” said Lateefah Harris, his daughter. “I think people should remember him for that. He was a man who sought equality and wellness for his community. He worked until the day he passed to make sure people were taken care of.
“He was a man of his word, had great wisdom and was a fighter for people,” the public-school teacher told the Crusader from her home in Phoenix, Arizona. “He believed in education and really made sure my brothers and I studied and knew who we were and what was going on around us. As a kid, I didn’t always understand why he was strict about reading and knowing our history and things like that, but now as a mother and a fifth-grade teacher, I fully understand.”
Johnson was born in Chicago on Dec. 8, 1957, to parents, Harold Johnson, a U.S. Navy and Korean War veteran, and his wife Vera, a homemaker, who moved from Lambert, Mississippi, to North Lawndale during the last wave of the second Great Migration in the 1950s. Vera tragically passed in May of this year just weeks before her son’s death.
The eldest of 10 children, Johnson grew up in a loving, tight-knit home in the 3200 block of West Lexington and graduated from Manley High School. A strapping and athletic youth with a great sense of humor, he played linebacker on his high school football team and excelled in basketball at the Sears YMCA, 3210 W. Arthington, where he also enjoyed swimming and other sports activities, according to his first cousin Ronald Gordon.
“His parents were hard workers and instilled in him very early on the need to get an education, obtain a skill and to be able to provide for himself,” Gordon said. “Omar’s first job as a teenager was at Jackson Hardware store, which was Black-owned and located at 800 S. Kedzie.
“He also worked with his grandfather, who was a contractor and who was among the first in the Johnson family to move to Chicago back then,” Gordon said. “That was his introduction to construction, and he became very knowledgeable about how it functioned.”
Albert Johnson, his paternal grandfather, built houses for a living and got a job at Eckhart Construction, according to Gordon. Along with his wife Genevieve, the patriarch of the family left Mississippi in search of better opportunities and to escape a state rooted in racial violence and oppressive Jim Crow laws. Their adult children had already moved on by joining the military or enrolling in college. The family held about 900 acres of land they had obtained in 1896.
As a youngster, Johnson enjoyed listening to the stories about his heritage and learned of an ancestor who served in the Civil War for the Union’s 1st Mississippi Cavalry, renamed the 3rd U.S. Colored Cavalry Regiment. The relative’s assignments included tracking down “the traitor Jefferson Davis and destroying bridges and other infrastructures to curtail the movement of future Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Forest,” Gordon said.
“Omar’s great-grandfather, John Gordon, in the 1920s looked around and saw children in Coila, MS, without a school to attend,” Gordon said. “He joined other Black men and built a school on our land. So, (Johnson) grew up knowing about our lineage of service and responsibility to one’s community.”
As a boy he loved horses and later in life he travelled to Kentucky and worked for a brief period with jockeys and trainers for the Kentucky Derby, Gordon said.
Johnson was in the fourth grade when the West Side erupted into rebellions instigated by Chicago’s apartheid-like conditions and the assassinations of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968, and Black Panther Chairman Fred Hampton, Sr., 20 months to the day later. As Black communities throughout the city were flooded with guns and drugs; and incidents of police became more public, as a teenager he joined the Vice Lords and saw himself as part of a protective force within his neighborhood.
Johnson’s leadership skills grew, and his charisma made him stand out among his peers. He was outspoken, unafraid, and focused. He also had a knack for reducing conflict. Civil rights leaders Rev. C.T. Vivian, Rev. Al Sampson, and Rev. James Bevel, all senior aides to King, began working with Johnson and other youth teaching them the principles of nonviolent resistance, operational unity, and the role of politics in their community.
“Two years before his death, MLK lived on the West Side, and he and Mrs. King opened their apartment to gang leaders so they could teach them about the struggle,” Gordon explained. “Omar was just a kid at that time, but eventually he was influenced by the older guys in North Lawndale—particularly those who responded to King’s call for unity and to use their power for the betterment of the community rather than its destruction.”
Sampson, pastor of Fernwood United Methodist Church and who was ordained by King, said “(Johnson) was brilliant and had the unique qualities of leadership,” the 86-year-old said. “I organized 15 buses of men for the Million Man March, and I know he also brought hundreds of people with him from the West Side to Washington, D.C. He loved his people and that was demonstrated in his work.”
Johnson was reportedly given a speaking role at the historic march that drew 800,000 to two million Black men to the nation’s capital but reportedly declined, Gordon said. “He was actually seated on the stage with Minister Louis Farrakhan.”
CHALLENGING SYSTEMS & STRUCTURAL RACISM
As Johnson matured during the ‘70s, he watched North Lawndale slowly transform from a vibrant, working-class community to a place where poverty, violence, struggle and death became synonymous with its ZIP code. He left Chicago for a period of time and joined his cousin in Atlanta.
“He was only 18 and still choosing his path, so he moved with me while I pursued a master’s degree at Atlanta University,” Gordon recalled. “When Mayor Maynard Jackson, announced that at least a quarter of the airport’s $500 million in contracts would go to Black-owned firms—and warned contractors he’d stop the whole project if they refused—Calvin was fired up. Up to then, he’d seen nothing but white men in power and working on Chicago job sites. The mayor’s stance as a Black man showed him what Black political power could do.”
Upon his return to Chicago, Johnson added “Omar” as his middle name having been inspired by his studies in Black history, culture and religion. As his stature grew, Johnson trained his focus on politics and canvassed neighborhoods in the 1983 election that led to Harold Washington becoming the first Black mayor of Chicago and Wallace Davis being elected alderman of the 27th Ward. He also did work for Democratic Party machine “boss” Ed Quigley, who was Chicago’s commissioner of sewers and controlled several West Side wards.
“The previously majority white 24th Ward was changing to majority African American and Quigley wanted to run his Black secretary for City Council and Omar eventually got on the campaign,” Gordon said, “But Quigley called the woman a ‘bitch’ in front of some Black precinct captains who didn’t do anything to defend this sister; they just bowed their heads and this rubbed (Johnson) the wrong way. Omar checked Quigley and walked out the door on the spot and never returned.
“He believed Black women should be protected and to see those precinct captains standing there like that went against everything he believed men should be about,” he said.
Later, Johnson would join the Republican Party and run a successful campaign to become a committeeman. Gordon said he did that for strategic reasons and so he could not be “locked out of meetings” and “he would be able to see where opportunities were.” Earlier, the activist had already rejoined his grandfather at the construction job. “He was 20 at the time and started talking to the older guys who had been there 15 or 20 years; asking them why they were still laborers and not on bobcats and cranes, which paid more money,” Gordon said. “He started advocating. The bosses didn’t like this and called him a troublemaker. He was fired.”
At some point Johnson and a brother enrolled in Washburne Trade School to learn drywalling.
Washburne, which opened in 1919 initially as a grammar school, was Chicago’s flagship vocational institute. To enroll, students needed to not only score high enough on an aptitude test but also obtain a union-sponsor letter. This proved problematic for African Americans who were locked out of the city’s building trades. Those who were able to secure the recommendation were generally told classes were full, though there were a number of open seats. In a city that was a third Black, the school’s African American enrollment hovered at two percent. This went on for decades.
Johnson also discovered that union selection boards mostly sponsored white candidates, excluding top scorers from Washburne’s exams. Black trainees faced a six-month probation on job sites managed by unions, which in turn were often dismissed before completion, causing them to lose their chance for a union card.
“Omar was deeply impacted by what he saw and the fact that Black men—even those willing to work and who already had skills—were being locked out of jobs,” Gordon told the Crusader. “They couldn’t feed their families. Some were turning to drinking and drugs to cope. There was little pushback and this had been going on for years. He wasn’t going to just sit there and watch. (Calvin) was an analytical thinker, and he understood the lessons of the civil rights and Black power movements—he knew he had to organize.”
So, Johnson began using the tactics he learned from Larry Patterson, another King organizer, Sampson and Bevel, and soon orchestrated a series of demonstrations that brought national attention to Chicago’s unemployment crisis and apartheid-like public works’ systems. He became knowledgeable about “front companies,” and often exposed such firms, which under the guise of Black ownership secured lucrative contracts at the behest of white-owned companies, which took the majority of the proceeds.
He also got involved in hydroponic farming and set up a site at Lake Street and Kedzie, believing it was another avenue for people to achieve economic stability. As Johnson continued his construction advocacy, he purchased a vacant lot at Campbell and Roosevelt and trained people on how to install prefab housing as part of a community development effort.
The community leader also founded E-Quality Inc., a security firm that still employs people on the West Side. Johnson created gun turn-in events before it was popularized by local ministers. He became an active member of his Local School Council and actively trained new leaders on how to organize, disrupt, and fight for justice.
His organizing campaigns weren’t always against white-owned construction companies or negligent elected officials; Johnson also protested other Black rights leaders and groups he felt were betraying the needs of the people. “He didn’t discriminate,” Gordon said. “If you were doing wrong by the community, he didn’t care who you were.”
Johnson and his lifelong partner, Delores raised their four children, a girl and three boys, to pursue their education, take pride in their history and to understand how systems worked. He became a vegetarian and before he became ill, was developing a strategy to challenge construction projects in the West Loop that lacked Black participation. Days before he was hospitalized, he told close associates he had arrived at a strategy.
“My dad worked nonstop, all of the time. We had Sunday meetings along with our Sunday dinners,” Lateefah Harris fondly recalled, “and my father would have us sit down and discuss the issues going on in the world. Sometimes he’d load us in the car and drive us around and point out certain things going on. He had these sayings–“The mind only works on truth”; “Fear is the enemy”; — and, if you called him and said ‘hello,’ he would always say “ Hell is low, now tell me something that’s up.
“My father had a lot of wisdom and was always telling us about atonement and forgiveness,” she said. “And he had a deep love for the West side.”
In addition to Delores and four children, he leaves eight siblings and other close relatives to honor his memory. In lieu of flowers for the July 19th memorial service, the family has set up a GoFundMe entitled, “Honoring Calvin Johnson’s Legacy.” Proceeds will continue his work.
Scripture instructs, “Ye shall know them by their fruits,” and Johnson’s harvest endures—a living promise to those still pressing against the walls that confine freedom, and a reminder that the fight for economic and social justice is not a solitary endeavor but a shared, intergenerational calling. Calvin Omar Johnson’s work continues to nourish the struggle, a legacy of refusal to leave anyone behind in the quest for collective liberation.
