THIRD TIME IS A CHARM... MAYBE
LeMoyne-Owen president retiring — again.
Perhaps as a final show of how happy he’s been for his 55-year career in education, Johnnie B. Watson postponed his retirement at LeMoyne-Owen College for two months this summer to help the incoming president get her bearings.
He moved out of his sunny office in the college’s white-pillared administration building and into a small room off the receptionist’s area so he could be accessible, but out of the way.
“‘Really, Mr. President,’ I said,” said Daphne Thomas, head of the college’s public relations office. “‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘I’m just going to move over here so she can go in and get comfortable.’”
Today is Watson’s last day, and the third time he’s publicly retired.
“I have been very unsuccessful in my retirement attempts. This time, I intend to do it right,” he said, his face lighting up with the smile that has calmed many tense situations and lent courage in others.
For more than five decades, Watson, 77, has been a kindly face in education in Memphis, stepping in to fill gaps in leadership, and not just in public education, where he started in 1960, teaching social studies at Carver High School.
The day after he retired as deputy superintendent in Memphis City Schools in 1992, Rhodes College asked him to lead its College of Education. He was at work the next Monday and stayed eight years.
Twice more he filled in while boards looked for a permanent leader and ended up staying when the searches turned up empty. The first
I have been very unsuccessful in my retirement attempts. This time, I intend to do it right.”
Johnnie B. Watson,
outgoing LeMoyne-Owen College president
time was at MCS, where he became superintendent in 2000. He served until he retired a second time in 2003.
Three years later, LeMoyneOwen, Watson’s alma mater, was in danger of losing its accreditation and on the skids financially. President James Wingate, who had received a vote of no confidence from the faculty, was gone. Within a year, the board chairman would be, too.
Watson, who had served on the college’s board of trustees since 2000, knew enough of the underlying headaches to know what he needed to do.
On his first day, he met with Dr. Cheryl Golden, then head of the faculty organization.
“I asked Dr. Golden to appoint two members of the faculty to sit with the (president’s) cabinet every time we met. They have been a party ever since to the decision-making at this college,” Watson said.
The second big message came weeks later in employee paychecks. Watson asked the board to pay him $28,000 less than Wingate, who had earned $125,000.
“I then asked the board to match that,” Watson said. “It allowed me over $50,000 to distribute not only to faculty but staff, too. Every employee on campus received a bonus of $500. It was a big thing because they had not received salary increases for two years.”
Golden, now chairwoman of the college’s social and behavioral sciences division, remembers it well.
“It was a bold move. It was the shot heard around the world, at least at LeMoyne-Owen,” she said. “It was a transparent move as well that captures the spirit of his presidency. He was signaling that his heart was with the employees of the college.”
“He was perfect for the season — conciliatory, compassionate, loved the institution and made it credible,” Golden said. “He always said you are only limited by your creativity.”
Nearly every day of his tenure, he wore a white, pressed shirt, often with his monogram on the cuff. His desk was perfectly tidy.
“I take the position that almost every piece of paper that’s on my desk, or every email, somebody is waiting for it,” Watson said.
In a tribute this summer, guests gave more than $32,000 to endow a scholarship in Watson’s name, including $2,500 from Democratic Party strategist Donna Brazile, who spoke at the college’s graduation in early June and mailed a check from her foundation shortly afterward.
A separate package arrived with a pair of gold cuff links, signed by President Barack Obama, a gift Brazile procured in honor of Watson’s retirement.
In a word, his management style is democratic, Thomas said.
“He likes buy-in. He seeks feedback from faculty and staff. He treats everyone on this campus with respect and dignity. He says that all the time. It’s what he wants to be remembered for.”
“He’s out on the campus every day, talking to students,” said Sandra Barnes, principal of Hollis F. Price Middle College High, a small, dual-enrollment high school on the campus. This month, Newsweek named it among the top 10 “Beating the Odds” high schools in the nation for its work with students in poverty.
“He knows all our students. It’s not like he has ever made a separation and said, ‘These are the high school students and these are the college, and I only deal with the college students,’” she said.
The challenge for the new president, Dr. Andrea Miller, a LeMoyneOwen graduate, will be bridging the financial divide so the college can thrive and reselling the city on the value of its historically black college, which has existed here since 1863, and traces to missionaries who started a school for freedmen and runaway slaves at Camp Shiloh in Mississippi.
The campus is in the heart of South Memphis, near Soulsville USA.
In his soul, Watson was never far from LeMoyne-Owen. He grew up across the street, the only son in a family of five girls. He graduated from Booker T. Washington High, the first triumph for a young man who had rheumatic fever as a child and missed most of the first three grades.
“Once he got well, he never wanted to miss another day,” said Watson’s wife, Loretta Watson. “When his grandmother died, he begged his parents to let him go to school after the funeral.”
Watson, who dreamed of being a high school principal, didn’t get his wish, in part because school administrators quickly saw how powerful his good nature could be in the central office.
“They were desegregating the central office in 1970. I had been a guidance counselor for only one year, but with a master’s degree from Indiana University and my supervisors had observed the way I interacted with people — white folk, black folk, anyone. I was asked to serve,” he said, admitting it was a “big promotion.”
Before Dr. Willie Herenton became superintendent in 1979, very few African-American people served in the central office. Watson says they could be counted on one hand.
“It was interesting. We had a mutual respect for each other. When something happened that I did not feel was right, I would make it known, but I would not do it in a public forum,” he said.
“It made all the difference in the world for me to go in, even in the superintendent’s office — at that time, John Freeman — and close the door and let him know my concerns.”
Watson, who watched court-ordered busing for integration in the early 1970s, had the simple pleasure of undoing it in 1982 when he negotiated the agreement between the school board and plaintiffs in the case.
“It put kids back in their neighborhood schools,” Watson said. “It was very much a comfort because you could see who was getting on the buses every day.”
Loretta, his wife, says he’s been successful in part because “he is a person who can make you think you are getting what you want.
“He remains calm in a crisis and in big decisions. He has a way of calming others down and steering them where he wants them to go,” she said. “Most of the time, they don’t know they are being steered.”
Her long-running feud with him is that she has wanted to travel and he wouldn’t take time off.
“My No. 1 goal is to ease him into retirement so it can stick this time. I’m gong to keep him busy and get him going somewhere.
“You have to work with him the same way he works with other people,” she said. “I know how to steer a little bit, too.”