Sunday, October 22, 2023 || By Michael Romain || [email protected]
Sheila Johnson — who became the country’s first Black female billionaire when Black Entertainment Television (BET), the company she co-founded with her husband, Bob Johnson, sold to Viacom for $3 billion in 2001 — has published her memoir, “Walk Through Fire: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Triumph,” and Maywood figures prominently in its pages.
Johnson’s parents, George and Marie Crump, moved her and her younger brother to Maywood in 1959. The house at 237 S. 20th Ave. figures prominently in Johnson’s life. So does the school orchestra at Irving Elementary (now Middle) School in Maywood, where the future businesswoman cultivates her passion for the violin. She’s good enough to play for the Proviso East High School orchestra and apparently talented enough to move her parents to take out a second mortgage on their home to buy her an 18th-century violin that cost $15,000 (in the 1950s/60s!). Johnson eventually sells the violin to help fund BET.
Maywood Old Timers will wax nostalgic as Johnson talks about her job “mopping floors at the J.C. Penney in downtown Maywood” or seeing her dad at “Petersen’s Ice Cream parlor in downtown Maywood.”
They’ll also be familiar with the old-fashioned racism that made George, a brilliant Black doctor, move his family 13 times before settling in Maywood because so many hospitals refused to hire Black doctors (white patients refused to be treated by them).
And then there are the 1950s/60s-era family dynamics. George, who eventually finds work at Hines VA Hospital, abruptly decides to leave Marie for another woman, prompting the homemaker and mother of two to descend into a mental breakdown on the kitchen floor. In a moment, this upper-middle-class, socially elite Black family dependent on the income of the male breadwinner becomes a single-parent household.
The motif of a woman whose life is so centered on a man that she nearly loses her mind when he abandons her haunts Johnson’s memoir and proves to be a foreshadowing. Johnson herself is nearly broken by her powerful husband’s sociopathic mental abuse. On their wedding night, Bob inexplicably leaves Sheila alone in their motel room, prompting Sheila to call her mother, who had warned her not to marry him.
Bob constantly belittles Sheila, even in front of friends and their two adopted children. He openly flouts his affairs, most notably with former BET executive Debra Lee, who wrote about the illicit relationship in her own memoir published earlier this year. And the businessman constantly throws cold water on Sheila’s dreams and ambitions.
Johnson nearly experiences the mental descent that her mother went through in Maywood before realizing she must do the thing she dreads — divorce the man she’s been with for three decades since their college days at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Marie Crump was rescued after her fallen marriage by the community of caring women at the First Baptist Church in Melrose Park while Sheila was rescued by her post-divorce business ventures, namely her luxury Salamander Resort in Middleburg, Va. Johnson would eventually become an owner or partner in the NHL’s Washington Capitals, the NBA’s Washington’s Wizards and the WNBA’s Washington Mystics.
Johnson, who married the judge who presided over her divorce from Bob, named the resort after the nickname given to its previous owner, former Rhode Island governor and World War II hero Bruce Sundlin. The French nicknamed Sundlin the “salamander” due to his legendary war exploits and because the salamander “is the only animal that can walk through fire and survive.”
Curiously, what’s notably missing from Sheila Johnson’s memoir is any mention of another heated conflagration — the 1960s racial strife at her alma mater, Proviso East, where she’s the only Black cheerleader and has to navigate an environment where she’s something of an outsider both to whites because she’s Black and to Blacks because she’s “high yellow.”
Johnson graduated from Proviso East in 1966, the same year Fred Hampton graduated. After Hampton was assassinated on Dec. 4, 1969, his funeral was held five days later at Melrose Park’s First Baptist Church. Some longtime Proviso Township residents may wonder how the social strife affected Johnson.
Overall, though, Johnson’s memoir is a surprisingly vulnerable and engrossing read. It’s also a valuable contribution to the historical record of Black business firsts.
We learn that Sheila Johnson not only helped fund BET, but also worked there for no pay in its early days. She eventually came on as an executive before Bob abruptly fired her and promoted his paramour to second-in-command. If Bob had listened to Sheila’s advice, perhaps BET would have become more than the brand known for raunchy music videos and tacky hip-hop award shows. Sheila writes that she became known as “BET’s conscience” for her internal criticism of the company’s content and her efforts to push her husband to broadcast more news and educational programming.
We’ll never know what BET would have become had it been in the hands of Sheila, not Bob, to mold. What we do know from Sheila’s memoir is that she isn’t just Bob Johnson’s wife, she’s a force of nature in her own right who was shaped and cultivated right here in Maywood.
You can buy Sheila Johnson’s new memoir pretty much wherever books are sold, but we suggest purchasing it through Afriware Books.
