In 2021, the Johnson County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to change our county’s eponym (namesake), placing Lulu Merle Johnson (1907-1995) into that lofty position.
After her years at Iowa, Johnson went on to become an esteemed educator while researching the lives of African Americans, teaching at Florida A&M and West Virginia State College, before joining the faculty of Cheyney State College in Pennsylvania as a history professor and dean of women in 1952. Throughout her lifetime, Lulu was an activist against segregationist policies. In the 1940’s, for example, she joined with a group of SUI alumni, leading a campaign to desegregate our university’s residence halls, which finally happened in 1946.
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