Robert (Bob) Johnson

In 1961, Bob Johnson, his wife Lois, and their three children, moved to the Orange County city of Tustin.  In 1966 he began almost three decades of work to eliminate segregation of blacks in the county through the Orange County Fair Housing Council.  In 1969, he was elected chair of its board of directors. He served as an officer through 1995 and in 2009 returned to the board. In 1981 he received the “Fair Housing Volunteer of the Year” award from the Community Relations Conference of Southern California.  Bob is a board member of the Orange County Community Housing Corporation, which he co-founded in 1978 to provide housing for extremely low-income people, and is on the board of the Santa Ana Black Historical Society.  He has B.S. and M.S. degrees in engineering from UCLA, and is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.  In 2009 his book A Different Shade of Orange, Voices of Orange County, California, Black Pioneers was published by California State University, Fullerton.  It is now in its second printing.

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