Jacksonville Area Legal Aid working to save the home of local golf and civil rights legend Arthur Leroy Johnson
As a child in Jacksonville in the 1950s, Arthur Leroy Johnson would go get ice cream with his father and brothers at the Foremost Dairy in Riverside, the Jacksonville, Fla., neighborhood where he has lived for nearly 40 years and where he is struggling to hold onto his two-bedroom home with the help of Jacksonville Area Legal Aid. “My father worked two blocks from where I live today,” said Johnson, whose father was employed at the dairy. “At 5 o’clock in that neighborhood, all the Black people had to be out. There was a whistle that would blow. If you worked in that area, as a Black person you had to be leaving. The whistle was called Big Jim.” In 1986, Johnson, who is now 80, became a homeowner in that very same neighborhood when he bought an 1,100 square-foot, aluminum-sided home from a woman who employed his mother as a domestic worker. Johnson, who will be inducted into the African American Golfers Hall of Fame in May and had a successful career as a concert promoter, eventually ran into financial difficulties when prostate cancer and other health problems sidelined him from his job as director of First Tee – North Florida, a program that integrates golf with a life skills curriculum to help youth build strength of character. He took out a reverse mortgage on the 1912 home, initially borrowing just $24,000. But living on $941 a month in Social Security, he was having trouble making needed repairs to his home. Unable to get insurance, he defaulted on his reverse mortgage. After fighting to hold onto his home for 12 years, he ended up owing a total of $140,000 to pay off the mortgage.
