About Jereann King Johnson

Jereann King Johnson is a beloved artist and community builder based in North Carolina.

A long-time Warrenton resident, Jereann pieces together people, organizations, and resources toward racial, social, and environmental justice.

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Growing Up in Southwest Georgia

Jereann grew up in Southwest Georgia during the Jim Crow era. Born in 1951 in Bainbridge, the child of former sharecroppers, she was just two generations removed from slavery. Family life in segregated Bainbridge was ordered by work, school, and church. While her barber father worked and her mother taught school, Jereann and her older sister participated in African Methodist Episcopal youth programs, Girl Scouts, piano lessons, and summer church camps. Her tightly knit community provided some shelter from the racial horrors of the past and the mid-century prejudice and violence around them.

“Quilts were integral to our community. Quilts were seen as symbols of wealth. If you had quilts, you knew you could be warm in the wintertime.”

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College, and the Call of the Movement

Off to Atlanta for college in 1969, Jereann found the constraints wanting. “There was just so much more to participate in other than the college President’s Day and making sure my white dress was the proper length.” The movement called her, and she heard the call.

She moved to Washington, D.C., studied at the Center for Black Education at Federal City College, organized by SNCC workers, and graduated from Antioch College, where she majored in “Human Problems.”

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WVSP: Voices Serving the People

While in D.C., a housemate interning at WVSP in Warrenton, NC, mentioned that the station needed “somebody to play jazz and do a children’s program.” A college grad ready for a new challenge, Jereann said, “Okay, I’ll go to Warrenton,” packed up her six-year-old son, Juba, and moved.

WVSP 90.9 was a community-based public radio station serving Northeast North Carolina and Southside Virginia — the first Black-organized rural community public radio station, signing on the air in 1976. It was founded to entertain, educate, and mobilize the African American community in the county and its neighboring areas. Though she was new to radio, Jereann learned to produce children’s programs, public affairs programs, and jazz programs.

Colleagues taught Jereann the broadcast business and the region. Not relying on AP or NPR, staff covered local news themselves. WVSP’s investigative reporting covered illegal toxic waste disposal in rural Black communities, helping birth the environmental justice movement in the early 1980s.

There, Jereann discovered ways to use creativity, organizing, and love to move people, to help them find their way to a more honest understanding and appreciation of themselves and the world around them. She has continued that work in various forms for nearly fifty years.

When the station moved to Rocky Mount in 1983, Jereann stayed in Warrenton. She had met her soulmate, Bernard Johnson. “I just never moved anywhere else.”

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Adult Literacy and Learner-Centered Education

Working in adult literacy had never occurred to her, but a friend suggested a job with Literacy South. Jereann figured she needed a job, took it, and loved the work. Her favorite part was developing curricula that connected with the lives of adult students. She worked across the South with the University of Tennessee, the National Institute for Literacy, and the Rural School and Community Trust.

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The Quilts

During the late 1970s, Jereann rediscovered her passion for quilting when the Carolina Lily quilt pattern caught her eye in a McCall’s pattern book. She bought the pattern and made the blocks with leftover African prints from clothes she had made — and kept going. Now she says quilting makes her feel good and gives her the strength to do other things.

One such quilt of Jereann’s is called “Hope in Impossible Odds.” Made with black and white cotton and red linen, it depicts a figure behind bars against a swirling black-and-white background.

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Building Quilt Community

Photo o the Quilt Circle or Heritage Quilters at work

In collaboration with several North Carolina quilters, Jereann helped launch the African American Quilt Circle in Durham and the Heritage Quilters in 2001 in Warrenton. Jereann and her fellow quilters work to preserve and highlight African American quilting traditions; they also speak to the present moment by creating quilts that artistically portray historic and current events.

In addition to quilting, the Heritage Quilters work directly in the community by leading community tours, working with the schools, and organizing a giving circle that funds scholarships and youth field trips. They create math lessons with quilt designs and organize tours for new Warren County teachers. Jereann believes teachers need to know the African American economic and cultural history of the county — once one of the wealthiest slaveholding counties in North Carolina.

In 2023, Jereann helped plan Kindred Spirits: A Convergence of African American Quilters. This inaugural conference took place over Juneteenth weekend, 2023. Her wisdom, guidance, and experience contributed to the success of the event, with 50 conference attendees and 450 visitors to the conference’s pop-up quilt show, Deconstructing the Mammy Archetype Through African American Quilt Work.

In 2025, she helped plan the second edition of Kindred Spirits: A Convergence of African American Quilters. Taking place over Juneteenth Weekend, this conference brought together quilters from across the county. The pop-up quilt show, Space and Time: Quilting Afrofuturism, drew over 600 attendees.

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Recognition

In 2018, Jereann received the Old North State Award. She was among fifteen North Carolinians honored by Governor Roy Cooper for their efforts to preserve African American heritage and culture.

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The 1921 Project

In recent years, Jereann has been part of a community effort in Warren County to re-enact a 1921 trial of the “Norlina 16,” a group of Black men who were wrongfully accused and convicted. Two additional men didn’t make it to trial; Alfred Williams and Plumber Bullock were lynched, killed by a mob. Marking the 100th anniversary, Jereann said, “We have to do something to commemorate this lynching.”

She worked with playwrights and local community members to write and perform haunting monologues from the perspectives of individuals involved in the trial.

“It wasn’t just about them, but it was about all of the context around that. The terror, the fact that those lynchings prompted people to leave the community. There was land that was lost, people left the community, left their land, and at the same time there were Black institutions being built. In fact it shapes who we are today, in positive and negative ways. The resilience is one of the positive outcomes. The negative stuff is that we act as if we’re still unfree.”

In conjunction with the performances, Jereann also organized a series of five panel discussions called “Liberating Futures: Erasures, Reckonings, and Transformations,” connecting the legacy of slavery with the injustices of racism today.

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Ongoing Community Work

Jereann currently sits on a monument committee in Warrenton to recommend what should replace a Confederate statue that was removed in 2020. She was also involved in the 40th anniversary commemorations of the 1982 protests of the dumping of PCBs in Warren County — largely thought of as the beginning of the environmental justice movement. She organized the Everlasting Garden at Oak Chapel AME.

Jereann says community organizing, like quilting, requires persistence. She’s constantly teaching people about the place where they live.

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In Her Words

So much of the problem stems from the fact that America is a violent society. It was born out of violence, it was created out of violence. America itself has not reconciled that violence. Slavery was one of the most violent acts that the world has known… As African-American women we have to raise those critical issues. We have to help our young men put all that violence into perspective and understand that there are some reasons that they are acting out in their communities.”

Jereann King-Johnson

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A Legacy of Creation and Equality

Jereann King Johnson has a legacy of artistic creation and working for equality. In the film, we will document the many ways that Jereann has been a pivotal figure in her community and beyond. We will show the ways she connects people, encourages artistic expression, preserves and contributes to a fiber arts tradition, and works for justice.