I Grew Up in Mike Johnson’s District, Where Kindness Can Mask Cruelty
I don’t know Mike Johnson, the brand-new speaker of the House of Representatives, but I feel as if I do because we’re from the same neck of the woods.
He’s from Shreveport, in Caddo Parish, La., where I was born and where one of my brothers died. Johnson’s district encompasses my childhood hometown, Gibsland, about 40 miles east of Shreveport, and home parish, Bienville, which is where most members of my family have lived for as long as I can track them back.
My mother and two of my brothers still live there. He graduated from Louisiana State University. A few years earlier, I had turned down a scholarship to L.S.U.
to accept one at Grambling State University, a historically Black college about a half-hour east of Gibsland. He also wrote opinion essays for the newspaper where I cut my teeth as a working journalist, The Shreveport Times.
