User:Cullen328/sandbox/Johnson

an impressive portrait of tenacity, fury and ambition, and reconciliation within an inescapable family frame.

Johnson was inside as a reporter at the end of the 1971 Attica Prison riot, when prison guards and state troopers shot to death 29 prisoners and nine hostages. A tenth hostage later died. State officials falsely claimed that the prisoners had cut the throats of the hostages, and many news outlets repeated the erroneous accounts. Johnson declined to do so because he had seen no such thing. Interviewed decades later, he said, "I didn’t see that. All I saw were troopers, police and Guardsmen going in with guns and firing in a cloud of smoke."

In the book, Johnson describes his childhood in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the "intense love-hate dynamic between his abusive father, 'Black Jack,' and his alcoholic mother, Irene—in a narrative frightening in its emotional intensity."

Johnson was among the pioneers of the Eyewitness News format after it first came to New York in 1968. Decades later, the New York Times quoted Johnson's description of the multiculturalism of those early years: "We really did something different, we had a personality, and a news team that was a microcosm of America . . . We were black, white, Jewish, Latino. That’s why it became so beloved."