Remembering Nan Johnson, who carried on the legacy of Susan B. Anthony

In the fall of 1975, the editorial board of the Democrat and Chronicle was faced with a tough decision as to which candidate to endorse for election in the Monroe County Legislature’s 21^st District.

“This is one of those contests where you keep wishing two such fine people were not running against each other,” the paper wrote.

Ultimately, the paper backed the Republican, Edward P. “Ted” Curtis Jr., a member of a storied Rochester family who had served as Rochester’s city manager and had been an executive at Eastman Kodak and Rochester Institute of Technology.

But the board also had high praise for the Democrat, Nan Johnson, a Rochester neighborhood activist and a political scientist, and as it happened, a woman who was to become a powerful force in the life of Rochester - a genuine force who carried on Susan B. Anthony’s mission on behalf of women.

Voters went with Johnson, who died on Nov. 25, 2022, at age 92, by a margin of 365 votes. She would go on to become a power in the legislature, where she served for 20 years, eventually becoming the first woman and the first Democrat to be chosen as majority leader.

She was a presence from the start, smart and articulate, quick to defend the defenseless, ready to take on any challenge, always guided by Anthony’s insistence that women be treated equally.

“I never had the slightest sense there was anything I couldn’t do,” Johnson told Susan McNamara of the Democrat and Chronicle in 1998. “And so, I did everything. I wasn’t reckless, but I certainly wasn’t held back from anything by fear.”

Johnson entered the County Legislature the same year that Louise Slaughter of Fairport was elected to that body. Eventually, Slaughter would be elected to the State Assembly and the U.S Congress. However, Johnson chose not to follow her colleague’s lead. Other than an unsuccessful run for Monroe County Executive in 1983, she focused on the County Legislature.

“She passed up several opportunities to run for the state legislature and for Congress,” her son Reed Johnson, an editor at the Los Angeles Times, said in an email.

“It was partly for personal-family reasons, but also because she thought that being sequestered in Albany or Washington would distance her from the folks who’d voted to send her there. I don’t think she regretted her choice. Simply on a pragmatic basis, she thought she could get more done and impact more lives directly by serving close to home, on the county legislature.”

Johnson had a reach well beyond the legislature.

At the University of Rochester, she taught political science and women’s studies and was instrumental in the founding of the Susan B. Anthony Center. She was a member of the State University of New York’s board of trustees.

Johnson also left a legacy of advocating for other women. “She has always been a mentor for me,” Lois Geiss, then the president of the Rochester City Council, told the Democrat and Chronicle in 1998.

Beyond all of this, Nan Johnson was simply good company.

“She was classy but down-to-earth, fun and funny,” her family wrote in Johnson’s death notice. “Among her favorite adages was, ‘Don’t be so open-minded that your brains fall out.’”

Johnson and her husband Bill, a retired University of Rochester English professor, moved to California in 2017 to be nearer to family. She remained active, spreading Anthony's message.

In May of this year, her husband died. “In her last months, Mother was physically quite frail, and of course grieving Dad’s death,” Reed Johnson wrote. “But her curiosity, her fighting spirit and her love and concern for the world she was leaving behind were undiminished.”

In addition to her son, Reed, and his wife, Marla Dickerson, both former reporters at the former Rochester Times-Union, she is survived by her daughter, Miranda Johnson-Haddad, her husband Mark Haddad and three grandchildren.

Remarkable Rochesterians

Let’s add Nan Johnson’s name to the list of Remarkable Rochesterians that can be found at https://data.democratandchronicle.com/remarkable-rochesterians/.

Nan Heffelfinger Johnson (1930-2022): Elected to the Monroe County Legislature in 1976 from a Rochester district, she served until 1995 and was the first woman and first Democrat to be the legislature’s majority leader. A Pittsburgh native, who grew up on the New Jersey shore, she graduated from Barnard College, where she majored in political science, and later received a Master’s in that subject from the University of Rochester, where she also taught women’s studies and was the founding director of the Susan B. Anthony Center. In 1998 she co-chaired Forum 98, a gathering to mark the 150th anniversary of the first U.S. women’s rights convention. She was also a trustee of the board of the State University of New York.

This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Remembering Nan Johnson, who carried on the legacy of Susan B. Anthony