Malcolm Johnson was born in 1904 in Claremont, Georgia. He attended Mercer University, where he wrote for the campus newspaper The Mercer Cluster, graduating in 1926. He began his career as a reporter for the Macon Telegraph, from 1924 to 1928. In 1928, Johnson began working for The Sun, where he wrote nightclub, movie, and book reviews, then became the war correspondent in the Pacific for the paper. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting in 1949 for a 24-part news series exposing corruption and organized crime among dockworkers entitled “Crimes on the Waterfront.” The series was adapted for a film entitled On the Waterfront in 1954. After The Sun ceased publication in 1950, Johnson worked for International News Service (INS), a newswire, from 1950 to 1954. In 1954 he became a writer for Hill and Knowlton Inc., a public relations counseling firm. He was elected vice president of the firm in 1966. He died in 1976.
Haynes Johnson was born in 1931, the son of Malcolm Johnson and Emma Ludie. He attended McBurney School in New York, graduating in 1948. He graduated from the University of Missouri's journalism school in 1952. He then served in the United States Army as an artillery lieutenant during the Korean War. He earned his Master's degree in American history from the University of Wisconsin in 1956. He worked for The Washington Evening Star from 1957 to 1969, after which he worked for The Washington Post. He won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1966 for his coverage of the civil rights movement in Selma, Alabama. He wrote more than a dozen books, including Dusk at the Mountain (adapted from his Washington Star series “The Negro in Washington”), Bay of Pigs, In the Absence of Power, and The System. He taught journalism at Princeton in 1975 and at the Annenberg School for Communication in 1993. He also taught at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, where he was the Knight Professor of Public Affairs Journalism from 1998 until his death in 2013.
