DETROIT (AP) — Former Associated Press reporter Marlene Louise Johnson, whose lawsuit against the wire service for race and gender discrimination led to affirmative action plans to spur hiring of female, Black and Hispanic journalists, has died at 89.Johnson died May 9 in an Inglewood, California, elder care facility. She had been suffering from dementia, according to her daughter, Morenike Joela Evans.Born in Rochester, New York, Johnson earned an associate’s degree from the University of Buffalo and a bachelor’s degree at Wayne State University in Detroit. At the age of 75, she graduated from Howard University’s School of Divinity with a master’s degree in religious studies.While working in the Detroit office of the late-Congressman John Conyers in the early 1970s, Johnson met and befriended late civil rights icon Rosa Parks. In 1955, Parks helped spark a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, when she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man, ultimately leading to the desegregation of the city’s public buses. Parks died in 2005.
Johnson was hired in 1972 as a general assignment reporter in the AP’s Detroit bureau. She covered stories on Black capitalism, court-ordered busing in Detroit’s public schools, tensions between the predominately white police department and the city’s Black residents, breast cancer screening and women empowerment in business and culture.
