Arthur Johnson, 65; first black chief of staff at Cedars-Sinai

Dr. Arthur Ingram Johnson was a college student majoring in chemistry when Mississippi began to burn.

It was the late 1950s, and his childhood friends and classmates were joining the protests against racial injustice spreading across their state. Johnson was absent. His parents, fearing for his safety, forbade his participation.

“He said, ‘If I can’t march, and I can’t peacefully protest, then I’m going to educate myself so I can uplift my people,’ ” said Anita Johnson, the doctor’s daughter.

Johnson went on to become an obstetrician/gynecologist and the first African American chief of staff at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. When he died Sunday at his home in L.A. at the age of 65, he had made good on his vow to use his education to uplift others, said friends and family.

Johnson created mentoring programs for youth at two public schools, he designed an educational program to reduce breast cancer in underserved communities through early detection, and he served an endless flow of patients as volunteer director of the L.A. Free Clinic, which provides healthcare to those without insurance.

In 2004, suffering from progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare neurological disorder, Johnson left Cedars-Sinai. He died from complications of the illness.

“He was well-respected as a clinician, but also as an advocate for the physician as well as the patient,” said Dr. Carole Jordan-Harris, a friend and longtime colleague. “He was not afraid to speak up about necessary changes and doing the right thing. And I think that’s what helped him become chief of staff.”

One issue Johnson spoke about was healthcare bureaucracy. He found HMO regulations cumbersome and time-consuming and sought a simpler way to serve patients.

“It would take me now maybe 30 seconds to order a test, but with an HMO it may take me 30 minutes to get that permission,” he said on a 2000 CNN program, “Democracy in America: Doctors Under the Knife.”

At the L.A. Free Clinic, Johnson was director from 1990 to 1998 and chairman of a committee to create a Hollywood Free Clinic. “He genuinely believed in our mission: that healthcare is a right, not a privilege,” said Abbe Land, co-chief executive of the L.A. Free Clinic. “Dr. Johnson really cared about the patients that we have here.”

Born Nov. 12, 1941, in Goodman, Miss., Johnson was one of three children of a mother who taught elementary school and music and a father who worked as a county agent with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. When Johnson was a child, injustice was part of Mississippi’s landscape; the Ku Klux Klan burned his uncle’s home, which was two doors down from his own, Anita Johnson said.

“When he would see things like that, it wasn’t a feeling of bitterness that would overcome him, it was more a feeling of ‘How can I change this?’ ” she said.

At Tougaloo College in 1962 Johnson earned a degree in chemistry. Five years later he received a medical degree from the University of Michigan. With the nation at war, Johnson enlisted in the Air Force, served a tour of duty in Vietnam as a medic and was awarded two Bronze Stars.

His early experiences in Los Angeles would shape his views about the need to mentor and support minority doctors new to the city. In 1970, Johnson arrived in L.A. to serve his residency and study at the UCLA School of Medicine. He tried to rent an apartment in Santa Monica but was denied because of his race, Jordan-Harris recalled.

Johnson earned a master’s in public health and joined the staff of Cedars-Sinai in 1976. Over the years he became the first physician in the hospital’s history to hold all elected offices of the medical staff, a hospital spokeswoman said.

His tenure as chief of staff was described as “a kinder, gentler leadership.”

“You want to go beyond just responding to the problem; you want to solve it,” he said in a 1999 article in the Los Angeles Business Journal. “Sometimes you have a really narrow window of time to accomplish things. But I’ll say this -- this is the one place you can dream and then see it happen.”

At Cedars-Sinai he co-chaired the cultural diversity committee, which sponsors events such as an annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration. The committee created a mentoring program for new doctors that pairs incoming minority physicians with others of the same racial group and gender, Jordan-Harris said. The goal is to provide the kind of support that Johnson lacked when he arrived in Los Angeles.

James Jenkins was 16 and working at Cedars-Sinai through a youth employment program when he heard Johnson deliver a lecture. Afterward the doctor made time for “a little high school kid” with dreams of a career in medicine. Johnson helped Jenkins find work at the hospital after he finished college and remained a mentor. Years later, Jenkins, who is chief executive of the Pacific Arthritis Care Center, doesn’t remember the speech.

“I just remember his presence,” he said. “It was just very positive to see another black man in a professional capacity in a hospital like Cedars-Sinai, who [was highly regarded] and was such an approachable and affable person.”

In addition to daughter Anita, Johnson is survived by his wife, Drina; three other children, Anthony, Angela and Arthur Johnson, all of Los Angeles; and two sisters, Fannye Jean Yates of Detroit and Lillian Johnson of Inglewood. A son, Christos, died in 2000.

A funeral will be held today at 10 a.m. in the Hall of Liberty at Forest Lawn Memorial-Park Hollywood Hills, 6300 Forest Lawn Drive, Los Angeles. Memorial donations can made to the Dr. Arthur I. Johnson Memorial Fund, in care of Michael Wells, Strategic Counsel, 523 W. 6th St., Suite 1128, Los Angeles, CA 90014-1219.

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jocelyn.stewart@latimes.com