Charles Spurgeon Johnson (July 24, 1893 – October 27, 1956) was an American sociologist and college administrator, the first black president of historically black Fisk University, and a lifelong advocate for racial equality and the advancement of civil rights for African Americans and all ethnic minorities.

He preferred to work collaboratively with liberal white groups in the South, quietly as a "sideline activist," to get practical results.

During Johnson's academic studies and leadership of Fisk University during the 1930s and 1940s, the South had legal racial segregation and Jim Crow discriminatory laws and practices, including having disfranchised most black voters in constitutions passed at the turn of the century.

When he was appointed director of research and investigation of the National Urban League, the couple moved to New York City.

During his time with the National Urban League, he also founded the magazine Opportunity as an outlet for black expression in the arts.

In 1926 he moved to Nashville, taking a position as chair of the Department of Sociology at Fisk University, a historically black college.

There he wrote or directed numerous studies of how combined legal, economic and social factors produced an oppressive racial structure.

In 1929 an American missionary in Liberia reported that Liberian officials were using soldiers to gather tribal people who were shipped to the island of Fernando Po as forced laborers.

During World War II, Johnson examined urban race relations at a moment when whites fought to preserve their power and privilege, especially in education, employment, and housing.

He was also a consultant for several White House conferences related to youth in American society, and a member of the first Board of Foreign Scholarships for the Fulbright Program.

[14] Johnson lived to celebrate the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which ruled that racial segregation in the public schools was unconstitutional.