Thomas Fairfax Johnson (March 10, 1917 – March 21, 2007), nicknamed "Lil Professor", was a

Negro league baseball The Negro leagues were United States professional baseball leagues comprising teams of African Americans and, to a lesser extent, Latin Americans. The term may be used broadly to include professional black teams outside the leagues and it may be ...

player and

American football American football (referred to simply as football in the United States and Canada), also known as gridiron, is a team sport played by two teams of eleven players on a rectangular field with goalposts at each end. The offense, the team with ...

coach. He served as the head football coach at Howard University from 1953 to 1956. A native of

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Sinc ...

, Johnson received his undergraduate degree from

Springfield College Springfield College is a private college in Springfield, Massachusetts. It confers undergraduate and graduate degrees. It is known as the birthplace of basketball because the sport was invented there in 1891 by Canadian-American instructor J ...

in 1940, and played for the Philadelphia Stars that summer, posting a 3–4 record over 41.1 innings. After serving in the

USO The United Service Organizations Inc. (USO) is an American nonprofit-charitable corporation that provides live entertainment, such as comedians, actors and musicians, social facilities, and other programs to members of the United States Armed F ...

during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

, Johnson became a coach at Howard in 1946, and received a graduate degree from

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then-Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. In 1832, the ...

in 1947. He received his Ph.D. from the

University of Maryland The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland. Founded in 1856, UMD is the flagship institution of the University System of M ...

in 1967, and served as a professor of physiology at Howard from 1962 to 1978. Johnson died in

Silver Spring, Maryland Silver Spring is a census-designated place (CDP) in southeastern Montgomery County, Maryland, United States, near Washington, D.C. Although officially unincorporated, in practice it is an edge city, with a population of 81,015 at the 2020 censu ...

in 2007 at age 90.

Head coaching record

References

External links

an
Seamheads
* Thomas Johnson a

{{DEFAULTSORT:Johnson, Thomas 1917 births 2007 deaths Howard Bison baseball coaches Howard Bison football coaches Indianapolis Clowns players Philadelphia Stars players Pittsburgh Pirates scouts College swimming coaches in the United States Howard University faculty Springfield College alumni Sportspeople from Philadelphia Players of American football from Philadelphia African-American baseball coaches African-American coaches of American football 20th-century African-American sportspeople 21st-century African-American sportspeople