On Saturday morning, May 17th, at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a 49-year-old black man named Raymond Johnson will be awarded a law degree. He worked hard to earn that diploma, even though he knew, as a convicted felon, that he'd never be able to practice law.
1968 was a volatile year, marked by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, anti-war demonstrations and race riots. 1968 was also the year that a young black college student named Raymond Johnson entered his senior year at Southern University in Baton Rouge. He was a good student, well-liked by his professors. But there was revolution in the air, and Raymond breathed too deeply of it.
Many of Raymond's professors were charismatic men filled with the fervor of seemingly righteous indignation. They frequently denounced America as a racist, classist society and extolled Castro's Cuba as a worker's paradise. Maybe these posturing pedants never expected anyone to take their inflammatory rhetoric to heart and join the struggle against oppression, but that's what Raymond did, and it cost him nearly 25 years of his life.
Just a few minutes after its takeoff from New Orleans on the morning of November 4, 1968, Raymond Johnson commandeered Miami-bound National Airlines Flight 186 and hijacked it to Cuba. Expecting to be hailed as a hero in Havana, he was instead thrown immediately into prison. After all, Cuban officials hold no illusions about their wretched country, and they know that only an idiot or a spy would choose to live there. This would-be black activist from America was obviously one or the other and deserved to be locked up.
Raymond spent several years in Cuban prisons and work farms. When at last he was released, he discovered that life in Cuba outside of prison is not much better. In 1986, eighteen miserable years after his arrival in this so-called worker's paradise, Raymond was able to arrange for his repatriation to the United States. By then he'd been born again, had gotten married, and knew that a better life awaited his wife and children in the land he'd once condemned.
Raymond served five more years in prison in the United States, at the federal correctional facility in Talladega, Alabama. He got out in 1992, and picked up his life where he'd left off 24 years earlier. In 1993 he earned his long overdue bachelor's degree, and that fall he entered law school.
Raymond Johnson blames no one but himself for the trials and tribulations he's had to endure, and rightly so. But he conquered his demons long ago, reaffirming his faith in God and his love for America. When he mounts that stage tomorrow morning to accept his diploma, the sense of triumph he's sure to feel will be fully justified. Congratulations, Raymond! It's good to have you home again.
CONTACT:
Raymond Johnson at 504-346-1773
