The photographer who captured Black San Francisco in the 1960s: ‘We wouldn’t have seen it without him’

A young boy sits on an Abraham Lincoln statue in front of San Francisco’s city hall during a NAACP-sponsored demonstration. Photograph: Courtesy of the David Johnson Photograph Archive; the Bancroft Library; the University of California, Berkeley

David Johnson saved a portrait he took as a teen of his younger brother and a relative while they were growing up in segregated Florida in the 1940s.

Johnson, who was the only person who could read and write in his household, knew nothing about photography then, he recalled in 2017, but something told him that one day he would be a photographer.