The First Black Chief Justice of Louisiana, Bernette Johnson, Is a Member of Zeta Phi Beta

Did you know that trailblazing jurist Bernette Joshua Johnson, the first Black chief justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court, is a member of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Inc.? Johnson is an active member of the sorority’s Omicron Nu Zeta Chapter.

Bernette Joshua Johnson was born in 1943 in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, and raised in New Orleans, where she graduated as valedictorian of her high school and earned an academic scholarship to Spelman College. She received her bachelor’s degree from Spelman in 1964, then returned home to become one of the first African American women to attend the Paul M. Hebert Law Center at Louisiana State University, earning her Juris Doctor in 1969.

Johnson devoted her early career to justice for the vulnerable. During the 1960s, she worked as a community organizer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, spreading word of new school desegregation rulings across the South. After law school, she became managing attorney at the New Orleans Legal Assistance Corporation, delivering legal services to thousands of clients in underserved neighborhoods, before serving as a deputy city attorney for New Orleans.

In 1984, Johnson was elected to the Orleans Parish Civil District Court, becoming the first woman to serve on that bench. A decade later, in 1994, she joined the Louisiana Supreme Court as the first African American woman ever to serve on it. Then in 2013, she made history again, becoming the first African American chief justice in the court’s history, a role she held until her retirement in December 2020.

Even in retirement, Johnson’s legacy of service continues. Among the many people she has mentored is Theo Shaw, one of the Jena Six, who earned his law degree and went on to clerk for her. From civil rights fieldwork to the top of Louisiana’s judiciary, her career reflects the scholarship and service at the heart of Zeta Phi Beta, founded at Howard University in 1920.