To Sonya Jackson, her great aunt Lulu Merle Johnson was a picky but mysterious woman. She was a pillar of her family and the kind of older woman with wisdom beyond any number of years. Johnson was also a woman who would downplay her past too often, Jackson said.
“She was the woman who taught me how to cook and was always in the kitchen. With a cigarette hanging out of her mouth, brastraps hanging down, and sometimes her nose running,” Jackson said. “People would say, ‘You haven’t lived if you haven’t eaten Aunt Lulu’s snot.’”
But that past was full of childhood grandeur. While Jackson saw her great aunt’s human side, most know her as a scholarly legend. With a doctorate in her field, Lulu Merle Johnson was the first Black woman from the University of Iowa to graduate with a Ph.D…