Fall 2020 - 1736 Magazine

His dream of gracing the cover of WWE Magazine
ended his junior year, when his left leg hyper-extended
while being slammed to the mat during an exhibition
match. His kneecap was literally shattered.
The wrestling team injury that left Johnson in a full
leg cast for most of the school year wasn’t his first — he
previously suffered a tendon-snapping hip dislocation
— but it was his last.
“I said I don't want to do any more surgeries or go
through any more therapies,” he said. “The wresting
pictures stayed up, but the desire to wrestle went
away.”
The 27-year-old bachelor will enter 2021 ready for
a different sort of battle: earlier this year, Johnson
emerged from a field of five to win the District 1 seat in a
run-off against against Michael Thurman with 61.8% of
the vote.
The 25,000-person district he will represent includes
the entire downtown corridor, as well as parts of the
historic Summerville, Harrisburg, Olde Town and
Laney-Walker/Bethlehem neighborhoods. The boundaries
also cover a wide swath of east Augusta that
extends southward along the Savannah River to Augusta
Regional Airport.
Johnson grew up in east Augusta’s East View neighborhood
before his family moved to Hephzibah while
he was in elementary school. He moved back to the
primarily African-American neighborhood — which was
developed in the 1950s and ’60s by the Pilgrim Life and
Health Insurance Co., once the city’s largest blackowned
enterprises — while working for the Boys & Girls
Clubs of the CSRA, a nonprofit organization he credits
with helping him mature as an adolescent and eventually
enroll in Paine College.
The man who has yet to have his 10-year high school
reunion is the youngest elected official since consolidation
of the city of Augusta and Richmond County in
1996, and he is believed to be the youngest person to
hold a pre-consolidation office since at least the early
1980s.
A FRESH PERSPECTIVE
Johnson considers his youth an asset. He said his
primary reason for seeking the seat was to be a voice for
millennials such as himself.
“Augusta is in a great position for growth, and if we’re
ever going to see that growth happen at a rate where we
could benefit from it sooner rather than later, we’ve got
to have people at the table who think differently,” he
said. “One of the key things I found about other cities
was that their growth was centered around their millennial
base. When you look at downtown Augusta, a large
number of the taxpayers are millennials. The average
folks living in apartments above these restaurants are
District 1 Augusta Commissioner-elect
Jordan Johnson campaigns during the
Aug. 11 runoff election near the Kroc
Center near downtown Augusta.
[FILE/THE AUGUSTA CHRONICLE]
millennials. The young families moving into Olde Town
were born in the ’80s. Same thing for the folks moving
into the Laney-Walker district.”
District 1 — represented through the end of the year by
term-limited Commissioner Bill Fennoy, a baby boomer
— is one of the city's most geographically and socioeconomically
diverse political subdivisions in Augusta,
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