William Henry Johnson (March 18, 1901 – April 13, 1970) was an American painter. Born in Florence, South Carolina, he became a student at the National Academy of Design in New York City, working with Charles Webster Hawthorne. He later lived and worked in France, where he was exposed to modernism.

One of the most brilliant yet tragic careers of an early twentieth-century African-American artist was that of William H. Johnson. Originally from the Deep South, Johnson became a world traveler who absorbed the customs and cultures of New York, Europe, and North Africa.

William Henry Johnson, one of the great painter/poets of American experience, left South Carolina, the state of his birth, in 1917, when he was only 17, and found a place in the Harlem home of an uncle who made a good living as a porter on the trains that ran north and south.

William Henry Johnson (March 18, 1901 – April 13, 1970) was an African-American painter. Born in Florence, South Carolina, he became a student at the National Academy of Design in New York City, working with Charles Webster Hawthorne.

William H. Johnson is regarded as one of the most progressive painters of his time and as one of the South’s most revered twentieth-century artists.

William H. Johnson (1901–1970) painted his last body of work, the “Fighters for Freedom” series, in the mid-1940s as a tribute to African American activists, scientists, teachers and performers as well as international leaders working to bring peace to the world.

Born in a small South Carolina town, William H. Johnson left for New York at seventeen and enrolled at the National Academy of Design in 1921. Though he originally intended to become a cartoonist, he won acclaim as a painter, leading to a year of independent study in Paris in 1926.