Cal Johnson: From the Battlefield Dead to the Racetrack

The first contract Cal Johnson took after the Civil War was one that other men did not want. He exhumed the bodies of soldiers buried in temporary graves on the Tennessee battlefields and reinterred them in national and private cemeteries. It was grim, necessary work, and it paid well enough to start a business.

Johnson had been born enslaved in Knoxville on October fourteenth, eighteen forty-four. His parents, Cupid and Harriet, were owned by the McClung family, merchants on Gay Street. His father was a horse trainer and jockey of some local reputation. When the war ended and Johnson was freed at twenty-one, he had the reburial income, a knowledge of horses, and a city beginning to reconstruct itself.

He used the proceeds to open saloons on Gay Street. By the mid-eighteen eighties he owned three of the city's most popular establishments. In eighteen ninety he purchased land on the north side of the city and built a horse-racing track. He stocked it with thoroughbreds. One of his horses set a world speed record at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in eighteen ninety-three.

The city made him an alderman from eighteen eighty-three to eighteen eighty-five, one of very few Black men elected to public office in Knoxville in that era. He donated a building at the corner of Patton and Vine Streets to serve as the first Black YMCA in the city. He was a regular benefactor to orphanages and Black civic organizations.

Johnson died in nineteen twenty-five, at roughly eighty years of age. His estate was valued at somewhere between three hundred thousand and five hundred thousand dollars, several million in present terms. He had lived his entire life in Knoxville, the city where he had been born as property and from which he had built a fortune most of his white contemporaries could not match.

The street named Speedway Circle traces the oval of his racetrack. The track is gone. The street is the evidence.