The Rev. Mitchell Ikenna Johnson, Chicago’s new Board of Education president, apologized to the Jewish community Wednesday and said he would protect all students after he faced criticism and calls for his resignation — from City Council members, school board candidates and pro-Israel politicians and organizations — for his social media posts about the war in Gaza.
Johnson said he would not resign, as 26 alderpersons have called on him to do, but said he was “deeply sorry for not being more precise and deliberate in my comments.” He acknowledged that some of the posts he shared “could be construed as antisemitic.”
“Let me start by apologizing to the Jewish community for the remarks I posted, which were clearly reactive and insensitive,” Johnson told the Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ in an interview. “Since that time, I have asked for and received feedback from my Jewish friends and colleagues who helped me be more thoughtful as I addressed these sensitive matters.”
A review of Johnson’s Facebook account showed from October 2023 to a few months ago, he often wrote pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel posts on social media, many of which referenced Jewish people in hostile and inflammatory ways.
The media outlet Jewish Insider first reported about Johnson’s posts on Tuesday, calling them “antisemitic” and “pro-Hamas.”
The Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023 killed 1,200 people, Israeli authorities have said.
Israel has subsequently killed more than 43,000 Palestinians in 13 months of attacks, according to Gaza health authorities. Tens of thousands more have remained trapped under rubble and are missing. Parts of the besieged enclave are enduring famine as a result of the Israeli blockade, according to the United Nations.
Ald. Debra Silverstein (50th), the City Council’s only Jewish member and a vocal supporter of Israel, said the school board president’s posts called “into question his ability to fairly represent Jewish students and families in Chicago Public Schools.”
“We are deeply troubled by antisemitic and pro-Hamas comments made by Rev. Mitchell Ikenna Johnson,” read a letter signed by 26 alderpersons who called on him to apologize and resign. “This situation is a failure of leadership and judgment on the part of Mayor [Brandon] Johnson and his executive team.
“[Rev. Johnson’s] comments have crossed major red lines into overt antisemitism, both in his explicit support for Hamas and his insistence on collectively blaming all Jews for Israel’s military actions,” they said. “His continued role on the school board is non-negotiable.”
American Jewish Committee Chicago, a pro-Israel organization, said it welcomed the letter.
The mayor’s appointment of Johnson, no relation, was already under scrutiny — including by some of the same alderpersons — after the previous Board of Education resigned en masse this month, an embarrassment for the mayor amid a battle with CPS CEO Pedro Martinez over the school system’s budget woes.
The new board president has faced questions about his delinquent child support payments and his legal disbarment nearly 30 years ago.
Asked about the situation at an unrelated news conference, the mayor said he would “continue to fight back and beat back” antisemitism. He said he appreciated that Rev. Johnson had apologized and would “work toward restoration and healing.”
Johnson, the board president, said he has worked for years with Jewish communities to fight antisemitism. Johnson said, “As board president, [I] am committed to making sure that hate of any kind has no place in Chicago Public Schools.
“I don’t disagree that at a time like this, we can have conversations on difficult topics without being insensitive,” he said.
Johnson also stood by his support of Palestinians, saying “the manner in which the Palestinian community has been treated is abysmal.
“I would agree on two different things. One, the actions of Hamas were unforgivable on Oct. 7. I would also agree that the actions of any army unjustifiably killing civilians is inconsistent with those of us who have, objectively, records of fighting for justice.”
Rev. Johnson had previously supported Israel on social media and said he still supports its right to exist. After the 2018 mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, he linked the “struggle and the crimes against humanity perpetrated against people of African descent” with the massacres against Jews in the Holocaust.
“And if we are silent … crimes against humanity seem to be the loudest voices we hear,” he wrote then. “So let us who are combatants against hate stand and be accounted.”
Johnson on Wednesday also referred to the killings of three Jewish students who were fighting for Civil Rights in Mississippi in 1964. “I believe that the history of the Jewish community and solidarity with the African American community is a relationship that should always be nourished,” he said.
But from October 2023, Johnson turned his attention to the war in Gaza. There is also a long history of Black-Palestinian solidarity.
“How can a group of people who have suffered from the Holocaust; today join with the Alt Right Community?” Johnson wrote last December.
“The Nazi Germans’ ideology has been adopted by the Zionist Jews,” he wrote in February. “The Israeli government offers a renewal of Nazi language once directed toward European Jews, ‘savages, dogs, vermin,’” he added in March. Most of these posts now appear to be deleted.
Top Israeli government officials have routinely used inflammatory language to describe Palestinians as “human animals,” “savage” and “children of the darkness” in the past year.
In a December 2023 post, Johnson shared a video of author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates sharing his experience visiting the occupied Palestinian territories and what he described as an apartheid Israeli government. Johnson commented: “I suspect my Jewish friends, or perhaps ‘former’ friends will post a rebuttal to this post. I cannot support Israel until it relents and discontinues [its] apartheid regime.”
Rev. Johnson wrote on New Year’s Eve: “Let us go into 2024 with a commitment to change the narrative and force, yes force Israel to [atone] for its shameful attempt at genocide against the [Palestinian] people.”
In March, he posted that his “heart is broken in additional pieces when I consider people who I work with and considered my friends in the fight against antisemitism who today, not only defend Israeli ongoing acts of genocide but have told me to my face that I was ridiculous.”
Many countries are accusing Israel of committing genocide and have taken the case to the International Court of Justice, which has found plausible evidence for their case.
The United States and Israel have denied the war in Gaza is a genocide. In addition, some of the world’s leading human rights organizations have found Israel to be operating a supremacist apartheid regime in the Palestinian territories, but Israel and its allies reject that characterization.
Rev. Johnson at times also painted Jews with a broad brush, asking, “How long will the Jewish people in America stand for these crimes?”
That month he also wrote: “I have been saying this since October 2023. People have an absolute right to attack their oppressors by any means necessary!!!”
He acknowledged last year that his comments might face criticism. But he wrote in one post, “I am not Anti-Semitic. I am anti in-justice.”