I couldn’t believe it when I got the text message on Tuesday morning. Bishop Eugene Johnson had passed away the day before a couple of weeks before his 80^th birthday. Eugene was the founder of Madison Pentecostal Assembly back in the 1980s and was engaged in civil rights work for most of his stay in Madison. He was such a decent man with a big heart and a great sense of humor.

I first met Eugene a few weeks before he arrived in Madison in 1983. He had come from Memphis with the directive to found a Pentecostal church in Madison. It is said that he arrive in Madison with a couple of hundred dollars in his pocket and I believe it. Eugene was a man of tremendous faith.

If I am not mistaken, he had a graduate degree from UCLA and with his intelligence, he could have gone on to have a lucrative career in the private sector. But Eugene was driven by his faith and came to Madison on the basis of faith and little else.

Our paths first crossed in 1983 when he was a temporary employee for Norrell Temporary Services, owned by Marlene Cummings who would later go on to become Secretary of Regulation and Licensing under Governor Tommy Thompson. The Madison Urban League was undergoing a leadership transition. I was helping out with the transition as a staff member. The Urban League contracted with Norrell for Eugene to become the interim CEO of the Urban League.