Thomas Johnson (American football coach)

Biography

Thomas Fairfax Johnson (March 10, 1917 – March 21, 2007), nicknamed "Lil Professor", was a Negro league baseball player and American football coach. He served as the head football coach at Howard University from 1953 to 1956. A native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Johnson received his undergraduate degree from Springfield College in 1940, and played for the Philadelphia Stars that summer, posting a 3–4 record over 41.1 innings. After serving in the USO during World War II, Johnson became a coach at Howard in 1946, and received a graduate degree from New York University in 1947. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 1967, and served as a professor of physiology at Howard from 1962 to 1978. Johnson died in Silver Spring, Maryland in 2007 at age 90.

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