Decades after KKK threats, family pushes to honor trailblazer Leroy Johnson
By Summer Knowles
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OCALA, Florida (WESH) — Larry Johnson is working to ensure the legacy of his father, the late Rev. Leroy Johnson, is recognized in Ocala, where his story began.
Leroy Johnson was a father, husband, minister, civil rights advocate, philanthropist, and businessman during a time when society imposed strict limitations on Black men.
A childhood trip to Harlem, New York, in the late 1940s and early 1950s exposed Leroy Johnson to Black entrepreneurs and prosperity, which inspired his ambitions back home in Ocala. Larry said this ambition made his father a target.
“This one here is the KKK across the street from my parents’ house,” Larry Johnson said, describing a photograph from his family’s archive.”They were yelling obscenities at my father, telling him to shut the gas station down. ‘We’re going to kill you. We’re going to burn your house down.'”
Larry said the threats were due to his father’s efforts to uplift the Black community.
“Because of what my father was doing and what he was accomplishing,” he said. “He was trying to help out the Black people to come up, and that’s what they didn’t want.”
Before becoming a business owner, Leroy Johnson served in law enforcement and became one of the first Black Marion County sheriff’s deputies in the early 1960s.
“This is Sheriff Doug Willis giving my father his sheriff’s deputy badge,” Larry said. “When my father became one of the very first Marion County Black sheriff’s deputies.”
Despite serving for three to four years, racism persisted. “When he showed up to the station, either one of his tires would be flat, or the windows would be broken,” Larry said. “They wouldn’t let him drive the car home.”
Leroy Johnson eventually left law enforcement and focused on entrepreneurship, using business knowledge gained in Harlem.
He opened a diner in downtown Ocala and later transitioned into the fuel industry.
In 1974, Larry Johnson said, the Ku Klux Klan attempted to firebomb his father’s Gates Gas Station.
“The Klan came with cocktail bottles to set the gas station on fire,” he said. “That was the truck he shot at with his sheriff revolver that he had from the sheriff’s department.”
When police arrived, they initially believed Leroy Johnson was robbing his own station.
“They said it was a big Black man with a gun robbing the gas station, which he owned,” Larry said. “So how can you rob yourself?”
Gates Gas Station became a vital resource for the Black community, providing fuel and kerosene to families in need.
“If people didn’t have money for gas, my dad let them get free gas,” Larry said. “If they couldn’t afford kerosene in the winter, he gave that, too.”
Leroy Johnson’s ability to secure bank loans allowed him to support other Black entrepreneurs.
Today, a seafood restaurant stands where Gates Gas Station once operated, but Larry believes his father’s legacy extends beyond that site.
Last year, he proposed renaming a portion of Southwest 12th Avenue as Leroy Johnson Boulevard, but it did not receive enough votes.
He plans to bring the proposal back to the City Council next month.
“I don’t really have anything in Ocala with my father’s name on it,” he said. “But my father is deserving of a street.”
Johnson also hopes to write a book and eventually see his father’s story adapted into a film.
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