Born in Atlanta, GA, to a father who was a slave, Mae Reese Johnson was educated in a Methodist mission school, graduated from Clark University, taught at Clark and then ran kindergartens for Tuskegee University’s extension program. When she and her husband, George Johnson, a Master Sargent, retired to Pasadena in 1926, she started the Scattergood Club for black children. “Attendance was purely voluntary. Children came because they found there a second home, and a person who knew and loved them, individually, who knew the problems of their parents and helped to solve them….” Their horizons were widened by various cultural activities.