Oprah Producer Recalls Divided Harvard

For Judith A. Banks-Johnson ’79, Harvard was a land of dichotomies.

She was a black woman living in a white world. She was a preppy girl who let her hair down. And she was a dreamer who took the chance to pursue her passions before settling down with a more stable career and, eventually, a family.

“I enjoyed Harvard very much,” says Banks-Johnson, who recently married Carlos Johnson and added his last name to hers.

“I loved it,” she adds. “I look back on my years at Harvard as having been some of the most interesting, fun-filled years of my life.”

Today, a quarter century after receiving her Harvard diploma—a diploma she says she has not looked at in 25 years and thinks is at her mother’s residence—Banks-Johnson is the post-production producer of the hugely successful Oprah Winfrey Show.

Though Banks-Johnson enjoys the stability her life now provides, her friends who know her best describe the Harvard Judy as being more of a free spirit.

“Judy was kind of a dreamer type of a person,” says Lynee S. Gore ’79, who was Banks-Johnson’s first-year and sophomore roommate and to this day considers Banks-Johnson her best friend. “She wasn’t like a lot of people in our class at the time that were really, really goal-oriented and knew they wanted to go to grad school and that had their whole life planned out for them.”

B. Evette Porter-Lipscomb ’79-’81, who lived with Banks-Johnson and Gore in a Matthews Hall triple and then in Leverett House, also calls Banks-Johnson one of her closest friends. She says that Banks-Johnson was in many ways a college student looking to have fun and explore the world.

Porter-Lipscomb remembers Banks-Johnson as a preppy woman who “let her hair down” at Harvard.

“She just struck me as very preppy. She was very much a product of the kind of strict, New England attitude and approach which is very different from my own,” says Porter-Lipscomb, who is from the South.

“There’s the Judy who was my freshman college roommate and there’s the Judy who was a different person around her parents and was the ideal sort of daughter,” she recalls.

Porter-Lipscomb says she, Banks-Johnson and Gore often went to parties together, including many at the Fly Club.

“At the time it was legal to drink at 18, so we’d just party and have fun,” she says.

Before attending Harvard, Banks-Johnson, who was born in Boston, lived in the shadows of Cambridge for much of her life, calling Roxbury and then Needham home during her childhood. For the first two years of her life, she lived in married student housing at Harvard Law School, from which her father, Richard L. Banks ’51 graduated in 1958.

For Banks-Johnson, like so many others, studying at Harvard was her first time living away from home. She took the opportunity to “enjoy life and do all the things that your parents say you shouldn’t do, whatever that is,” Porter-Lipscomb says.

“The thing that I remember the most was that she was very much involved in theater and musical theater at Harvard,” Porter-Lipscomb adds. “She’s got a wonderful musical theater voice.”

ACTING OUT

Banks-Johnson says theatrics are the most memorable parts of her Harvard experience.

“I met some amazingly talented people and I had a lot of fun working on various productions,” she says.

Banks-Johnson says, among other productions, she held a lead role in the musical The Gentlemen of Verona which was staged right in Harvard Yard, as well as two productions on the main stage at the Loeb Theater.

Banks-Johnson also performed in a BlackCAST production of Ellington at Eight her senior year and served as the organization’s treasurer “probably in my junior year,” she says.

Despite her heavy involvement in theater groups at Harvard, Banks-Johnson ultimately decided to enter, in her professional career, the much more stable world of production, working behind—rather than on—the stage.

“I had always given a lot of thought to trying to pursue some kind of career in college, but I think the practical side of me won out,” she says. “I’m just too concerned about security to go into that so I opted for something that was somewhat more stable but still gave me the same excitement of being in a production, so that’s why I went into TV production.”

Upon graduation from the College, Banks-Johnson stayed in Cambridge working for WGBH Channel 2, first as an intern and then as a producer for the documentary series “Frontline.” Starting out as a production assistant, she quickly worked her way up to post-production supervisor.

But “finally when I got to be 30 [years old] I realized that I had lived in a circle of about 20 miles my whole life. I decided that I wanted to see what it was like to live somewhere else,” she recalls.

In 1988, Banks-Johnson hopped onto a plane to Los Angeles, Calif. where she spent the next five years.

In Los Angeles, she worked on production for the PBS documentary series “Power in the Pacific” and subsequently for “The Quiz Kids Challenge,” a quiz show that pit adults of average intelligence against very intelligent children. She also had stints at talk shows hosted by Montel Williams and later Vicki Lawrence.

“I was freelancing and trying to find my niche,” Banks-Johnson says of her time on the West Coast.

She finally found her calling when, in 1993, she learned of an opening at the Oprah Winfrey Show. She got the job, and in 1993 moved to Chicago to work as an associate producer for Oprah.

Banks-Johnson is currently the post-production producer, which has her overseeing the production of the show.

“I do enjoy it,” she says of her job, which she says “is essentially editing” the videotape of the show and fitting it into the one-hour time slot.

“It requires an enormous amount of organizational skills which I’ve fortunately been able to develop over the years,” she says. “I guess I like it because a lot of it is like putting the pieces of a puzzle together.”

COLOR LINE

Though by the late 1970s the Civil Rights movement had won its legislative battles, Banks-Johnson recalls that race played a visible and important part of her life at Harvard.

“My sense is that there were two different worlds,” Banks-Johnson says of blacks and whites at Harvard. “There was some [separation of the races]. I certainly knew other African-American students who really didn’t fraternize with anybody who wasn’t black.”

Indeed, both Gore and Porter-Lipscomb are African American, meaning Banks-Johnson was placed into an all-black first-year dorm room. Porter-Lipscomb says same-race dorm rooms were the norm on campus and that certain Houses—including Leverett—were known to have larger populations of minority students while others—such as Eliot and Winthop—housed hardly any minorities.

But Banks-Johnson says she was able to bridge both worlds.

“I had friends who were white; I had friends who were black. I sat at the black tables [during meals], but I had friends who were white who I ate with too,” she recalls. “I was pretty comfortable walking in both worlds.”

Banks-Johnson says her childhood prepared her for her Harvard experience more than most of her peers.

“It wasn’t a big shock for me,” says Banks-Johnson, who says she attended a high school where she was one of only two African-American students in a class of 630 students.

Banks-Johnson says that although her academic experience has not contributed much to her career, it has help shaped her perspective of the world.

“I was [at Harvard] between the ages of 18 and 22. I’d like to think that it was a place where I was encouraged to think and examine issues,” she says.

She remembers learning from the drastic changes that the University underwent while she was enrolled.

“By the time I started college in 1975 the war in [Vietnam] had ended and we’d missed the sit-ins of the war years, but there was still a substantial amount of political activism on campus,” she writes in an e-mail. “I remember many rallies in the Yard protesting apartheid and urging Harvard to divest its holdings in South Africa.”

Banks-Johnson’s class was also the first to see the implementation of the Core Curriculum and was the last class of women admitted to Radcliffe College. After that, all students were admitted to Harvard College.

Banks-Johnson says she is also grateful for the lasting friendships she has established with Gore and Porter-Lipscomb.

“I consider myself very fortunate that my two roommates from freshman year are still to this day my closest friends,” she says. “I don’t know how we were matched up, but we’re still great friends. We’ve been in each others’ weddings. We talk all the time.”

And last June a new person joined Banks-Johnson’s life—her baby daughter Natalie.

“It’s pretty much considered, I don’t want to say it, a medical miracle,” says Banks-Johnson, who gave birth to the child at the age of 46.

And so Banks-Johnson has managed to balance the dichotomies that loomed so large in her life, as her job as post-production producer of the Oprah Winfrey Show proves. It allows her to continue working in entertainment as she did at Harvard yet also to have a greater modicum of security.

“I have a great life, but my family is the most important part of that,” she says.

—Staff writer William C. Marra can be reached at wmarra@fas.harvard.edu.