Johnson left Detroit after high school in the summer of 1945 to attend the progressive Black Mountain College in North Carolina,[REF][REF] where he stayed for the next three years (spending the spring 1946 semester at the Art Students League in New York but returning the following summer).
"I risk to say, [that at Black Mountain College] 'anything went'-between the students and the faculty..As I said to my wife the other day, 'I think I'm a good old man now, but I was a very bad boy.'..