The 30 January 1937 edition of the New Pittsburgh Courier carried a sensational story of divorce drama. The principals: Robert H. Johnson, Interior Department employee and son of Episcopal priest Robert J. Johnson; his new wife Muriel Moore Johnson; and Clotilde Green, a married beautician who was named as co-respondent, i.e. “the other woman.”

Muriel Johnson accused her husband of “misconducting” himself with Green at an apartment on 18th Street and Oregon Avenue, N.W., on two days in October and on Christmas Day 1936. Green denied the charges. She admitted that she lived in the apartment, but claimed she was not there in October and had been ill in December. Green countercharged that Muriel Johnson was carrying on with a man named Luther Hemans in a Vernon Street, N.W., apartment and that Johnson had showed up at Green’s apartment and had “annoyed and threatened her” and “used vile and profane language to her in the presence of guests.” Green also claimed that Muriel Johnson had not lived in Washington, D.C., the requisite 90 days to file for divorce and that the Johnsons were married in Wilson, North Carolina, rather than the District as the divorce petition claimed.

On that last point, anyway, Clotilde Green was correct. Rev. I. Albert Moore, pastor of Saint John A.M.E. Zion Church and Muriel Moore Johnson’s father, applied for the license and performed the ceremony. Robert Hoff Johnson, 26, of Goldsboro, N.C., son of Robert J. and Catherine Johnson, and Muriel Moore, 28, also of Goldsboro, daughter of I. Albert and Irene Moore, were married on 25 January 1936 in Wilson in the presence of, among others, Georgia Dupree.

Muriel Moore Johnson was a former Angeleño, and California Eagle covered the wedding under a Wilson, N.C., dateline.

California Eagle (Los Angeles, Calif.), 14 February 1936.