Colleagues bid farewell to student leader

By Reginald Stuart WASHINGTON, DC — John J. Britton, a Nashville native who graduated from Pearl High School in 1954 and went on to earn a variety of assignments in the news industry and served as public relations spokesman and executive assistant to the president of Meharry Medical College for more than a decade, was laid to rest this week, having passed from heart disease.& Britton’s seemingly never-ending careers included reporting for the Atlanta Daily World and Jet Magazine, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and Washington-based Joint Center of Political and Economic Studies. In college, he attended Lincoln University in Missouri, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, graduated with a B.S. degree in journalism from Drake and earned a M.S. in journalism from Syracuse University in New York. The son of a school teacher, Martha Parrish, and preacher, the Rev. John Henry Britton Sr., a minister, ‘John Jr.’ as some people came to know him, also spent time as a promotions manager in the early 1970s for Motown Records. In an interview with the Chicago-based History Makers, he credits his parents with “instilling in him lifelong strong values and religious principles.” They have carried him through his adulthood,...