After a career in aerospace, Langston Johnson pivoted to the arts -- and he’s still pivoting.

Langston Johnson has the uncanny ability to walk into a room, suss it out, decide if he wants to stay and leave immediately if he’s not feeling it.

It’s an ability he honed during a “military brat” childhood, he says, in which he attended 12 schools in five states between first grade and his senior year of high school. Two of those schools were in his senior year – he started in one place, then graduated from Seaside High in the class of 1967. His father, an Army man, ran military dining halls and kitchens all over the country and the world, including Korea and Vietnam, before landing in Seaside.

“Every time you go to a new school, there’s always one guy who wants to beat you up,” Johnson says with a laugh. “You figure it out fast.”

At 72, and with a vast array of life experience in his wake, he can now laugh at many things – microaggressions that come with being a Black man who grew up in the ’60s among them.

With a lucky high draft number that kept him out of Vietnam, Johnson went from Seaside High to Monterey Peninsula College before transferring to Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo. While a student, he landed an internship at an aerospace company that made sensors for classified military satellites. The internship turned into a job at Aerojet where he negotiated contracts with the U.S. government. From Aerojet, he went to Rockwell International to work on GPS satellite systems. And he was working there when the Challenger space shuttle exploded. While none of Rockwell’s components were responsible for the disaster, “we were all in shock,” Johnson says.

Now, about those microaggressions.

Johnson entered the aerospace industry in Southern California at a time when there were few Black people working in management positions. At his first job, he beat out a white USC graduate for the position; the man started the rumor that Johnson got the job because he was Black.

“I went into my boss’ office, closed the door and said, ‘Excuse me?’ and it was never brought up again,” Johnson says. “And I think I was the only Black face there for a while.

“But you have to pick your battles,” he adds. “Not everyone who comes at you is worth going after. Screw that. I don’t have time for that.”

He can laugh about it now, because to do otherwise would only leave him frustrated. He has too many other things to do; he has a burgeoning third life career as a photographer and he also has slow-moving prostate cancer that he plans on dying with, not from.

Johnson left the space industry in 1987, finding the industry required him to constantly sell himself and his abilities. He moved back to the Monterey Peninsula, managed an exotic car repair shop, and delved into writing and performing; he hosted a weekend morning show on KBOQ, sang with the Camerata Singers and performed spoken work art with an improvisation group. Always a dabbler in photography, it’s now one of his main forms of expression. He photographers surfers and the oft-times insular group of Central Coast surfers has come to appreciate how he captures their physicality on the ocean.

Johnson also helped launch a special ceremony for Black MPC students that’s become a rite of passage – the presentation of a Kente stole to Black students who are graduating. Kente, a hand-woven, ceremonial cloth originating in Ghana, visually represents African principles, and the presentation is a way to acknowledge the sacrifices of a student’s ancestors.

“Many have never had a community acknowledge them and what they have done,” Johnson says. “So we decided to do something that would put a bounce in their step and let them know they can accomplish more than society tells them.”

The past year, of Black Lives Matter and mass protests, he says, was a validation of what he’s been talking about for decades. “If you talk to many older Black men, you find out many have been stopped by the police and many have been arrested,” he says. “But I didn’t put up with a lot of shit. I’ve also graduated from the past. Rather than continually reviewing bad stuff, I look at the positives.”