Kansas City, Mo ? Herman A. Johnson, a former Kansas City NAACP president, Tuskegee airman and state legislator, has died. He was 87.

“Herman Johnson was a champion of civil rights and a man committed to the betterment of this city,” Mayor Kay Barnes said.

Johnson died Tuesday at St. Luke’s Hospital.

Johnson was the local NAACP president when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, and he guided the Kansas City group through the turmoil that followed by campaigning against police brutality. He also often worked quietly behind the scenes and persuaded businesses and trade unions to hire and promote black employees.

Johnson was born and raised in New York, earned a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and did graduate studies at the University of Chicago. He served with the Tuskegee Airmen in World War II.

Johnson moved to Kansas City in the late 1950s where he met his wife, Dorothy, and became manager of the district offices of the Supreme Life Insurance Co.

He later opened the Herman Johnson Co., a real estate and insurance firm, and owned Lincoln Cemetery, where Kansas City saxophonist Charlie Parker is buried.

Johnson also served several years in state government. He was a Missouri representative from 1968 to 1972 but lost a bid for the state Senate in 1972. In 1978, he tried to regain a House seat but lost in the primary.

In 1981, then-Missouri Gov. Kit Bond selected him to serve as secretary of the Kansas City Board of Election Commissioners. Bond, now a U.S. senator, remembered Johnson as a friend and valued adviser.

“I could always count on him,” Bond said Tuesday.

In recent years Johnson had campaigned to see his father, Henry Johnson, receive the Medal of Honor for gallantry during World War I. In April, Johnson accepted the Distinguished Service Cross on behalf of his father.