James G. White was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1962. White graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee with honors, attended graduate school at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, and was conferred the degree of Doctor of Divinity by Trinity Theological Seminary. He is currently the President and CEO of the Johnson Institute (Foundation). White relocated to Washington DC to lead the organization from its national headquarters on Capitol Hill.
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White is a former hip hop music recording artist, producer, and musician, signed in the fall of 1990 as Ghetto Priest. In the fall of 1990, White joined the national program planning team for the "Self Destruction: Stop The Violence in Hip Hop Movement" where he proposed the first touring national Hip Hop Summits to promote dialogue between the civil rights establishment and the hip hop community. He was a co-founder of NU-LITES, the National Urban League Incentives To Excel and Succeed, a model national youth leadership development program. As Ghetto Priest White served as the executive producer and host of Slave Uprising', a weekly radio talk show and lead newspaper column for Courier Communications in the late 1990s.
In 1994, White co-founded Faith Partners with Trish Merrill (now Johnson Institute Vice President). Faith Partners is a group that works together with the National Interfaith Alliance Against Substance Abuse [1] to support local communities in their efforts stop substance abuse. They stress religious tolerance to help negate "extremists" who are a threat to freedom and democracy.[2] Johnson Institute became an early investor in Faith Partners, and in 2004 Faith Partners merged with the Johnson Institute and the Rush Recovery Center.
In the spring of 1996, White was elected to his first four-year term on the County Board of Supervisors in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He served three terms on the Board, serving at times as First Vice Chairman of the Board, Chairman of General Mitchell International Airport, the Milwaukee County Transit System, and the Milwaukee County Highway Commission. He was the only incumbent Milwaukee County supervisor to lose his office to a challenger in the April 1, 2008 Milwaukee elections; his failure to collect enough petition signatures to appear on the election ballot may have cost him his seat. Some speculate that White expected to secure the Johnson Institute presidency prior to the nomination paper deadline and was to make a retirement announcement.[3]
As 1st District Milwaukee County supervisor, White sponsored and secured passage the United States' first local legislation to prohibit post-hurricane rebuild contractors from doing business with local government until Federal authorities removed them from the list of companies who took money but failed to help rebuild New Orleans and other hurricane ravaged Gulf region communities.
White is currently the President and CEO of the Johnson Institute. Johnson Institute was founded in 1966 by Vernon Johnson and philanthropists Irene and Wheelock Whitney. Johnson Institute was a pioneering force in the launching of the addiction recovery field, and the Minnesota Model of substance abuse treatment. Intervention for the addicted, and outreach to the families of the afflicted was their specialty.
White also serves as National Advisory Board Chairman of the Katrina Information Network and at the Praxis Project.
Currently, White is leading efforts towards the launch of a national advocacy, prevention, intervention, and recovery support campaign as a partnership initiative between the Johnson Institute and the Congress of National Black Churches (CNBC), which has a 30-year track record of engaging the Black community in progressive national campaigns through its network of 65 thousand congregations and 19 million members of the Historically Black Christian Denominations.
White is founder and chairman of Encompass: The Milwaukee Engineering Planning and Technical Careers Partnership; serves on the board of directors of the Milwaukee Regional Science and Engineering Fair (MRSEF); and serves on the advisory board of the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Engineering School's Office of Diversity. White also served as Co-Chairman of the Hip Hop Congress National Advisory Board and is currently a National Board officer with H2A, the Hip Hop Association.
In the spring of 2004, White served as the keynote speaker for the Dialogue International Interfaith Conference on World Peace in Istanbul, Turkey, and continues efforts to promote dialogue and shared global responsibility among the Abrahamic faith traditions (Christians, Muslims, and Jews). He hosted a cultural exchange delegation of young professionals from the US to Turkey in the summer of 2006 and returned with a group of educators from the US in the summer of 2008.