Johnson was born in Chapelton, a small town in the rural parish of Clarendon, Jamaica. His middle name, "Kwesi", is a Ghanaian name that is given to boys who, like Johnson, are born on a Sunday.[1] In 1963 he and his father came to live in Brixton, London, joining his mother, who had immigrated to Britain as part of the Windrush generation shortly before Jamaican independence in 1962.[1] Johnson attended Tulse Hill School in Lambeth. While still at school he joined the British Black Panther Movement,[3] helped to organise a poetry workshop within the movement, and developed his work with Rasta Love, a group of poets and drummers.
Johnson studied sociology at Goldsmiths College in New Cross, London, graduating in 1973.[4] Speaking in a 2018 interview about his start as a poet, he said: "I began to write verse, not only because I liked it, but because it was a way of expressing the anger, the passion of the youth of my generation in terms of our struggle against racial oppression. Poetry was a cultural weapon in the black liberation struggle, so that's how it began."[5] During the early to mid-1970s he was employed as the first paid library resources and education officer at the Keskidee Centre,[6][7] where his poem Voices of the living and the dead was staged, produced by Jamaican novelist Lindsay Barrett, with music by the reggae group Rasta Love. Johnson has recalled: "it was fantastic, you know, having written something and having it staged with actors and musicians. That was back in 1973 before I had a poem published anywhere. That was before anyone had ever heard of Linton Kwesi Johnson."[8]
Johnson wrote for New Musical Express, Melody Maker, and Black Music in the 1970s.[4] As a freelancer for Virgin Records he wrote biographies for their reggae artists, sleeve notes and copy for adverts.[9]
