This collection consists primarily of material which Johnson collected and created during his career in education with York County School District #1 as a teacher of agricultural education and later as district superintendent. Johnson served on several advisory committees and organizations supporting agricultural and vocational education and was appointed to President Kennedy's Panel of Consultants to study technical and vocational education in America.

The material in the Strom Thurmond Collection Gubernatorial Series includes correspondence (both official and personal), campaign material, speeches and other items documenting Strom Thurmond's term as Governor of South Carolina from 1946-1951. Some of this material was originally part of the holdings of the South Caroliniana Library of The University of South Carolina and the South Carolina Department of Archives and History.

The records in this series concern Strom Thurmond's personal life, excluding his legal and military careers, which are represented in a series of their own. The series is divided into four subseries: College Days, Educational Career, General Correspondence and Subject Correspondence. There are some family trees on the Thurmond/Strom families stored in the Special Collections' oversize section.

The Pinks series was the cross-reference file for subject correspondence generated by Senator Strom Thurmond's office for the period 1954-1976 before the introduction of the centralized Correspondence Management System by the Senate Computer Center in 1976. The original cross-reference files consisted of pink colored carbon paper copies-hence, the "Pinks" series.