“It’s a lot different when you're running yourself,” Johnson-Tonkins says. She laughs when she thinks about it. “It was an eye-opener.”

Her first campaign was an impressive one, though, resulting in her election as Guilford County Clerk of Superior Court. She beat an incumbent in the Democratic primary and then drew 54 percent of the vote on an Election Day that went heavily for the Republicans.

The decision to run for a judicial office may seem like a natural one for her. Her father, Walter Johnson, was a defense attorney, and her mother is Yvonne Johnson, former Greensboro mayor and long-time member of the City Council. Johnson-Tonkins herself has practiced law in Greensboro in a law firm and as a prosecutor. And she worked in her mother’s campaigns.

Still, it wasn’t a decision that came easily.

“I was actually approached to run,” she says. “Attorneys and others in the community asked if I would consider it, and I said no.” Then, she thought about it some more.

She knew that morale had deteriorated in the clerk’s office. Customer service was suffering. Complaints and frustration were common among the office’s customers, lawyers and non-lawyers alike.

“I realized I could make a positive change,” she says.

The voters agreed.

She describes herself as “pretty upbeat, thorough, fair.” She has a good background for improving the clerk of courts office.

Johnson-Tonkins graduated from A&T in 1994 with a degree in public relations, but her entire career has been in the law. She went straight from A&T to work in her father’s law office.  He practiced criminal defense law.  She did research, drafted documents and did a lot of day-to-day management of the office.

After six years working with her father, she went to law school at North Carolina Central University. She came back to Greensboro as an associate in a law firm, working on criminal, civil and bankruptcy cases for three years. For the last eight years, she has been a prosecutor in the District Attorney’s Office.

The job title may be “clerk,” but Johnson-Tonkins will have judicial duties as well. Clerks of Superior Court in North Carolina issue arrest and search warrants and, like magistrates, can take guilty pleas for a variety of minor offenses.

Clerks conduct proceedings including adoptions, incompetency determinations and partitions of land. And they serve as probate judges.

That’s all on top of the office’s actual clerical functions: administering oaths, keeping court records, providing court dates, accepting court fees, and providing court-related information to people working in the judicial system and the public.

Johnson-Tonkins knows that it all adds up to a major challenge in delivering on her campaign promise of delivering the “ultimate in customer service.” She’ll begin making that promise a reality when she’s sworn in on December 1.

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