Antoine Johnson needs a kidney. So he threw a party to raise awareness about the need for living donors.

I arrived in time for golden hour, that magical period of the evening when the setting sun casts a warm glow over everything and everyone.

A keyboardist played jazzy tunes. Guests helped themselves to oysters on the half shell and charcuterie. At the behest of the host, attendees dressed in colorful resort glam. On the surface, it was a beautiful midsummer party atop a luxury Center City apartment building.

But there was a serious undercurrent to the event because we were there for a consequential reason. Public relations guru Antoine Johnson was diagnosed a year ago to the day with end-stage kidney disease and is desperately in need of a donor.

We enjoyed ourselves, but it was also an emotional evening of love and healing, as well as a fundraiser for akidney.org, an organization founded by Johnson to help spread awareness about the importance of living kidney donors.

Too often, potential donors assume they have to be dead to donate an organ. That’s not the case when it comes to kidneys, because humans typically have two. As Johnson wrote in a Facebook post, “People think they need to wait until someone has passed away to give their kidney, it’s a myth, a person can, in fact, donate while they are still living.”

At one point during the party, he sat center stage dressed in a bright red suit and recorded a video message for his survivors that will be posted on LifetimeofMessages.com. I blinked back tears listening to him talk about wanting his ashes taken back to his native New York and scattered in the Hudson River.

It just doesn’t seem fair. I met him years ago when he was fresh out of Villanova University and representing models, singers, and various personalities through his company, House of Talent PA. For a time, he also served as a publicist for Geno’s Steaks and was an on-air personality for PHL17.

At 44, Johnson should be enjoying the prime of his life, yet there he was, 49 pounds lighter than I’d ever seen him and staring down his mortality. Just when it started to feel like too much, he pointed out, “I’m not dead yet. I don’t plan on dying.”

He added, “I plan on getting through this.”

But Johnson, who holds the record for the fastest 60-meter hurdle at Villanova, is running the race of his life. African Americans are almost four times more likely to suffer from kidney failure than white Americans. To make matters worse, “their rate of live-donor kidney transplantation is more than four times lower than it is for their white counterparts,” according to Harvard Public Health.

Johnson discovered he was sick after bumping into Fox 29’s Mike Jerrick, a prostate cancer survivor. Since Johnson was experiencing some symptoms that could have indicated prostate cancer, he said Jerrick urged him to get tested — which Johnson did. He went to see his doctor on a Friday, and the following morning, he got a call that he needed to get to an emergency room.

He was stunned to learn that he didn’t have the prostate cancer he suspected, but stage-five kidney disease, which means his kidneys had failed. When a patient experiences kidney failure, it means one or both of their kidneys aren’t functioning. Treatment includes dialysis or a transplant.

Johnson is adamant about not going on dialysis. ”I don’t ever want to be comfortable using a machine for nine to 10 hours to filter my body’s blood," he told me.

I’m not sure when it was, but I told Johnson about Dave Petersen, a South Philly resident who had been placing “NEEDS A KIDNEY” stickers all over Philly. Johnson reached out to him and invited him to join him on one of his TV interviews. Sadly, Petersen died in December. He was just 24.

I feel bad that Petersen didn’t get a kidney in time. But with our help, by signing up at Jefferson University Hospital to become living donors, Johnson can. And, hopefully, sooner rather than later.