UA Professor Publishes Collection of Essays from Famed Civil Rights Era Judge

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – As a federal district judge in Alabama from 1955 to 1979, Frank M. Johnson issued some of the most significant civil rights rulings in the 20th century. Dr. Tony Freyer, a University of Alabama research professor of history and law has now edited and published a collection of Johnson’s essays where the judge explains, in his own words, how he grappled with those decisions.

In Defending Constitutional Rights, Frank M. Johnson, Freyer also includes the first published transcript of Johnson’s 1980 interview on Public Television with Bill Moyers. Johnson’s rulings were exceedingly unpopular in many circles, particularly during the 1960s, Freyer said. Although many of his rulings were controversial and even, on one occasion, resulted in a dynamite attack on Johnson’s mother – an attack intended for the judge – Johnson continued accepting invitations to discuss his rulings in public forums during the civil rights era, the UA professor said.

“The ideas Johnson expressed on these occasions reveal the mind of a great judge grappling with issues fundamental to maintaining the rule of law,” Freyer wrote in the preface of the book, published in August by The University of Georgia Press.

Johnson, who died in 1999, was a 1943 graduate of the UA School of Law. Although best known for his civil rights-related rulings, Freyer said Johnson also proved a champion for mental health patients, prisoners, women, white as well as black voters and others.

“The mark of Johnson, was that he often would take the Supreme Court’s ruling and actively expand it with the expectation the Court would back him up,” Freyer said. “He was an exceptional human being and an excellent judge as well.”

For example, Johnson, along with federal judge Richard T. Rives, ordered the desegregation of the Montgomery bus system, marking the first time the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling was extended beyond schools. He would later apply the desegregation opinion to parks, libraries, and prisons.

His rulings would forever change the state and the nation’s mental health hospitals for the better, Freyer said, as they relieved deplorable living conditions and overcrowding, provided better treatment for patients and led to the release of some patients who should never have been admitted.

Today, the most vocal proponents of civil rights issues are often labeled as ‘liberal,’ and the same was true in relation to Johnson, Freyer said. He, however, was actually a Republican, born in Alabama’s rural Winston County, opposed to President Roosevelt’s New Deal philosophy and appointed to the bench by Eisenhower, Freyer said.

“Notwithstanding the claims of critics that Johnson was the quintessential activist liberal judge, the materials collected in this volume evidence core values that are essentially conservative, embodying a view of Americanism based on individual freedom defined in terms of equal opportunity and equality under law,” Freyer wrote in the book.

Although four biographers, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have previously published works on Johnson’s life, Freyer said he wanted to publish this collection of essays to give readers more insight into Johnson’s thoughts leading to his rulings.

“I realized that his story as a human being, as dramatic as it was, could be added to by showing his ideas and his thinking,” Freyer said.

Although widely criticized, Johnson also had many supporters, including Martin Luther King Jr., and, more surprisingly, George Wallace’s lawyer, who Freyer said once stated, “ ‘he was the fairest judge I’ve ever seen.’”

Following his 24-year term as a federal district judge in Alabama, Johnson served as a federal circuit court judge in Alabama from 1979 until 1991. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995 and was nominated, but did not serve, as Director of the FBI.

“Ultimately, he believed the revolution in rights that had taken place in his lifetime was what was most right about America,” Freyer wrote at the end of the book’s introduction. “When Johnson died on July 23, 1999, at age 80, few Americans had done as much to preserve that faith.”