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Jim Johnson of Arkansas Segregationist Prototype ELIZABETH JACOWAY In Arkansas they called him Justice Jim. He was the last of a long line of colorful Arkansas political characters, displaced in an era of television by the more bland and sophisticated David Pryors, Dale Bumpers's and Bill Clintons. His Mama gave him the middle name Douglas, because as he says "she was in love with Douglas Fairbanks"; and some of the movie star's aura clung to the boy from Crossett who blew into Arkansas politics on the charged winds of the Dixiecrat movement.1 In 1948 Jim Johnson was twenty-three and a newly-established lawyer in his home town in south Arkansas, not far from the Louisiana line. One of his political heroes, former Governor Ben Laney of neighboring Camden , had been among those southern bolters to walk out of the Democratic Party convention and form the National States' Rights Party, or the Dixiecrats; under Laney's tutelage, Johnson became the southArkansas manager of Strom Thurmond's presidential campaign. In that heady experience Johnson cut his political teeth on the conservative issues that had been the hallmarks of the southern political tradition: small government, states' rights, and white supremacy; and he would spend the next fifty years promoting those issues with a consistency that spoke to his sincerity, if not his ability to accommodate himself to changing political fashions.2 Johnson's defining moment came in his 1956 campaign for governor against the incumbent Orval Faubus. The young lawyer had arrived on the political scene amid the birth pangs of the segregationist crusade, and he had a much firmer grasp of the racial fears of white southerners than did the then-liberal Governor Faubus. Johnson had spent the preceding eight years building a following by employing the defiant segregationist rhetoric of the states' rights and Citizens' Councils movements, and he forced Faubus in that campaign to move to the right in order to parry his blows and survive the segregationist onslaught. As he would say later in reflecting on Faubus' 1957 maneuvers: "He took my nickel and hit the jackpot!"3 137 138 Johnson of Arkansas: Segregationist Prototype Over the years, political commentators in Arkansasand beyond (most notably the Arkansas Gazette) have branded Johnson with an assortment of derogatory and value-laden labels such as "diehard segregationist," "redneck . . . and rabble rouser" or one of the forces of "organized racism ," designations which have had the intended effect of causing more moderate observers to want to distance themselves from him and to discount his brand ofthinking.4 He has also been the butt of manya political joke as one who was out of touch with the political realities of a modernized , industrialized, sanitized South; George Fisher's cartoons in the Arkansas Gazette regularly placed him in the Old Guard Rest Home along with Orval Faubus and the other kingmakersofan old-style Arkansas politics . The annual political roast put on by the Arkansas Bar Association, the Gridiron Show, for years included a segment that parodied Johnson's message as well as its delivery: "Stand uup fer Ar-kin-saw, and stand uup fer whut's riiit—faar riiit!"5 Johnson has been an easy target. His slowArkansasdrawl and his emotional , stump-style delivery seemed to fit him perfectly for a skit on Saturday Night Live; his endless flood ofhand-written letters (usuallyin pencil) and his outrageous spelling seemed to suggest that he was nothing more than a country-bumpkin with no claims on the respect of more sophisticated types such as the image-conscious, upwardly-mobile denizens of the region's new political and economic elite.6 Unappealing as he may have been, however, to the boosters of a hopeful new Sunbelt South, and distasteful as his ideas may now seem to the academic and political commentators who attempt to reconstruct the milieu of his heyday in the 1950s and 60s, contemporary students of southern history and the civil rights movement will proceed at their peril if they refuse to listen carefully to Jim Johnson's voice, for he was the spokesmanfor a significant element of the populace, and the era, they are seeking to understand. Much as a later generation may now wish it were otherwise, in his passionate denunciation ofthe political and media "insiders," the communist infiltrators, and the "un-American" and "un-Christian" infidels abroad in the land in the South of the 50s and 60s, Jim Johnson spoke the language of the hard-working, God-fearing, rural...

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