The Judge: The Life and Opinions of Alabama's Frank M. Johnson, Jr. (review)

A P R I L 2 0 0 8 153 library—public, university, and school—should own a copy of Petry’s On Harper Lee for readers and students. As William T. Going concludes in his foreword, “now is the time for serious examinations such as this to begin to place Mockingbird and its multiple themes and symbols in scholarly worldwide perspective—and to remind us all of the joy of reading and rereading this unique classic” (p. xi). Alice Hall Petry and her co-authors have fulfilled that challenge. NANCY GRISHAM ANDERSON Auburn University Montgomery The Judge: The Life and Opinions of Alabama’s Frank M. Johnson, Jr. By Frank Sikora. Montgomery: New South Books, 2006. 320 pp. $29.95. ISBN 978-58838-158-3. The year 2005 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Dwight Eisenhower ’s appointment of Frank M. Johnson Jr. to the federal judgeship for the Middle District of Alabama; it marked the same anniversary for the Montgomery bus boycott, a protest that many consider the point of departure for the modern civil rights movement. To commemorate the two occasions, Frank Sikora has published a second edition of his 1992 account of Johnson’s life that focuses on the civil rights cases and decisions that made Johnson one of the most renowned jurists of his time. The new edition of the book is largely unchanged; Sikora has added a short chapter on the final years of the judge’s life (he passed away in 1999), and the index has been expanded, the format slightly modified, and pictures eliminated. Sikora interviewed Johnson extensively over thirteen years, and those interviews form the basis for the biographical portion of what is essentially a co-authored book. Sikora has produced several such collaborative works in the past, including a popular account of the voting rights campaign in Selma, Lord, Selma (Tuscaloosa, 1980), told through the eyes of two adolescent participants. Sikora’s open narrative in The Judge sets up passages of direct quotation from Johnson, reflections on his childhood , his war experiences, his early career as a United States attorney, and, in greater detail, his ruminations on the famed civil rights cases he presided over. Sikora walks the reader through excerpted trial testimony for some of the more notable cases. Johnson’s commentary is as enlightening as it is entertaining. If he is best known as a judicial champion of civil rights, he emerges here as T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 154 a more complex historical actor: a man who was no advocate, who was wholeheartedly committed to the rule of law before his personal inclinations , who was intolerant of ineptitude but was, above all other things, fair, and who loved to smoke and, later, chew tobacco. Remembering the famous decisions, injunctions, and orders he issued over the course of the movement—from protecting the Freedom Riders in 1961 to desegregating the state’s public school systems—Johnson emphasizes his personal disapproval of the strategy of demonstration and the various forms of direct action employed by movement activists. He believed that blacks should have come to the courts from the beginning instead of, as he says, inviting disorder and violence first. Nonetheless, when protests were lawful, Johnson respected that legality , and when the end to which activists were striving was constitutional, he ruled in their favor. Johnson stopped short of crediting the protests and demonstrations with success, though; he told Sikora that “all the boycotts and the sit-ins and marches themselves did not cure the illness of discrimination. It was the court decisions that did it” (p. 221). Johnson failed to mention what he undoubtedly knew and, perhaps, lamented: that African Americans had been seeking redress in both the state and federal courts without success since the nineteenth century. Johnson’s thoughts on the leaders he dealt with during his judgeship are equally illuminating. He shows his admiration for the Kennedys, Lyndon Johnson, Andrew Young, and John Lewis, his disdain for the deceitful demagoguery of onetime friend George Wallace, and his ambiguous view of Martin Luther King Jr., whose leadership style he compares to Wallace’s...