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274 chapter twenty-three The City Almost Too Busy to Hate Although Tuttle joined the Fifth Circuit in 1954, he had carried a low profile until late in 1960, when, almost simultaneously, he became chief judge and he entered the order that desegregated the University of Georgia. Then he became the iconic activist judge. Tempers ran hot, and he, along with his colleagues, was the target of increasing animosity over the next several years. His daughter-in-law, Ginny, would never forget a call to her home in the aftermath of that order. “I have a daughter at the University of Georgia, and if anything happens down there you had better watch out for your kids at Westminster,” a man’s voice told her. Ginny had three children in grade school at Westminster. For a few weeks they were not left unattended; then that danger seemed to have passed. At their home, the judge and Sara suffered crank calls and crackpot letters. Moreover, the antipathy of many of their friends was quietly apparent. Still, compared to some of Tuttle’s colleagues , they were largely insulated from the worst of it. Judges Richard Rives and Frank Johnson were less fortunate. They had the misfortune to be on the cutting edge; it was their ruling that integrated the Montgomery buses in late 1956. Geography and demographics may have mattered more than timing. In Montgomery, a smaller and less sophisticated city than Atlanta, virtually no one stood by the federal judges—even in church. Richard Rives had been among the most highly and most affectionately regarded lawyers in Alabama until the civil rights cases; then he became a pariah. It hurt profoundly when old friends would change pews in church to avoid sitting near him and his wife. It was far worse when vandals desecrated his son’s grave with paint and garbage. Yet when Time magazine blamed the incident on Rives’s “fellow Alabamians,” it was Richard Rives who wrote in defense, pointing out that no one knew The City Almost Too Busy to Hate » 275 who had committed the act, but whoever had “must have been mentally ill. Certainly it should not be charged to my fellow Alabamians, the overwhelming majority of whom are as fine, decent, and fair-minded people as can be found anywhere.”1 Unlike Richard Rives, who was a native of Montgomery, Frank Johnson was born and raised in Winston County in northwestern Alabama, a county that opposed secession. When the South seceded from the Union, there was some talk of Winston County seceding from Alabama; that earned the county its enduring nickname, the “Free State of Winston.” Winston did not secede from Alabama, but it did send more than twice as many men to fight for the Union than for the Confederacy. After the Civil War, Winston became a Republican pocket in an otherwise solidly Democratic region.2 Accustomed to being an outsider, Johnson reacted differently than Rives when friends at church gave him and his wife, Ruth, too wide a berth. They simply stopped attending. Johnson minded, but being ostracized hurt him less than it did Rives in part because he had not felt as much a part of the circles they traveled in in the first place and in part because, unlike Rives, while Johnson enjoyed the company of good friends, he was not by nature sociable in a broader sense. Still, his temperament could not insulate him entirely. Even Frank Johnson, a man of great physical and moral courage, was shaken when his mother’s home was bombed. Atlanta was just up the road from Montgomery, less than two hundred miles away. In 1960 it was still in the grip of Jim Crow segregation. Not only schools but also hotels, restaurants, and cabs were segregated. There were perhaps a dozen black lawyers in Georgia in 1950, all of whom had been forced to go out of state for their legal education. One of the oldest, T. J. Henry, took the bar exam at the same sitting as Tuttle and was admitted one day before him, on July 9, 1923. Still, the Atlanta Bar Association as well as the State Bar of Georgia remained segregated until 1964 and 1963, respectively. Most black attorneys of the era were known by their initials: T. J. Henry, A. T. Walden, E. E. Moore. One of the insulting traditions of Jim Crow segregation was never to call a black man “Mister”; using initials was a stratagem to prevent...

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