Taming the Storm; The Life and Times of Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr., and the South's Fight Over Civil Rights

New York, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1993. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. viii, [4], 512 pages. Minor soiling to bottom edge. Includes Illustrations, Footnotes, Acknowledgments, Prelude, Notes, Appendix, and Index. Chapters include Searching for Root; The Free State of Winston; The Growing-Up Years; Manhood Responsibilities; Off to the War; A Good Life in Jasper; Road to Montgomery; A Long Row to Hoe; Johnson and Rives; Early Years in Montgomery; A Trailblazing Court; The Evolving Storm; Freedom Riders; The Break with Little George; Close to Home; Ticking the Last Tick; Selma; Family Sorrows; Neighborhood Schools; Justice Johnson--Almost; The Right to Treatment; A Hell of a Day; Unfit for Human Habitation; Going to the FBI; Putting My Hay Down; Troopers; Overcoming Discrimination; Recognition and Acclaim; Appellate Judge; An Onerous Job; The Death Penalty; and Mark of a Man. Jack Bass is an American author and journalist. He was born in 1934. He graduated from the University of South Carolina in 1956 with a degree in journalism. He worked at The News and Courier, a co-owned weekly paper, The West Ashley Journal, and The State (Columbia). He received a Nieman Fellowship from Harvard for 1965-66. From 1966 to 1973 Bass worked as the Columbia Bureau Chief for The Charlotte Observer and was a lecturer for journalism at the University of South Carolina. He was named South Carolina Newspaperman of the Year in 1968 and 1972. His The Transformation of Southern Politics was on the American Library Association's "Notable Books for Adults List" for 1976, and he received a Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for "Taming the Storm" in 1994. Thrust by fate into the center of a raging storm of controversy, Frank M. Johnson, Jr., at thirty-seven the youngest federal judge in the country, would turn the tide of white resistance to integration with a stream of decisions that upheld the claims of black Southerners to their civil rights. In his twenty-fur years on the District Court, Judge Johnson declared segregated public transportation unconstitutional, ordered the integration of public facilities, and required that blacks be registered to vote. He ordered Governor George Wallace, his former law school classmate, to allow the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, and brought about comprehensive statewide school desegregation. Judge Johnson paid heavily for his judicial vision. Ostracized from his community,subjected to death threats by the Ku Klux Klan, and labeled by George Wallace as "an integrating, scalawagging, carpet-bagging, race-mixing, bald-faced liar" who should be given "a barbed-wire enema," he was called by some "the most hated man in the South." Despite it all, he did not waver in administering justice by applying his concept of the Constitution as a charter of liberty. Martin Luther King, Jr, called him a man who "gave true meaning to the word Justice." Derived from a Kirkus review: Bass, using extensive quotes from taped interviews with his subject and others, tells the story of an outstanding and heroic federal judge: Frank M. Johnson of Alabama, who, despite the constant threat of violence in the explosive 1960's South, contributed to the achievement of racial justice in numerous landmark civil-rights cases. Johnson was a typically ornery product of the ``free state of Winston,'' as northern Alabama's Winston County was known (out of Unionist and antislavery sentiment, Winston attempted to secede from Alabama in 1862). Aside from his fiercely independent personality, there was little in Johnson's upbringing to suggest that he would become a champion of civil rights: He received a conventional legal education at the Univ. of Alabama-where he graduated first in his class-and, after WW II combat service in Europe, he returned to a legal practice in Alabama. But Johnson apparently had an innate sense of justice that, after his appointment to the federal bench in 1955, led to frequent confrontations with Alabama's political culture. Bass describes how Johnson's attempts to enforce Brown v. Board of Education resulted in dramatic and vituperative showdowns with Wallace and finally ended segregation in the Alabama schools, and how Johnson's decisions allowed the historic Selma march to go forward, and punished violence directed against African-Americans. Together with judges of the Fifth Circuit, who affirmed Johnson's progressive decisions, Johnson had a pervasive effect on the eradication of racial discrimination in the South. A vivid, first-rate biography of a judicial hero.