A Lincoln Man

When secession talk began to sweep through Alabama after the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the leaders of Winston County in the northern hill country held a meeting and decided that if their state seceded from the Union, their county would secede from the state. The county's delegate to the secession convention in Montgomery duly voted to remain in the Union, and state authorities put him in jail. In the years since then, Winston County has changed little. It remains independent and proud of it, a staunchly Republican island in a Democratic sea. Alabamians often refer to it as "The Free State of Winston."

The most eminent living son of Winston County is Frank Minis Johnson Jr., 45, judge of the U.S. District Court for Middle Alabama. A steady, even-toned spokesman of the law, Judge Johnson is a Republican, a Lincoln man and a sturdy adherent of principle. His nickname is Straight Edge, and it fits.

Enthralled by Lawyers. Johnson's father once served as county judge, and young Frank loved to sit in the local courtroom and listen to lawyers argue their cases. "I was enthralled," he remembers. His rise in the law was swift: he went from small-town practitioner to U.S. Attorney in 1953, and two years later President Eisenhower named him a district judge. He was then 37, one of the youngest federal judges in the nation.

During his years on the bench, Johnson has handed down numerous civil rights rulings that angered, or at least annoyed, many white Alabamians. In 1956, as a member of a three-judge panel, he held that segregation on Montgomery buses was unconstitutional--a decision that meant victory for the historic bus boycott led by Martin Luther King Jr. In 1959, Johnson ruled that segregation in public parks in Montgomery violated the Constitution. In 1961, he ordered Macon County voter-registration authorities to permit Negroes to register under precisely the same standards that the county applied to whites.

Since last summer, Judge Johnson has been involved with the school desegregation struggle in Macon County. He ordered a dozen Negro students admitted to all-white Tuskegee High School last September; but segregationists organized a boycott, and a private school was set up for the white students. In January, Alabama's Governor George C. Wallace had Tuskegee High closed down as uneconomical--there were 13 teachers for twelve pupils. Judge Johnson promptly assigned the Negro students to the county's other two white high schools--six to each. One school capitulated, but at Macon County High in Notasulga, the mayor forbade the entry of the reassigned Negroes on the grounds that the school was overcrowded and the admission of more pupils would violate a newly enacted fire ordinance. Last week Judge Johnson issued an injunction prohibiting the mayor from interfering with the Negro pupils. The new fire ordinance, said Judge Johnson, was merely a device for opposing desegregation.

Ten Angels. His task as a judge, Johnson says, is not to advance the cause of civil rights but to apply the law in the cases that come before him. "I'm not a segregationist," he says, "but I'm no crusader, either. I don't make the law. I don't create the facts. I just interpret the law."

Governor Wallace, one of Johnson's classmates at the University of Alabama Law School, has called him rash, headstrong, vindictive, unstable, erratic, and demanded his impeachment. Even so, Johnson has come in for surprisingly little abuse. The mail brings only about a dozen nasty letters a week (he never replies). None of the old friends he values have cut him. Two boys once burned a cross on the front lawn of his house, but to the judge that was only a boyish prank rather than an attempt to intimidate him.

Attempts to intimidate tall, athletic Frank Johnson are not likely to be effective. On his desk he keeps a clear glass paperweight with a quotation pasted to the bottom. Every so often he reads it: "I'll do the very best I know how--the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference." The author: Abraham Lincoln.

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