Measuring a life: Frank Minis Johnson, Jr.

• Author: Thompson, Myron H.

Yes, he was a great jurist; he was a man of vision; he was all those things we say about people who did great things. But it would be grossly inadequate for me to attempt to assess this man's judicial career by measuring it against some standardized ruler of appropriate superlatives. For, if anything, he was not a man of norms based on mere social acceptability; at the time he memorialized his notions of justice and the rule of law in words, these notions, though self-evident today, were novel to many in this country--indeed, so original and socially unacceptable that they provoked violence. Nor can I reduce him to personal anecdotes. We were not fishing buddies. I did not clerk for him. The times that we sat together on the bench on cases, though exquisitely meaningful, were few. No; for me, he was much more, incomparably more. He was for me what he was for many Southerners who came of age at the end of the second part of this century: a full life's experience.

Many, upon reading these words, will surely think that I exaggerate, and that I am taken by the emotion of the moment and of the honor of making this tribute. I do not and I am not, and let me explain.

I begin in 1955, during my childhood, an African-American childhood in Alabama. It was an important year for those of us (both black and white) born in the South near the beginning of the second half of this century, for we were then poised to leave the seclusion of home and enter the public world of state-enforced racial segregation, that first entry being into public schools. But it was also an important year because it was the year that he was sworn in as a United States District Judge for the Middle District of Alabama. The forces behind these two events would collide again and again, for, due in great measure to what he did over the next half-century, the public life that I and others entered would hardly resemble the one of 1955. Indeed, for me, some twenty-five years later, the two events would ultimately coalesce into a singularly significant event. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The first collision was immediate. In the late 1950s and the early 1960s, he entered the public schools that I attended and sought to attend and, by court order, began a three-decade effort to change the environment in which I was to be instilled with the tools to become a competent American citizen. He sought to impose on (and teach to) me and other children the simple notion that, for us...