Measuring a life: Frank Minis Johnson, Jr.

• Jurisdiction: United States
• Date: 01 April 2000
• 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...