JUDGES
(See Cover) Every major confrontation imprints names and images on the minds of those who witness it, and the struggle for civil rights has left deep imprints, especially in the South. There were the marchers streaming over Selma's Pettus Bridge on their way to Montgomery, Ala., after having been stopped by tear gas and cattle prods the day before. There was the blank puzzlement on the faces of Collie Leroy Wilkins and his two accomplices after their conviction for violating the civil rights of Selma Marcher Viola Liuzzo, after they had been previously acquitted of murdering her. There were the pictures of Negro voters forming a long line outside an Alabama coun- try store to vote for the first time; of Governor George Wallace "standing in the school-house door"; and of a younger Martin Luther King (before his Nobel Prize) organizing and leading the Montgomery bus boycott through to success.
Millions of Americans know these names and remember these scenes. Yet few know the name of the man central to them all, Frank Minis Johnson, the U.S. district judge for Alabama's 23 southeastern counties. At 48, Johnson has established an impressive record of calm and considered judgment that has stamped him as one of the most important men in America. In 11½ years of inter- preting and enforcing the U.S. Constitution, he has wrought social and political changes that affect all of Alabama, all of the South, all of the nation.
The Man Who. It was Frank Johnson who applied the school-desegregation decision to the Montgomery bus system— and thus helped speed desegregation of all public facilities in the South. It was Frank Johnson who ordered both marchers and police to halt their confrontation at Selma, and then— although he disapproves of most demonstrations— gave the marchers permission to go ahead.
It was Frank Johnson who sat as a member of the three-judge court that abolished the Alabama poll tax; that handed down the first order requiring a state to reapportion its devised by judges. It was Frank who so inspired an Alabama with a sense of responsibility that it was able to convict the three Ku Klux Klansmen who gunned down Viola Liuzzo on the road back to Montgomery from Selma. It was Frank Johnson whomustered the three-judge court that has just ordered desegregation of all of Alabama's 118 school districts next fall—the first such statewide ruling in the nation, and perhaps the most important school order since the Supreme Court's school decision of 1954.
Vision & Conscience. Johnson's record is all the more remarkable in light of the fact that federal district judges—314 of them in 97 U.S. district courts throughout the country—are more vulnerable to local pressures than any other members of the federal bench. Not only is a district judge drawn from his locality; he almost always owes his job to his state's dominant politicians—particularly the U.S. Senators. Chosen by men committed to local interests, he is then sworn to uphold national principles that may conflict with those interests.
Alabama-born and bred, Johnson could not be more sensitive to his state's cherished traditions and prejudices. His courtroom in Montgomery is only seven blocks from the statehouse, where a band played Dixie while Jefferson Davis was sworn in as Confederate Presi- dent, and where