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Republican Island. Johnson's austere impartiality is a family trait. As the first Republican sheriff of Fayette County, Great-Grandfather James Wallace Johnson was so fair that people called him "Straight Edge." Frank Johnson grew up in northern Alabama's non-Negrophobe Winston County. Because it had few slaves in 1861, Winston refused to secede in the Civil War (Johnson's forebears fought on both sides) and stayed neutral as "the Free State of Winston." It remains independently Republican. At one point, Johnson's father was the only Republican in the Alabama legislature—a situation that is now an ironic impossibility, since Johnson reapportioned the state. Combined by the judge with a more populous Democratic county, the Winston district now elects a Democratic legislator.
Johnson's mother was born Alabama Long. His father was once elected Winston County probate judge, and young Frank loved to hang around Daddy's courtroom listening to lawyers arguing cases. (Johnson's only child, Johnny, 18, does the same today.) All the same, Johnson did not decide to become a lawyer until he had graduated from Mississippi's Gulf Coast Military Academy, worked as a surveyor, spent a year in business college and, at 19, married a Winston County girl named Ruth Jenkins. Both worked their way through the University of Alabama.
Ruth graduated first and helped the family finances by teaching speech at nearby Tuscaloosa County High School. One of her ace pupils was Lurleen Burns, now Governor Lurleen Wallace. One of Frank's law classmates was George Wallace, a sometime bantamweight boxer and big man on campus. Even then, recalls Johnson, Wallace had "an uncanny ability to sense moves and determine an effective appeal."
George courted Lurleen at a local dime store, where she was a 16-year-old clerk, then went off to World War II service as a B-29 crewman (nine combat missions in the Pacific). The war also separated the Johnsons. Ruth served as a WAVE lieutenant in Washington, editing secret papers for an admiral on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. An infantry lieutenant in Patton's army, Frank won a Bronze Star in the Normandy invasion, was wounded twice and sent back to England as a legal officer.
Activist Opener. Back home in Alabama, Trial Lawyer Johnson discovered the sometime profit of being a Southern Republican. Though Stevenson swept Alabama in 1952, Johnson served as one of Eisenhower's nine state campaign managers. His reward: appointment, at 34, as U.S. attorney for northern Alabama. His two-year record: impressive. In one of the few such cases since Reconstruction, for example, Johnson won a peonage conviction against two Alabama planters who had paid Mississippi jailers to bind Negro prisoners over to them. In 1955 fate intervened with the death of the U.S. judge for Alabama's Middle District. Johnson drew up a modest resume, won the support of state G.O.P. leaders, met Ike in Washington and got the job one week past his 37th birthday.
Far younger than most new district judges (average age: 51), Johnson quickly made a name for himself in 1956 by extending the Supreme Court's school decision to Montgomery's segregated buses.