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Johnson is a product of northern Alabama's Winston County. In that rocky hill country, few 19th century landowners had slaves, and Winston attempted to withdraw from Alabama when the state seceded from the Union. Much of the county became Republican; at one point. Johnson's father was the only Republican in the Alabama legislature.
After winning a Bronze Star as an infantry lieutenant in combat during World War II, Johnson returned to become active in Republican politics. He helped manage Dwight Eisenhower's 1952 Alabama campaign and was named U.S. Attorney in 1953. Two years later, a week before his 37th birthday, he was appointed the youngest federal judge in the country. In June of 1956, Johnson and another federal judge ordered desegregation of the Montgomery transit system, extending the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision beyond the schools for the first time. In the years that followed, Johnson—acting alone or as a member of a three-judge panel—desegregated public facilities, voided attempts to evade such orders through "private" schools, abolished the poll tax, ordered legislative reapportionment based on population, mandated the inclusion of women on jury rolls, expanded a suspect's right to counsel and established a "right to treatment" for mental patients. Martin Luther King Jr.—who was, ironically, being wiretapped and harassed by the FBI —once said of Judge Johnson: "That is the man who gives true meaning to the word justice."
Johnson's activism has made for a turbulent personal life. In Montgomery, Johnson and his family were unwelcome at their neighborhood Baptist church and subjected to threatening letters and telephone calls. Two years ago, Johnson's son Johnny, 27, killed himself with a shotgun. Some friends thought the adopted Johnny's longstanding emotional problems could be traced to harassment by his Montgomery schoolmates.
Last year Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared in Montgomery to do research on Johnson for his senior thesis at Harvard. The two developed a closeness described by one observer as akin to a father-son relationship. "He's tough and strong, and he's got a great big heart," says Kennedy. An expanded version of Kennedy's thesis is to be published (as was his late Uncle Jack's Harvard senior thesis).
Lawyers and clerks who have worked with Johnson describe him as a no-nonsense administrator with an innate sense of justice. "God pity the Mafia," said Alabama Attorney George Dean. "He's mean as a snake on crime." But he does not lack compassion. In one case, a white man was accused of persuading several black youths to steal peanuts from a warehouse; the jury convicted the blacks but acquitted the alleged ringleader. Johnson sentenced the youths to 30 minutes in the custody of a U.S. marshal.
The judge has few outside diversions except an occasional golf game, tinkering with grandfather clocks, and a periodic chaw of Red Man chewing tobacco. His capacity for work is remarkable, and he keeps his docket unusually current. If an attorney fails to file papers on time, Johnson is apt to call him personally—collect.