Judge Johnson's Courthouse: The Man the Klan Called Most Hated

Frank M. Johnson Jr. took the federal bench in Montgomery in nineteen fifty-five, just eighteen months after the Supreme Court struck down separate but equal. What followed was a string of decisions that made him the most consequential civil rights jurist in Alabama history and, in the eyes of the Ku Klux Klan, the most hated man in the state.

Johnson desegregated Montgomery's bus system, eliminated the poll tax, ordered Black citizens onto Alabama jury rolls, and in nineteen sixty-five authorized the Selma to Montgomery march. His former law school classmate George Wallace became his fiercest political foe. His mother's house was bombed. Federal marshals protected his family for nearly two decades. Johnson was born in Delmar, Alabama, raised in Haleyville, and was a Republican. He served in the Army in Europe in World War Two, then as United States Attorney in northern Alabama, before President Eisenhower gave him a recess appointment on October twenty second, nineteen fifty five. After his nineteen fifty six ruling in the Rosa Parks bus case, a burning cross was left on his lawn. In nineteen seventy seven he was asked to become director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but he withdrew after an aneurysm was found. President Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in nineteen ninety-five. Congress renamed this courthouse for him in nineteen ninety-two. The building where Johnson worked stands in downtown Montgomery as a reminder that federal courts, not just marches, dismantled legal segregation.