Frank Minis Johnson
American judge
Frank Minis Johnson Jr. (October 30, 1918 – July 23, 1999) was a United States district judge and United States circuit judge, who served from 1955 to 1999 on the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama, United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. He made landmark civil rights rulings that helped end segregation and disenfranchisement of African Americans in the South. In the words of journalist and historian Bill Moyers, Judge Johnson "altered forever the face of the South."
Early life, education and career
Johnson was born in 1918 in Delmar, Alabama, and grew up in nearby Haleyville in northern Alabama, a longtime independent-minded part of the state. Winston County had opposed secession during the American Civil War.
Johnson graduated from the University of Alabama and later the University of Alabama School of Law with a Bachelor of Laws in 1943, and was admitted to the bar. While a student, he was asked by a staunchly Democratic classmate why he insisted upon being a Republican, to which Johnson replied that there were "so few of us that one day I might be a federal judge." Another classmate, George Wallace, future governor of the state, overheard the remark and replied, "Well, that'll be the day. I'll be governor by then." Wallace would prove to be Johnson's bête noire during the civil rights era of the 1960s.
He married Ruth Jenkins, a classmate from the University of Alabama. Johnson served in the United States Army in Europe during World War II, while his wife Ruth served in the WAVES as an adviser to Hollywood directors making films about the war.
“Frank Minis Johnson” enters the record as american judge. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Frank, Minis and Johnson can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Frank Minis Johnson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.