Taming The Storm; The Life and Times of Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr., and the South's Fight over Civil Rights
New York, N.Y. Doubleday, 1993. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. viii, [4], 512, [4] pages. DJ has minor wear and soiling. Minor corner bumping. Includes Acknowledgments and Prelude, Illustrations, as well as Notes, Appendix, and Index. Chapters include Searching for Roots; The Free State of Winston; The Growing-Up Years; Manhood Responsibilities; Off to the War; A Good Life in Jasper; Road to Montgomery; A Long Row to Hoe; Johnson and Rives; Early Years in Montgomery; A Trailblazing Court; The Evolving Storm; Freedom Riders; The Break with Little George; Close to Home; Ticking the Last Tick; Selma; Family Sorrows; Neighborhood Schools; Justice Johnson--Almost; The Right to Treatment; A Hell of a Day; Unfit for Human Habitation; Going to the FBI; Putting My Hay Down; Troopers; Overcoming Discrimination; Recognition and Acclaim; Appellate Judge; An Onerous Job; The Death Penalty; and Mark of a Man. Jack Bass is author or co-author of eight nonfiction books about the American South. His works have focused on Southern politics, race relations, and the role of law in shaping the civil rights era. He is Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Social Sciences at the College of Charleston. A graduate of the University of South Carolina, Bass studied as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and received a Ph.D. in American Studies from Emory University. In 13 years as a newspaper reporter and editor, he was twice named South Carolina “journalist of the year.” He taught for 11 years as a professor of journalism at the University of Mississippi. He has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Atlanta Constitution, and Washington Post. In announcing Bass the winner of the 1994 Robert Kennedy Book Award grand prize for Taming the Storm: The Life and Times of Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr., Arthur Schlesinger Jr. acclaimed it as "a strong and evocative work that illuminates the struggle for racial justice." Judge Frank Johnson endured the outrage of a society that felt itself and its allies under siege, and he prevailed, eventually winning honor even in his home state. In his twenty-four years on the District Court of Montgomery, Judge Johnson declared segregated public transportation unconstitutional, Judge Johnson paid heavily for his judicial vision. Ostracized from his community, subjected to death threats by the Ku Klux Klan, and labeled by George Wallace as "an integrating, scalawagging, carpet-bagging, race-mixing, bald-faced liar" who should be given "a barbed-wire enema," he was called by some "the most hated man in the South." Judge Frank Johnson endured the outrage of a society that felt itself and its values under siege, and he prevailed, eventually winning honor even in his home state. Taming the storm is the story of an authentic American hero, and the era that he did so much to define. Derived from a Kirkus review: Bass, using extensive quotes from taped interviews with his subject and others, tells the story of an outstanding and heroic federal judge: Frank M. Johnson of Alabama, who, despite the constant threat of violence in the explosive 1960's South, contributed to the achievement of racial justice in numerous landmark civil-rights cases. Johnson was a typically ornery product of the ``free state of Winston,'' as northern Alabama's Winston County was known. Aside from his fiercely independent personality, there was little in Johnson's upbringing to suggest that he would become a champion of civil rights: He received a conventional legal education at the Univ. of Alabama—where he befriended his future adversary George Wallace and graduated first in his class—and, after WW II combat service in Europe, he returned to an ordinary legal practice in Alabama. But Johnson apparently had an innate sense of justice that, after his appointment to the federal bench in 1955, led to frequent confrontations with Alabama's reactionary political culture. Bass describes how Johnson's attempts to enforce Brown v. Board of Education resulted in dramatic and vituperative showdowns with Wallace and finally ended segregation in the Alabama schools, and how Johnson's decisions allowed the historic Selma march to go forward, and punished violence directed against African-Americans. Together with judges of the Fifth Circuit, who affirmed Johnson's progressive decisions, Johnson had a pervasive effect on the eradication of racial discrimination in the South. A vivid, first-rate biography of a judicial hero. Condition: Very good / Good.
Keywords: Civil Rights, Alabama, Freedom Rides, Desegration, Alcee Hastings, Frank Johnson, Federal Judge, Martin Luther King, Prison Reform, Richard Rives, Supreme Court, Voting Rights, George Wallace
ISBN: 0385413483
[Book #82106]
Price: $65.00