Taming the storm

In 1955, the same year Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus to a white man, President Eisenhower brought down from the hills of northwest Alabama a young U.S. attorney to sit as a federal District Court judge in Montgomery. His name was Frank M. Johnson, Jr., and at thirty-seven he was the youngest federal judge in the country. Thrust by fate into the center of a raging storm of controversy, this quietly determined judge would turn. The tide of white resistance to integration with a stream of decisions that upheld the claims of black Southerners to their…