FRANK SIKORA, a native of Byesville, Ohio, is a veteran journalist and the author of The Judge: The Life and Opinions of Alabama’s Frank M. Johnson, Jr.; Selma, Lord, Selma; and Until Justice Rolls Down: The Birmingham Church Bombing Case. He is recently retired from the Birmingham News.
The Judge gives an inside look that blends court transcripts,
reporting, and exhaustive oral history interviews with Judge
Johnson, originally conducted over the course of years from 1976 to
1989. A no-nonsense look behind the scenes of the courtroom, and a
welcome contribution to biography as well as American History
shelves.-- "Midwest Book Review"
[Judge Johnson's] first ten years in the Montgomery courtroom
coincided with the most tumultuous period of Southern history since
the Civil War. This tense and emotional time--the civil rights
decade, 1955-65--is the primary focus of Frank Sikora's book.
Drawing extensively from interviews with the judge and from court
transcripts, he recounts and dramatizes the cases that challenged
and finally overturned the segregation laws. Sikora, an Alabama
journalist since the mid-1960s, interviewed Judge Johnson on
numerous occasions over a thirteen-year period. Roughly one-third
of The Judge is in Johnson's own words.--John Egerton "Southern
Changes Magazine"
While more limited as a character study and legal/historical
analysis than Jack Bass's Taming the Storm (reviewed above), this
book is a useful complement. Using long stretches of court
transcripts and equally long quotes from Johnson, Sikora, a staffer
on the Birmingham (Ala.) News, dramatically reconstructs several
major cases handled by the Federal Judge, whom former U.S. Supreme
Court Justice Brennan considers "a remarkable man and a remarkable
judge.'' Sikora describes courtroom arguments regarding the
Montgomery bus boycott, Freedom Riders in Montgomery, and, notably,
the march Martin Luther King Jr. led in Selma. Sikora presents
Johnson as a serious man with a sense of humor and of spirituality,
but should have further explored Johnson's distance from standard
liberalism: Johnson maintains that Northern liberal whites in the
civil rights movement were "sorely misguided, '' personally opposed
interracial marriages and by 1984 believed that blacks should
compete equally with whites in education.-- "Publishers Weekly"
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