Committee’s innocent victims deserve an apology

Contrition is coming late to the Florida Legislature. If at all.

Rep. Evan Jenne has offered fellow lawmakers an opportunity to demonstrate remorse, sponsoring a resolution expressing a “formal and heartfelt apology, albeit six decades after the legislature launched the infamous Johns Committee.

So many years later, it’s still hard to imagine that the Legislature’s imprimatur has ever been lent to a more ignominious pursuit. The much-feared Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, chaired by segregationist Sen. Charley Johns, persecuted civil rights leaders, university professors, college students, public school teachers and state employees for imagined offenses against redneck sensibilities. It was a kind of an Old South version of U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities.

The committee went on a nine-year rampage of racism, homophobia and attacks on academia. Niceties like due process or the right to counsel or civil liberties were ignored. Committee investigators chose their targets based on the vaguest of heresy evidence. They employed entrapment and blackmail. They disrupted ongoing classes at state universities to bring in professors and students for interrogation. They forced students, suspected of homosexuality, to submit to psychological treatment.

James A. Schur, author of

Closet Crusaders: The Johns Committee and Homophobia, 1956-1965,

calculated that 39 professors were either fired or forced to resign after the Johns Committee pursued them as suspected homosexuals. Another 71 public school teachers lost their professional certification. Scores, perhaps hundreds of students, abandoned college after encounters with the committee.

Jenne, a Dania Democrat, said the Johns Committee’s original target was the Dade County NAACP, which was leading the state campaign against segregation.

Johns was sure that he’d find commies on its membership rolls. “But Charley Johns ran into a human buzz saw,” Jenne said.

The NAACP’S legal counsel was future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. After Marshall, as Jenne put it, “handed Johns his head” in the courts, the state senator turned his attention to a vulnerable group without such formidable legal backing. In that closeted era, gay men and lesbians offered easy targets.

Scores of innocent lives were ruined. Jenne said suicides were attributed to the committee’s bully boy tactics. I can personally attest that the Johns Committee was an even more nefarious operation than the notorious Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, established by segregationists in the same era to protect the “Mississippi Way of Life.” (The operation kept a file on me in the late 1960s because of my association with the Mississippi NAACP.) But the Sovereignty Commission, bad as it was, lacked the Johns Committee’s unrelenting cruelty.

Imagine that. Nastier even than Mississippi. At the time, the wildly malapportioned legislature was controlled by a cabal of rural North Florida legislators, known as the Pork Chop Gang, which lent a senator like Johns, a former railroad conductor from Starke, far more power than his urban counterparts.

The committee was finally undone by its unrestrained zeal, particularly after publishing the so-called Purple Pamphlet, officially dubbed “Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida,” with such graphic photographs that it was repurposed as gay porn. After that, the committee was defunded. Its embarrassing records were ordered sealed until 2028. But in 1993, the Legislature decided to allow public access to redacted files.

Jenne said he dug through the 21 boxes of Johns Committee documents in the state archives and found a lesson on the dangers of “extreme government overreach.” He described his findings to Sen. Lauren Book, another Broward Democrat, “and she was flabbergasted.”

Book is sponsoring the Senate version of the resolution, an apology to Floridians “whose lives, well-being and livelihoods were damaged or destroyed by the activities and public pronouncements of those who served on the committee.”

But perhaps those 30,000 pages of committee records don’t convey enough shame. Some legislators, Jenne lamented, are still not ready to acknowledge the hurt the state legislature caused Florida’s LGBT community. And too few Floridians know enough about the Johns Committee to pressure legislators to pass the resolution. “Even people who work in the capitol don’t know,” said Jenne.

“I’m a white male heterosexual Democrat, the same demographic responsible for this,” said Jenne, 41, explaining his interest in making amends for transgressions committed years before he was born. Yet, he admitted, it could take another year, maybe longer, before the Legislature finally acknowledges Florida’s long abiding disgrace. Sixty years, apparently, hasn’t been enough.

Fred Grimm (@grimm_fred or leogrimm@gmail.com), a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976.