 |
|
|
| 3/14/2010 12:17:00 AM | Email this article • Print this article | IN MEMORIAM: Theodore Johns, 1927-2010
Judge Theo Johns left his mark on Southeast Texas, and not just in the branch of the Beaumont Public Library that bears his name, or the bronze bust of Johns at the Jefferson County Courthouse.
James Shannon
Mid & South County Editor
Theo Johns left his mark on Southeast Texas, and not just in the branch of the Beaumont Public Library that bears his name, or the bronze bust of Johns and former law partner Elmo Willard at the Jefferson County Courthouse.
Judge Theodore Johns died this week after a long illness at age 82. He had served as magistrate in Beaumont Municipal Court from the time of his appointment in 1994 until his death, though his illness had kept him off the bench in recent months. But his remarkable life left a definite imprint on the city where he practiced law for more than 55 years.
As a Beaumont attorney who litigated landmark civil rights cases beginning in 1955 that opened the gates to institutions of higher learning, golf courses and the larger society to persons of all colors, he forged a record for courage, tenacity, legal scholarship and above all, a willingness to challenge the status quo of Jim Crow. To say that Judge Johns was a major figure in the black community misses the mark by half; he was a towering figure across all of Southeast Texas.
Robert Kennedy once said, "Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation."
Those words came to mind in 2008 when two members of Bobby Kennedy's generation were honored in a ceremony at the Jefferson County Courthouse in Beaumont. Theodore R. Johns and his great friend and law partner, the late Elmo R. Willard III, were memorialized in bronze as "Crusading Lawyers" whose work for civil rights in the 1950s and '60s managed to bend history itself in this town. They litigated the landmark lawsuit Jackson v. McDonald that enabled the first African-American students to enroll at Lamar State College of Technology, commonly referred to as Lamar Tech, in 1956.
One response to the courtroom efforts of Johns and Willard was violence in the streets, but the events they set in motion would forever change both the college and the city where it is located. A tumultuous decade that began with the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 would culminate with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but the Lamar lawsuit brought this confrontation to Beaumont as the issue was still being defined nationally.
"Some states didn't address that problem as early as we did here in Southeast Texas," observed Jimmy Simmons, current president of Lamar University. "The result of crossing that hurdle in 1956 paved the way for Lamar University to become one of the most diverse campuses in the country."
•••
Theodore Johns was born in Silsbee in 1927, two years before the stock market crash of 1929 that would trigger the Great Depression.
He attended Prairie View A&M, then enrolled in the law school at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he encountered Charles Hamilton Houston. This remarkable individual - the dean of Howard School of Law - was responsible, perhaps more than any single person, for laying the legal foundation for what would become the Civil Rights Movement. With his pupil-turned-protégé Thurgood Marshall, Houston set out to overturn the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson that had established the "separate but equal" provision that validated repressive Jim Crow laws that had stifled progress for African-Americans for decades.
Dean Houston produced a cadre of attorneys who would go forward and challenge these laws in multiple venues across the nation. Whether these young lawyers were ready or willing to tackle this cause was never really a question - this greatness was thrust upon them.
The example of Marshall was already before them by the time Johns arrived at Howard. Marshall graduated law school in 1933 and won his first civil rights case in Maryland in 1936. By 1940, at the age of 32, he became chief counsel of the NAACP. In that role, Marshall argued many cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1967, he became the first African-American justice on the nation's highest court. But arguably his greatest achievement was the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education. The case was actually five cases that had been consolidated into one and dealt the fatal blow to Plessy that Houston had been seeking for years. It did not mean that the segregated school systems around the country would be reformed overnight, but it began a process that would take years - and many determined battles - to see through to the end.
That's where Johns, Willard and other disciples of Houston came in. Although he died in 1950, the influence of Houston continued to be felt.
After graduation, Johns was preparing to begin his practice when he received a draft notice. After serving in the Marine Corps during the Korean War, he was back in Silsbee, again looking to set up his practice. In a 1998 oral history preserved in the Tyrrell Historical Library, Johns described how fate intervened:
"I was over in Joe Guidry's barber shop here in Beaumont getting a haircut," he said. "I really hadn't planned to practice here, but they were telling me about a case, property case, and they said they didn't believe I could handle it ... and I said, 'Well, I'll take it.' And I took the case and I went to court and the judge ruled in my favor."
From that barbershop beginning, Johns began the practice of law here in 1953. The following year, he met Willard, who was preparing to take the bar exam after graduating from Howard. Johns said they discussed forming a partnership, and after Willard passed the bar, they did. For more than 30 years, they practiced law together in Beaumont. But in those first years together, they stepped into the pages of history with the struggle at Lamar.
•••
The end of World War II unleashed sweeping social change in the United States as men returned from war with a seriousness of purpose, determined to get on with their lives, to make up for lost time and ensure that their sacrifice - and that of their comrades who didn't make it back - would not be wasted.
These same issues concerned black veterans, as well, compounded by the indignities of Jim Crow laws and customs in the South, which had not changed during their sojourns in Europe and the Pacific.
The lack of educational opportunities in Southeast Texas was acute with the exclusion of blacks from Lamar State College. In 1952, Beaumont resident James Briscoe applied for admission to Lamar. A graduate of Charlton-Pollard High School, Briscoe had been a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta for two years. Upon submission of his application and transcript, he was admitted to Lamar - until he showed up to enroll for classes. Apparently, nobody in the admissions office knew Morehouse was a black college or that Briscoe was black. After they got a look at him, Lamar's acting president G.A. Wimberly told Briscoe a mistake had been made and that the school was for whites only. Despite urging from the NAACP, the Briscoe family declined to file a lawsuit, citing economic pressure from their white employers and social pressure from their black neighbors.
By 1955, that all changed when Versie Jackson and six others applied to Lamar. All were high school graduates; most had at least one successful year in college; all were black. Their applications would not be quietly swept under the rug like that of James Briscoe three years before. When Lamar regents announced a meeting to consider the situation, it provoked an immediate reaction from some whites, who delivered a letter of protest. Other protests were more direct. A cross 15 feet high was burned at the main entrance to the campus, one of several burning crosses that would be employed during this crisis. The symbol of racial terror was a familiar totem in the South whenever matters of race lurched into the public eye, but if its purpose was to deter blacks from pursuing admission to Lamar, it failed.
The Lamar Board of Regents voted to deny admission to the seven students, declaring the legislature had created the school for "whites only" - and besides, they added, "an unprecedented growth in student population" meant Lamar could not take on any more students, though they did promise to reconsider their decision at some future date.
Johns and Willard didn't wait and filed a lawsuit styled Jackson v. McDonald. For good measure, below their names the attorneys added those of U. Simpson Tate, regional counsel from the NAACP's Dallas office, and that of Thurgood Marshall. Although neither man came to Beaumont for the filing, Johns recalled with a chuckle the belief that those names added legal muscle to the cause.
The case went to Judge Lamar Cecil, who had been appointed to the federal bench by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1954. He was a Republican, an extreme rarity in Texas at that time, and had no ties to the state Democratic Party that controlled political life in the state then. Attorney General John Ben Shepperd offered a variety of innovative arguments on why the lawsuit should be dismissed, but Cecil was not convinced. In fact, the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown gave him clear guidance.
On July 30, 1956, he ruled that qualified blacks had a right to be admitted to Lamar, reiterating that the doctrine of "separate but equal" was no longer the law of the land.
On the first day of class, protestors erected picket lines in front of most of the eleven gates at Lamar. Needless to say, they weren't on their best behavior. Contemporaneous reports say they were loud and abusive, and alienated many of the white students and faculty they were attempting to "save." Police stood by and watched as picketers removed some black students from classrooms and stopped cars looking for others.
Among those students was Theodore Johns, who had enrolled at Lamar despite already having graduated from college and law school to be on the front lines of this crisis the lawsuit he filed with Willard had precipitated.
By the second week of school, the picketers grew even bolder, attempting to stop everyone entering the campus. City police and two Texas Rangers called to the scene refused to intervene. Ironically, it was Lamar president F.L. McDonald - who had been named in the lawsuit - who would finally bring forces to bear to restore order on his campus.
Mayor Jimmie Cokinos said McDonald asked him to have city officers enforce the law. In an interview with The Examiner, Cokinos recalled that fateful day in early October:
"I asked the police chief to go to Lamar and tell the pickets what the law is - they must keep moving; they cannot stop any cars to look at the cars to see if there were any black students they were carrying. If they don't understand that, I want you to arrest them," said Cokinos. "So they arrested 16 people. That night, they threw a Molotov cocktail under my house - I lived on Hazel. My house was up on piers and it went from the front to the side and nothing happened. But that same night, they went to St. Michael's church, where they knew I attended, and placed a bomb at the front door. It knocked the whole front façade of the church off and broke all the windows across the street."
Nobody was ever arrested for either incident. Johns and Willard received death threats, and their offices were vandalized. Dr. Ed Sprott, president of the local NAACP, was also singled out for threats and vandalism.
The protests at Lamar stopped for a while, as Cokinos described: "They moved the picket line from Lamar and they marched up and down Pearl Street shouting 'We want Cokinos, we want Cokinos,'" he said with a sigh. "From the mayor's office, I could see them, but I had just returned from the war. I wasn't afraid of them."
The arrests appeared to take some of the starch out of the protesters' sails, but it did not end the violence completely. A few days later, a student attempting to slip on campus in the back of a cab was spotted by a protestor, who jumped on the vehicle. Before it was over, a gun had been produced, the protestor was dragged down the street, and the student, protestor and driver were all taken to jail.
These terrible incidents were recalled that week in 2008 when the statues of Johns and Willard were unveiled. Simmons attended the ceremony, and notes that he presides over a Lamar University that is the legacy of that time.
"One of the telling stories that came across yesterday was when Mr. Johns said he was at the campus and he noticed that most of the protestors were not students," said Simmons. "At the height of the confrontation, he noticed the crowd was parting and an African-American girl and a white girl were walking arm-in-arm, and the white girl was wiping the tears from the cheeks of the black girl and that parted the crowd and dispersed the crowd. I think that's a great analogy of where we stand today as one of the most diverse campuses in the state of Texas - and the Wall Street Journal named us as one of the top 100 campuses as far as diversity goes, so we've moved an enormous distance from that 1956 incident."
This story is recounted here for two reasons: First, to illustrate how a young lawyer named Theo Johns, then 29, walked through the fire for social justice at considerable risk to his life and business prospects. Second, to recall the tenor of those times to demonstrate what Johns and Willard had to overcome and why their efforts were critical to all sectors of this community.
Beaumont attorney Mike Jamail was both a friend and admirer of this remarkable man and spoke to the essence of a towering figure who changed history.
"Judge Johns was a man who endured the worst in this community, yet he never lost faith that the rule of law would give him the strength to make this community a better place for all its citizens," said Jamail.
•••
After the integration of Lamar, Theodore Johns and Elmo Willard found no shortage of dragons to slay. They sued to open Tyrrell Park and its golf course to people of all races, then moved on to libraries and other public accommodations. They saved the life of death row inmate Joe Cephas after a Beaumont jury convicted him in 1960 for the rape of a 59-year-old white woman.
Willard died in 1991 after a long battle with cancer. He was 60.
Johns continued to practice law and served as a municipal court judge in Beaumont.
At the dedication ceremony at the courthouse in 2008, Sen. Rodney Ellis paid tribute to Johns and Willard as "two unsung heroes."
Recalling the Lamar case, he remarked that, "It wasn't just these men alone. Mayor Cokinos had his church bombed and his house burned."
Citing the courage of Johns, Willard and Cokinos in the face of violence, Ellis declared, "These were families with young kids - kids could have been killed."
Visibly moved, Ellis intoned, "We honor Judge Theodore R. Johns who is here today and we say 'thank you, sir.' And we honor Elmo R. Willard. Judge Johns, I know there are many doors I walk through because you opened those doors."
Ellis traveled from Houston to pay tribute to Elmo Willard and Theodore Johns because he knows that he and other political leaders today of all races can soar because they are standing on the shoulders of these giants who walked among us.
•••
The funeral service for Judge Johns was held Saturday, March 13, at Antioch Missionary Baptist Church on Cardinal Drive in Beaumont - not far from Lamar University.
|
|
|
|
|
|
