In the early 1950s, State Sen. Charley Eugene Johns led the “pork chop gang,” a group of 20 state senators from mostly rural northern Florida who dominated state politics and, among other things, shared a commitment to maintaining racial segregation, especially in schools.
The 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education — which ruled that laws mandating racial segregation in public schools were unconstitutional — prompted fears among White Southerners. This helped Johns gain the support he needed to create a legislative committee tasked with investigating the perceived subversive and radical elements he and his fellow Southern Democrats associated with Black civil rights advocacy. In 1956, the legislature created the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, which became better known as the “Johns Committee” because of the senator’s central role.
The Johns Committee was initially tasked with investigating groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for signs of communist infiltration and influence. This effort stemmed from anti-Black sentiments that even found some White Southerners arguing that the Black civil rights movement was a Soviet plot meant to disrupt American harmony and democracy.
Yet, after unsuccessful attempts to uncover such subversion, the committee turned its attention more fully to another scapegoat it believed threatened the safety of Florida’s children: LGBTQ people.
Taxpayer dollars paid for investigations of suspected LGBTQ professors and students throughout the state university system, purging dozens of women and men from the University of Florida, Florida State University and the then-nascent University of South Florida. In 1964, the committee notoriously published what became known as the “Purple Pamphlet,” officially titled “Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida,” that aimed to provide information that parents could use “to prepare” children “to meet the temptations of homosexuality lurking today in the vicinity of nearly every institution of learning.”
This anti-LGBTQ policy trickled down to local school boards and lower levels of education in myriad ways. Rumors could be enough to spawn an investigation or ruin a career. In 1962, two English teachers at a junior high school in Jacksonville were accused of being “involved in a homosexual relationship.” Schoolchildren had reportedly complained about the teachers’ “association” with one another as well as one of the women’s “unladylike posture.” Another investigation began when a committee informant claimed to have overheard a man loudly “accuse” his own sister, who taught at a Fort Lauderdale elementary school, “of being a homosexual.”
Following years of largely embarrassing stunts and failures, the Johns Committee disbanded in 1965 — but it succeeded in entrenching a pervasive narrative about children being susceptible to the “corrupting” influences of LGBTQ people in Florida’s political culture.