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Carlton: The Johns Committee was wrong. So say it.

Should Florida apologize for the Johns Committee, which worked to out and oust gay professors? To right history, yes. Now.
 
Charley Johns was a former Florida governor and the leader of a legislative committee that worked to out and oust gay teachers and others deemed subversive.
Charley Johns was a former Florida governor and the leader of a legislative committee that worked to out and oust gay teachers and others deemed subversive.
Published Feb. 22, 2019

Among matters soon to be contemplated by lawmakers in Tallahassee — red light cameras, motorized scooters, arming teachers and whether cities should be allowed to regulate backyard vegetable gardens, and no I did not make that up — is a proposal that we should apologize.

Florida's infamous Johns Committee, so-named for its first chairman Sen. Charley Johns, is a dark and McCarthy-esque piece of our history. Convened in 1956 with the broad purpose of ferreting out subversive activity, the Johns Committee unsuccessfully tried to prove communist links to the NAACP. Then it went after suspected gay professors and students in our state university system, the theory being that, politics or sexual orientation, deviance was deviance.

In fact, our own University of South Florida was deemed a haven for "sexual deviants." At least five faculty members were ousted, and more than a dozen at the University of Florida. (Investigators even surveilled the men's room at the Alachua County Courthouse, trolling johns for johns, the joke went.) Students and teachers were identified as homosexual and a threat. Lives were upended. A UF professor tried to take his own life.

After nine years, the Johns Committee died the death it deserved.

Today, state House Rep. Evan Jenne, a Democrat from Dania Beach, is proposing a resolution, HCR 893, to acknowledge "injustices perpetrated against targets" of the Johns Committee and offer a "formal and heartfelt apology to those whose lives, well-being and livelihoods were damaged or destroyed" by the committee's work and public pronouncements.

And let the rolling of eyes commence, as they do any time someone suggests we officially admit for the record how wrong we once were.

People will argue that it happened a long time ago. And it's true that, with considerable struggle, the world has seen progress: We can marry whom we want. We can almost stop saying "the first openly gay" county commissioner, mayor or other politician because of the varied make-up of our local government.

But officials acknowledging what happened in the past matters when there are those who claim "fake news" when the truth does not suit them, and those who deny the Holocaust, 9/11 or the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary ever happened.

People will say it looks weak to say you're sorry, that it's frivolous and beyond the serious business of legislators. Who, for the record, are also expected to consider whether restaurants should be allowed to hand out plastic drinking straws. And just this week, debated whether we should print on our lottery tickets that buying them is gambling and you probably won't win a big prize anyway. Which is to say their job is varied.

And sometimes symbolic.

Public meetings from your local city council on up are often lousy with symbolic pronouncements and acknowledgments on everything from Boys Scouts to Black History Month. As it should be. Part of government's job is to mark the world at the moment for the record.

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To acknowledge.

Here's an interesting perspective: Times' reporter Craig Pittman recently spoke to the widow of C.W. Bill Young, a Pinellas legislator on the Johns Committee before he became a congressman. Beverly Young said her husband was appointed as a freshman and didn't want to be there but had no choice. She also said: "Of course I think we should apologize."

And how could acknowledging a governmental wrong that ruined the lives of Floridians possibly be partisan? In 2017, the Legislature managed a notably bipartisan apology to the families of the Groveland Four, four black men wrongly accused of raping a white woman in 1949.

This resolution would not be a taxpayer boondoggle. It doesn't need to take much time. And it would mark Florida's past and present.

This would be saying even if it's who some of us once were — and what our state once did — it is, officially and for the record, not who we are now.

If that's what we believe, why wouldn't we say it?

Contact Sue Carlton at scarlton@tampabay.com.