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Gator's fame was a shame, some say

A list of prominent UF ex-students includes a governor who campaigned against gays, Jews and blacks.

By DAVID KARP
Published July 1, 2005

	[Times files]
	Former Gov. Charley Eugene Johns made the list of 81 prominent Gators at No. 39. This page is from the University of Florida Alumni Association magazine Today. The writer was unaware of his history.

GAINESVILLE - The editor of the University of Florida alumni magazine is not the kind to invite controversy.

She prefers feature stories about cancer survivors. She feels uncomfortable asking people she's interviewed for their ages.

So Liesl O'Dell, 35, never imagined the stir she would cause when she wrote and rewrote one paragraph in a story about prominent UF alumni. In that line, she said UF alumni could be proud of 81 Gators who influenced Florida history.

One of them was Charley Johns, the Florida legislator who led a campaign to persecute gays, African-Americans, Jews and liberals in the 1950s at UF and other Florida campuses. Johns died in 1990 at age 84.

Thursday, the UF Alumni Association publicly apologized for the article, which it said should have been better researched.

"It was a mistake," said Randy Talbot, executive director of the UF Alumni Association, who did not know who Charley Johns was until the article appeared.

O'Dell, who reported the story, found out before publication that Johns, a former governor, had worked against Communists during the 1950s. She also knew he supported segregation - something mentioned in the one-paragraph entry on Johns in the UF Today article.

She said she had heard vaguely that Johns had bashed gays and Jews too.

But she didn't realize the full extent of Johns' legacy until a friend at UF clued her in after the magazine appeared.

She asked O'Dell: "Do you know what the Johns Committee is about?"

Like Talbot, she did not.

When O'Dell learned about it, she said she felt awful. In an interview this week, she apologized - over and over again - for offending anyone.

* * *

The Florida Legislative Investigation Committee was formed in 1956, during the civil rights era, to investigate people "advocating violence ... or violation of the laws of Florida."

But historians say it quickly became a witch hunt to root out gay and lesbian students and professors, as well as civil rights activists, African-Americans, Jews and others Johns considered subversive.

The committee subpoenaed students and professors to appear, often at a motel near campus, to grill them on their sexual activities. It paid informants to root out gays and lesbians, and wrote down the license plate numbers of cars near gay bars, said Jim Schnur, an adjunct instructor at Eckerd College who has written about the Johns Committee.

They even asked a man if he ever had nontraditional forms of sex with his own spouse, he said. In Gainesville, the committee dispatched local police officers to the county courthouse to time how long men spent in bathrooms, he said.

In all, more than 100 university teachers and administrators were removed because of the investigation, and an unknown number of students were forced to leave school. Hundreds of others were investigated.

If teachers did not name names, they were threatened with a public hearing on their moral character.

In a 1972 interview, Johns said that he saw the committee as a way to stamp out homosexuality. Johns, who spent only a few months at UF and did not graduate, was especially disturbed by the number of homosexuals at UF.

"I don't get no love out of hurting people," he said. "But that situation in Gainesville, my lord a'mercy. I never saw nothing like it in my life. If we saved one boy from being made a homosexual, it was justified."

* * *

Including Johns on a list of prominent Gators immediately caught the attention of UF's gay and lesbian community. "People were definitely upset about it," said Tamara Cohen, UF director of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender affairs.

"So many LBGT folk know immediately about the Johns Committee and who Charley Johns was," Cohen said. "But clearly that information has not gotten out or is not remembered by anyone else."

The episode with the alumni magazine shows how people forget certain parts of history, she said.

"This was a shameful episode that at the time was kept quiet. People did not talk about it. I think that legacy of not talking about it persisted."

--This article included information from the Associated Press and Times files. David Karp can be reached at 1-800-333-7505, ext. 8430, or karp@sptimes.com

[Last modified July 1, 2005, 08:30:50]