The State Bar of Georgia’s
Committee to Promote Inclusion in the Profession presents its Commitment to
Equality Awards to persons who have shown a strong commitment to promoting
diversity in the profession and who are committed to providing opportunities that
foster a more diverse legal profession for members of underrepresented
groups. This year the Committee has
selected Charles S. Johnson to received its
Randolph Thrower Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of forty years of
work to secure a more accountable and representative judiciary. The award will be presented at the Bar's Annual meeting in Hilton Head in June.
Georgia’s constitution provides
that most of the State’s trial and appellate court judges are chosen by popular election, and
that mid-term vacancies are filled by gubernatorial appointment. However, many members of the public know very
little about the qualifications of prospective judges and are disengaged from
the process of judicial selection. In the
1970s, the leaders of Atlanta’s the historically Black Gate City Bar Association decided to take on the task of working to make the judiciary more accountable and
responsive. This decision stemmed from the belief that judicial
accountability requires that the courts be representative of the communities
that they serve; that judicial diversity also promotes impartiality by ensuring
that all viewpoints, perspectives and values are part of the decision-making
process. Accordingly, these leaders began
to erect an infrastructure which enabled them to directly engage with the
judicial selection process while educating the public on the importance of
judicial selection.
In 1974, the City of Atlanta
adopted a new charter which gave the Gate City Bar equal status with the
Atlanta Bar Association in recommending candidates to the Mayor for vacancies
in the City and Municipal Courts. In
1977, Gate City formalized its involvement in the process by which Georgia’s
Governor made appointments to statewide judicial positions and to the local
courts of Fulton County. As part of this
involvement, the Association regularly polled its members on the relative
qualifications of judicial candidates, and it also met with the Judicial
Nominating Commission (the “JNC,” created to screen candidates and make
recommendations to the Governor) to share the Association’s views.
With the Presidency and Congress
both in Democratic hands for the first time in several years, the Gate City Bar
played a leading role in a community–wide effort to influence the implementation
of the Omnibus Judgeship Bill of 1978, which ultimately resulted in the creation
of five new judgeships in the Northern District of Georgia. This effort included a study of the lack of
diversity among federal judges in the Southern states, as well as meetings with representatives
of the Senate, the Justice Department, and the American Bar Association, and it
is regarded by some as playing a role in the nomination and confirmation of
Horace T. Ward as Georgia’s first federal district judge.
The Association also served as a
forum for the discussion of judicial elections.
For example, in 1980 a position became vacant on the Superior Court of
Fulton County, requiring a county-wide election. Five candidates stepped forward for this
vacancy, including one who was a sitting member of the Atlanta City Council and
another who was a prominent figure in the Atlanta Bar Association. Both the Atlanta Bar and the Gate City Bar
polled their members as to the relative merits of the candidates, and the
results of both of these polls were highly publicized. Predictably, the highest ratings in the
Atlanta Bar’s poll went to the candidate who was one of its most active
members. In the poll conducted by the
Gate City Bar Association, the highest ratings went to Clarence Cooper, who had
previously served as Staff Attorney for the Atlanta Legal Aid Society,
Assistant Fulton County District Attorney, and Judge of the Atlanta Municipal
Court. The candidate who received the
highest ratings in the Atlanta Bar’s poll went on to obtain the endorsement of
the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
However, following an energetic and ground-breaking campaign, it was Judge
Cooper, who had received the highest ratings in the Gate City Bar poll, who was
ultimately chosen by the voters, becoming the first African in Georgia history
to take office by county-wide election.
The election of Judge Cooper
showed that, given an appropriate level of public engagement, the electoral
process afforded the opportunity to select – in the first instance, rather than
to merely re-elect - highly-qualified judges who were also representative of
the communities they served. This lesson
was further illustrated by the subsequent popular election of judges such as A.
L. Thompson, Leah Sears, and Kimberly Adams.
A number of bar leaders played
critical roles in this process. Among
them was Tom Sampson who, as Gate City’s President in 1977, urged the creation
of a judicial selection initiative within the Bar. To carry out this initiative, Sampson chose
Charles S. Johnson. Johnson served for
twenty years as Chair of the Atlanta Judicial Commission, where he worked with
Mayors Maynard Jackson, Andrew Young and Bill Campbell to create a highly-qualified
and broadly representative Municipal Court bench. He founded Gate City’s Judicial Nominating
Committee, oversaw the Association’s judicial polls, and served as the
Association’s liaison with the JNC. He
and others raised the filing fee for Clarence Cooper’s successful campaign of
1980, and he also served as Judge Cooper’s Campaign Treasurer. He also played a key
role in the campaign of A.L. Thompson.
More recently, Johnson has worked
with other bar leaders (including past Presidents of Gate City and the Georgia
Association of Black Women Attorneys) to reverse the recent erosion of diversity in Atlanta’s
judiciary. This group’s efforts have
included frequent “op-eds”, alliances with community-based organizations, and
engagement with public officials (ranging from local legislators to the White
House Counsel). The group has also sought to inspire a new generation of advocates
who will take the lead in recruiting, vetting, encouraging and supporting highly-qualified
and diverse candidates for elevation through the elective and appointive
processes.
