The Florida Legislative Investigation Committee (commonly known as the Johns Committee) was established by the Florida Legislature in 1956, during the era of the Second Red Scare and the Lavender Scare. Like the more famous anti-Communist investigative committees of the McCarthy period in the United States Congress, the Florida committee undertook a wide-ranging investigation of allegedly subversive activities by academics, Civil Rights Movement groups, especially the NAACP, and suspected communist organizations.
Having failed to find communist ties to Florida civil rights organizations, to gain continued funding it began to focus on a more vulnerable target: homosexuals, who at the time were widely believed to be a threat to national security, as well as a threat to youth. Students and faculty were fired or forced to resign from Florida universities, especially the University of Florida.
Charley Johns was leader of the Pork Chop Gang, rural legislators who dominated the Florida Legislature because of chronic misrepresentation, giving a city such as Orlando the same weight in the Legislature as rural Wakulla County. When the Legislature was finally reapportioned, through the Florida Constitution of 1968, the Pork Choppers came to an end, and with them the political power of Charley Johns.
The Sun-Sentinel reported in 2019 that the committee "persecuted civil rights leaders, university professors, college students, public school teachers and state employees for imagined offenses against redneck sensibilities.… Niceties like due process or the right to counsel or civil liberties were ignored.… They employed entrapment and blackmail." The Johns Committee resembled the contemporaneous Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, "but the Sovereignty Commission, bad as it was, lacked the Johns Committee's unrelenting cruelty."
Legislative mandate
Commonly referred to as the Johns Committee after its first chairman, state senator and former acting governor Charley Eugene Johns, the origins of the committee are tied to the panic caused by Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court's unanimous 1954 decision that racial segregation in schools (allegedly separate but equal) was unconstitutional. Many Floridians viewed Brown v. Board of Education as "a day of catastrophe — a Black Monday — a day something like Pearl Harbor". The Legislature passed a resolution (House Concurrent Resolution 174) declaring the Supreme Court decision "null, void and of no force or effect".
Unsuccessful investigation of NAACP
Johns had not succeeded in getting legislative support for a committee to investigate vice crimes. The "hysteria over the prospect of desegregation" led Johns to recast his proposed committee, successfully, as a tool to investigate the NAACP's activities in Florida. The committee's broadly-worded mandate from the Legislature was to "investigate all organizations whose principles or activities include a course of conduct on the part of any person or group which could constitute violence, or a violation of the laws of the state, or would be inimical to the well being and orderly pursuit of their personal and business activities by the majority of the citizens of this state." However, "Johns claimed that he believed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to be the only group that the Committee would investigate."
One of the Johns Committee's first tasks was to investigate and punish faculty and staff at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, a historically black college, for supporting the Tallahassee bus boycott of 1956–1957. The committee sought to find communist links to the NAACP and subpoenaed Ruth Perry three times in an effort gain access to the membership records. The committee was further rebuffed when the NAACP got a ruling from the United States Supreme Court denying the Johns Committee access to their membership lists (which they had mailed out of state, for safekeeping). The committee also investigated the activities of other politically active organizations, such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Ku Klux Klan, as well as both pro-Castro and anti-Castro groups."
Assault on homosexuals
Stymied in their investigation of the NAACP, the committee turned to the issue of homosexuals, specifically at the University at Florida. John d'Emilio has suggested that this may have been provoked by support for desegregation at the University of Florida, but Stacy Braukman sees it simply as a popular issue (cleaning out homosexuals, thought to prey on children) the committee seized hold of. As Johns said in a 1972 interview, "If we saved one boy from being made homosexual, it was justified."