Florida Legislative Investigation Committee

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."^[1] 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."^[1]