Florida Legislative Investigation Committee

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.

"[4] 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.

[6] 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.

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.

Having the power to subpoena witnesses, take sworn testimony, and employ secret informants, the committee spread terror among the closeted lesbian and gay population in state colleges, often using uniformed policemen to pull students and professors out of classes for interrogation.

[11] Sodomy was a crime under Florida law at that time and remained so until the United States Supreme Court's Lawrence v. Texas ruling in 2003.

However, the Johns Committee had already begun interrogating suspected homosexuals among students and faculty on Florida campuses before the legislature gave specific authorization for it.

He also prohibited the accused from confronting their complainants, seldom informed subjects of their legal or constitutional rights, and rarely offered them sufficient time to secure an attorney or prepare a defense.Students, too, faced the committee's wrath.

While faculty and staff suffered immediate dismissal if suspected of homosexuality, gay students could remain on campus only if they visited the infirmary and submitted to psychiatric treatments throughout their academic career.… The FLIC compelled personnel at the UF medical center to disclose information found in patient records and…also reserved the right to seize clinical records as it did when investigators seized paperwork on thirty-five female students who had given birth out of wedlock at the UF facility.

Over the next year, the university continued "investigations and expulsions of students and faculty" because, to pacify the Johns Committee, it had committed itself to "legitimate self-policing".

[9]: 93 By 1963, the Johns Committee could boast of having caused the firing of 39 professors and deans, as well as the revoking of teaching certificates for 71 public school teachers, all suspected or admitted homosexuals.

"[16] He permitted Johns Committee uniformed investigators to come on campus and to make tape recordings of interrogation sessions with faculty and students.

[17] Not content with rooting out homosexuals, the Johns Committee's investigators also interfered with academic freedom on state college campuses: Once in Tampa [at the University of South Florida], the committee singled out faculty for allegedly picking up on male students, scheduling speeches by "known communist sympathizers," teaching evolution as fact and assigning "obscene" books of "intellectual garbage" like the classic Catcher in the Rye.

USF suspended Sheldon N. Grebstein, assistant professor of English, after the Committee denounced him for handing out "indecent" reprints of literary criticism aimed at Beat writers.

[17] Another source states that: the committee surmised that USF's curriculum corrupted students through the use of "trashy and pornographic" works such as The Grapes of Wrath and Brave New World and that some faculty "were not qualified to teach" because they introduced evolution into their lectures in biology classes.

The plain fact of the matter is that a great many homosexuals have an insatiable appetite for sexual activities and find special gratification in the recruitment to their ranks of youth.

We hope that many citizen organizations in Florida will use this report… to prepare their children to meet the temptations of homosexuality lurking today in the vicinity of nearly every institution of learning.

Lawmakers outraged at what the media were calling "state-sponsored pornography" forbade the printing of further copies and eliminated funding for the Johns Committee at the next legislative session.

The committee subsequently disbanded and ceased its work on July 1, 1965, having amassed 30,000 pages of secret documents, which were left in the custody of the legislature, to be kept sealed for 72 years.

[1] In 2000, University of Florida student Allyson A. Beutke produced a half-hour documentary on the workings of the Johns Committee, Behind Closed Doors, as her master's thesis in mass communication.