Bootle remembered as 'drum major for justice'

The Macon Telegraph ^ | January 26, 2005 | Don Schanche, Jr.

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Retired U.S. District Judge William Augustus Bootle, who overruled Southern tradition and ordered the desegregation of the University of Georgia and Bibb County public schools, died early Tuesday. He was 102.

Bootle died peacefully at his home between 1 and 1:30 a.m., said his daughter Ann Hall.

"He went to sleep," she said. "We had been with him, my brother and I, that afternoon." The centenarian judge had rebounded from a pre-Christmas hospitalization for kidney trouble, but recently suffered a light stroke and was having heart failure, she said.

Bootle served as judge in the U.S. District Court in Georgia's Middle District from 1954 until 1970 and served another 11 years as a senior judge.

His tenure on the bench coincided with the tumult of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and '70s, and he handled many cases that challenged racial discrimination. His orders in 1961 to integrate the University of Georgia and in 1970 to integrate Bibb County schools exposed him to harsh criticism from conservative white contemporaries, but won him the accolades of history.

"He was a man who had the courage of his convictions at a time when it was hard to have the courage of your convictions," said Charlayne Hunter-Gault, one of two black students admitted to UGA under Bootle's order, and now CNN's bureau chief in Johannesburg, South Africa. She added, "He was one of the drum majors for justice."

Acquaintances lauded Bootle as a man and jurist.

"He's one of my personal heroes," said attorney Albert Reichert Sr., who knew Bootle more than 50 years. "He had a strong sense of what was right, and what was fair and what was just. He felt that it was right and fair and just that all people be respected. The symbol of justice is blindfolded, colorblind. He took that very seriously."

"Judge Bootle was a lawyer's judge and one of the most principled men I've ever known," said U.S. Rep. Jim Marshall, D-Ga., who once clerked for Bootle. "The world, but certainly Middle Georgia, is a far better place for having had him in our midst for more than a century."

"His name evoked the possibility of a fair shot in court, among civil rights attorneys and activists," said Bibb County Chief Magistrate and Civil Court Judge Billy Randall, whose family was on the front lines of the civil rights struggle. "He was a very courageous man to do what he did. Basically what it was, he just followed the law while so many other Southern judges were not so courageous. He put aside whatever personal feelings he had about the situation and he just followed the law."

"He was a wonderful man," said fellow U.S. District Judge Duross Fitzpatrick. "Judge Bootle was larger than life. He was truly a legend in his own time. I think he was probably the most courageous person I've ever known."

And U.S. District Judge Wilbur D. Owens Jr. said, "He was the epitome of justice. He had a reputation for absolute, 100 percent integrity, one always striving to do justice."

Macon Mayor Jack Ellis ordered city flags to fly at half-staff this week in honor of the late judge.

Bootle's life spanned an extraordinary breadth of time and social consciousness. The year of his birth the Boer War had just come to a close, Teddy Roosevelt was president and racial segregation was the unquestioned norm in the South.

Bootle himself progressed from being a lawyer who endorsed that norm to a judge who helped shatter it.

"He's a good example of someone who was able to grow," said Andrew Manis, history professor at Macon State College and author of "Macon Black and White."

"Earlier in his career, when he was a lawyer in the '40s or '50s, he represented a group of white Maconites who wanted to restrict blacks from swimming in a new swimming pool that the city was going to build," Manis said. "In the course of public discussions, some prominent blacks publicly said that Mr. Bootle is not known for being that helpful or having views all that advantageous for Negro citizens."

Later, Manis said, when Bootle issued his integration orders, "He lost a number of friends. Some fellow church members refused to speak to him after (he decided) that the law required that blacks be given access to these public institutions. Now, he wouldn't be considered an activist judge. He didn't act in this way until he felt he had the backing of the U.S. Supreme Court. ... He didn't intend to be a hero, but events moved him in that direction and more importantly the law moved him in that direction."

In the late 1950s, Georgia's early civil rights movement recruited two students to break the university system's color barrier: Hamilton Holmes, a football star at Morehouse College, and Charlayne Hunter, the 1958-'59 queen of Turner High School in Atlanta.

When they applied for admission to UGA, they were turned away. Not, officials said, on account of race, but because of other reasons that somehow kept interfering. No room in the dorms. Complications in transferring Hunter's credits from Wayne State University in Detroit. A traffic ticket on Holmes' record.

It took a federal lawsuit and a Macon judge to break through the subterfuge.

On Jan. 6, 1961, Bootle ordered the university to admit the black students. His ruling sparked an uproar.

Two nights after his decision was announced, Bootle was burned in effigy on the Macon campus of Mercer University, his alma mater. Five days later, when Bootle barred the state from cutting off funds to newly integrated UGA, then-Gov. Ernest Vandiver angrily denounced Bootle's "shocking attempt at usurpation" of state sovereignty.

Bootle later said, "I could not flinch in the face of duty. Simple as that. The federal judge had to assume the responsibility. He had to do it."

In the beginning, Bootle hardly looked like a candidate for that kind of prominence. Born Aug. 19, 1902, on a small farm near Walterboro, S.C., Bootle once told an interviewer that his family home "made Lincoln's log cabin look like a mansion."

In another interview, around the time of his 100th birthday, Bootle gave this account of his early years:

In 1917, Bootle's father went to work as a sawmill superintendent and moved the family to Nashville, Ga. Six months later the family moved to Reidsville.

Bootle wanted to study law, but lacked the money. After high school, at age 15, he went to work as an apprentice acid maker at a Savannah fertilizer company, then at a shipyard and later in his father's business.

But an unusual offer from a Reidsville businessman changed his life. Joshua Beasley loaned Bootle $300 to go to college.

"That's how he got to Mercer," Reichert said. "(Bootle) paid the $300 back as soon as he could. He kept the receipt. He still may have it."

Bootle's association with Mercer became a lifelong love.

He was a lifetime trustee at Mercer, and had graduated from the undergraduate and law schools there. He helped craft Mercer's charter, maintaining the school's academic independence. He was once the dean of the law school, and a chair of professionalism and ethics was established in his name.

Mercer also brought him the love of his life, his wife, Virginia Childs Bootle.

Judge Bootle, who had a deep, bass voice, was singing with a Mercer quartet at Vineville Methodist Church when he met Childs, a Wesleyan College freshman who was singing with the school's glee club.

Virginia Bootle's good humor helped sustain the judge when he faced hostility because of his decisions.

"During the times of the civil rights upsurge, he got numerous telegrams and letters and hate mail." Reichert said. "One of his letters said, 'You sir are a stuppid a--.' " Reichert said Virginia made a joke out of the misspelling.

"She could find a way to lift the spirit," Reichert said.

But Bootle himself was known for his sense of humor.

"He appreciated humor, and even though he was in a very important position in our justice system, he didn't take himself too seriously," Macon attorney Frank Jones said. "He took his job very seriously but maintained humility as a person."

Perhaps half in jest, Bootle once asserted that he owed his great success to the presidential ballot that he cast in 1928. He voted Republican, running counter to the white Southern tradition of voting Democrat. His federal appointments, as U.S. Attorney in 1929 and federal judge in 1954, were made by Republican presidents.

Last year, when Hunter-Gault visited Macon, she and Bootle reminisced about the 1961 case that changed Georgia history. She recalled this conversation:

"He said, 'Charlayne, how long did that trial go on. Do you remember?' I said, 'Yes it was a week.' He said, 'A week? What took so long?'

"People like that are born, not made," Hunter-Gault said. "I don't know where in his background he got the kind of moral courage that he had, but he had it."

- Staff writers Maggie Large and Tim Sturrock contributed to this report, which also includes material from Telegraph archives.

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