A Judge with Guts

It may take a long time, but once Federal Court Judge W. (for Wendell) Arthur Garrity Jr. reaches a conclusion, he sticks to it. He deliberated for more than two years before deciding that conditions at Boston's dilapidated Charles Street jail violated inmates' rights--and then only after he spent a night in a cell. He took 15 months to consider evidence in a suit brought against the School Committee before ruling, in June 1974, that black children in Boston have been systematically deprived of their constitutional right to an equal education. Ever since, in a series of increasingly tough orders that culminated last week with his placing South Boston High in federal receivership, he has determinedly moved toward restoring that right. Says a former law partner: "He knows what he thinks the law says and will go down the line for it."

Garrity, 55, the son of a prominent Worcester, Mass., lawyer, attended Holy Cross College and went on to Harvard Law School--with time out for Signal Corps duty in World War II (he watched the Normandy invasion from a command ship). In private practice in Boston, he represented a wide range of defendants from corporations to Mafia dons.

Garrity is a New Deal Democrat and has been closely associated with the Kennedy family. He worked in the Milwaukee headquarters of John F. Kennedy in the 1960 Wisconsin primary; a year later Kennedy appointed him U.S. Attorney. One of his assistants in that post was Kennedy's cousin, Joseph F. Gargan. In 1966, Ted Kennedy sponsored Garrity's nomination for the federal bench.

The busing decision was Garrity's first major case in education or civil rights, and he was unprepared for the resistance and violence it generated among many of Boston's working-class whites. When antibusing demonstrators stoned busloads of black children and rampaged in the streets in the fall of 1974 after the first phase of Garrity's desegregation plan was instituted, he was outraged: "Scores of young children, frightened out of their wits, afraid to go to school. What a situation. It's intolerable."

Irish Catholic Garrity has been vilified for his strong stand by antibusing demonstrators, who occasionally travel to Wellesley, twelve miles west of Boston, to demonstrate outside his house. Some moderates also feel he has gone too far.

"You won't find a nicer man," says one Boston lawyer. "But his sweeping decisions tend to be insensitive." Others regard his iron will with something approaching awe. In one unsolicited endorsement last summer, Red Sox Pitcher Bill Lee described Garrity as "the only man in this town with any guts."

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