<p>Angry whites burned an effigy of U.S. District Judge William Augustus Bootle when he ordered the desegregation of the University of Georgia in 1961, but he said the decision wasn't a difficult one for him to make.</p><p>Bootle, who died at his home here Tuesday at the age of 102, put it this way during an interview upon reaching his 100th birthday:</p><p>"It wasn't hard at all. Once you decide what's right, the making of it is easy. Right is right."</p><p>Bootle made a string of historic civil rights decisions in the 1960s, from desegregating the state's college system to integrating buses and school systems to ensuring blacks' place on voter rolls.</p><p>He signed the University of Georgia order following a weeklong trial that pitted two black students _ Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes Jr. _ against the school's top ranks and, for at least a time, the state's top political leaders.</p><p>However, four days after issuing his order, as Holmes and Hunter were registering at the university, Bootle stayed his own ruling, saying he wanted to give the state the opportunity to appeal. However, hours later, Elbert Tuttle, chief judge of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, ruled that Bootle's stay was "improvidently granted" and overturned it.</p><p>Bootle then ordered Gov. Ernest Vandiver not to cut off funds to the university as a state law provided should a Georgia school integrate.</p><p>Despite all the legal wrangling, the integration of the state's flagship university proceeded with relative calm compared to other states. Now, a key administration building on the Athens campus is named in honor of the school's first two black students, and Macon's federal courthouse was named in Bootle's honor in 1998.</p><p>"Judge Bootle took the lead in bringing about the elimination of segregation in the field of education and otherwise," said Carl Sanders, Georgia's governor from 1963 to 1967. "At the time, most politicians didn't appreciate his attitude and his decisions. But in the long run, when you look back on the result of what he was trying to do, you can't help but admit and admire the courage and the legal fortitude that he expressed at that particular time in the history of our state and the country."</p><p>Among Bootle's other decisions were ones ordering the Bibb Transit Co. to integrate seating on its buses, and ordering several middle Georgia counties to restore the names of blacks who were removed from voter rolls.</p><p>His most bitter battle would be the campaign to desegregate Bibb County schools, which took seven years. The struggle began in 1963, when a lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court on behalf of 44 black children.</p><p>The following year, Bootle issued an order directing the school board to make a "prompt and reasonable start" toward eliminating separate school systems. But it would be 1970 before the schools were finally desegregated.</p><p>Bootle also presided over the trial of Preston King, an Albany man who refused to obey his draft notice because the board stopped calling him "sir" and "Mr. King" when it saw he was black.</p><p>Bootle sentenced King to 18 months for draft evasion, but he never served the time. Instead, King fled to England and remained there for 39 years until receiving a pardon from President Clinton in 2000 _ a pardon which Bootle helped initiate.</p><p>"Someone asked me why I changed my mind. There's no inconsistency between imposing a sentence and favoring a pardon," Bootle said at the time. Back in those days, "I was just learning that it was appropriate to say `mister' to a black person."</p><p>King later visited Georgia several times, including a stop at Bootle's home. He was greeted with this phrase: "Mr. Preston King, welcome back to America and to my home."</p><p>Bootle also compared King to other blacks who took strong stands for civil rights.</p><p>"The lady on the bus in Montgomery _ Rosa Parks _ it took them both to show us just how wrongful racial discrimination was," Bootle said at the time.</p><p>State Sen. Robert Brown, D-Macon, said Bootle came from an unlikely heritage as a rural white Southerner to have such an impact on civil rights.</p><p>"You look at his profile and think that this is certainly not somebody who's going to make a landmark decision in desegregation. But he felt it was his duty as a judge to look at the law and apply it, and that's what he did," Brown said.</p><p>Bootle was born in 1902 in Walterboro, S.C., but spent most of his life in Georgia. His family moved to Reidsville in 1917 and he came to Macon and enrolled Mercer University in 1920.</p><p>He became a federal judge in 1954 and retired as senior judge in 1970. But he continued presiding over federal cases on a part-time basis until 1981.</p><p>His wife of more than 70 years, Virginia Childs Bootle, died June 24.</p><p>A funeral service for Bootle is set for 11 a.m. Saturday at the First Baptist Church in Macon, Ga. Visitation was planned for 6 p.m. Friday at Snow's Memorial Chapel.</p>
