Judge recalls childhood in segregated south

Now 61, Julian Houston has more than four decades up North behind him, first as one of a handful of minorities in a Connecticut boarding school, now as an associate justice of the Middlesex Superior Court. But it's his Southern past that Houston recalls in his book, "New Boy," released for young adults late last year. The book is a fictional account of the life of a black boarding school student in the 1950s, but it's drawn from his experiences.

Houston, of Brookline, grew up in Richmond, Va., the only child in middle class family. Houston said his parents did what they could to shield him from the indignities of segregation, such as driving him everywhere so he wouldn't be confined to the black section on public transportation.

But the effects of segregation were impossible to avoid. At department stores, Houston couldn't try on the clothing, though whites could. At the movies, he sat in an all-black section. He went to an all-black school with black teachers. A black couldn't even think of entering a white-owned restaurant. And the threat of severe retribution hung over anyone who considered retaliation for the inequality or racial epithets routinely directed at blacks.

"You just lived a totally separate existence," he said. "We all knew it was wrong. We deplored it."

Relief came at age 15, in 1959, when Houston entered the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Conn.

"I felt that I had escaped," he said. "My friends were all very jealous of me because I was getting away from it."