Jurist, novelist, concerned citizen

As a high school senior in the early 1960s, Middlesex Superior Court Judge Julian T. Houston would read accounts of civil rights demonstrations in the South and long to join the fight for racial equality -- while feeling cloistered from the fray at his Connecticut boarding school.

Now, more than 40 years later, Houston feels able to make the contribution he couldn't then. But rather than staging sit-ins, he fights from the bench and with a pen.

Houston, 61, has published a young adult novel loosely based on some of what he observed and experienced as a youth in the '50s and '60s, and spoke about it recently at the Central Square branch of the Cambridge Public Library, not far from where he lived while attending Boston University in the 1960s.

Houston's novel, ''New Boy," opens in 1959, amid turbulent desegregation efforts. Fifteen-year-old Rob Garrett and his parents have decided that he should attend a boarding school in New England to avoid Virginia's segregated schools. He attends the fictional Draper School in Connecticut as its first black student.

Houston himself, who grew up in Richmond, Va., made the same decision to avoid going to a segregated public school, and attended the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Conn., where he says he was very unhappy.

''Going to boarding school was a joint decision," he said. ''I wanted to go. The school had its own golf course and a pool. I thought I was going to paradise."

''I was miserable there," he said. ''But it taught me how to write and it changed my outlook on life by making me aware of what the upper class, the aristocracy -- and there is one -- is about, and I am not intimidated by that now."

He was the fourth black student to attend Hotchkiss, and although he didn't experience the same hazing and intimidation he witnessed happening to an Italian-American classmate, he said he felt alienated racially and culturally.

The experience of observing how the other boys intimidated and harassed his Italian-American peer stuck with Houston and became the genesis for writing his novel and his inspiration for the character of Vinnie.

In the novel, Rob becomes active in the civil rights movement in Harlem. Houston's own activism didn't begin until he came to Boston University in the 1960s.

Within two months of his arrival in Boston, Houston organized a boycott in Roxbury and, by his account, narrowly avoided arrest several times over the years.

He decided to become a lawyer because he wanted to continue to contribute to the civil rights movement in some way. In 1984, while he was a judge in Roxbury District Court, he had an idea for creating a childcare center at the court for people with business there who couldn't afford a babysitter.

''It grew to include 10 Massachusetts courts and served nearly 18,000 kids each year," Houston said.

The program ended in 2002, when Governor Jane Swift cut funding, he said.

''I'm still trying to see that justice is realized," he says of his work at the Cambridge courthouse.

Houston says he worries especially about the prospects for young black men in the US and their disproportionately high rate of unemployment.

''I think there are several reasons for it," he said. ''Young men are not finishing school, and they are pursuing lifestyles that are counterproductive to the workplace of the 21st century.

''In dress, behavior, even hairstyles," he continued, ''they take themselves out of the mainstream and make it difficult to find employment that is meaningful."

He said he believes kids need fewer ''feel-good" programs and more programs that are ''frank with kids about what they need to survive today."