S. Boston's James Kelly dies at 66

James M. Kelly, the powerful city councilor from South Boston who was considered a pugnacious neighborhood champion by his supporters but a polarizing symbol of intolerance by others, died yesterday morning after a long battle with cancer. He was 66.

Mr. Kelly, who served an unequaled seven consecutive terms as City Council president, had undergone several surgeries since 2003 to remove cancerous masses from his brain and colon.

After achieving notoriety as a firebrand opponent of court-ordered busing in the mid-1970s, Mr. Kelly used his 23 years on the City Council as a bully pulpit. He fought integration of South Boston's public housing, battled the inclusion of gay and lesbian marchers in the neighborhood's St. Patrick's Day parade, and negotiated a controversial financial bonanza for the neighborhood in exchange for his support of waterfront development.

William M. Bulger, the former state Senate president from South Boston, said Mr. Kelly "had that most valuable quality of courage."

The councilor trusted his own judgment "to the point where you assert it, stand for it, and fight for it," added Bulger, who will deliver a eulogy at a funeral Mass Friday.

As a councilor, Mr. Kelly earned a reputation among friend and foe as doggedly attentive to constituent services, often personally responding to complaints about potholes, abandoned cars, and rowdy teen-agers. But outside his district, Mr. Kelly was often seen as an unapologetic point-man for a white constituency that he considered under attack and belittled by a liberal elite, a view that shaped his public persona beginning with the violent antibusing demonstrations that rocked South Boston.

To many, Mr. Kelly, a lifelong resident of South Boston, became the most visible face of his neighborhood, a symbol of what some perceived as an angry, isolated enclave that bitterly resisted change. But within the neighborhood, Mr. Kelly continued to be idolized among the long-established Irish-American families that gave South Boston a national reputation for tough-minded, community-oriented, politically savvy cohesion.

In the end, Mr. Kelly proved to be a tenacious political survivor, holding the council presidency from 1994 to 2000 and wielding influence afterward, even as the city's demographics changed and the council became more diverse.

Mr. Kelly helped frustrate plans to move the New England Patriots to South Boston. He also opposed French doors on bars and cafes in the neighborhood and sought to restrict sun decks in a district that became increasingly gentrified.

Mr. Kelly had an up-and-down relationship with Mayor Thomas M. Menino and was not afraid to buck the mayor. Yesterday, Menino called him "a true gentleman, a man of his word whose convictions always came from the heart."

Governor Deval Patrick also had praise for Mr. Kelly. "He was a passionate advocate for his beloved neighborhood and constituents," Patrick said. "His dedication to public service was unquestioned."

Mr. Kelly was born shortly before the United States entered World War II to a father who worked as a laborer for the Boston Housing Authority and a mother who ironed for a laundry service. Like many of his generation in South Boston, Mr. Kelly had a passion for sports and played football at South Boston High School. After graduating from high school in 1958, he married in 1959 and worked as a sheet-metal apprentice, eventually joining the union.

Off the job, Mr. Kelly pursued a fast, hard-drinking life in which he fraternized with the notorious Mullins Gang from South Boston and often carried a gun. The drinking took a toll on his personal life, Mr. Kelly once recalled. In 1971, after a weeklong binge following St. Patrick's Day, he joined Alcoholics Anonymous.

In 1974, divorced and disabled by an industrial accident that had severed the tendons in his right hand, Mr. Kelly found an all-consuming focus in the federal court order to integrate the Boston schools. A tough, stocky man with a penchant for brown leather jackets, Mr. Kelly clashed with police sent to South Boston to protect black students from white protesters and also confronted black demonstrators at Carson Beach.

Mr. Kelly first tested the political waters in 1981 when he ran for City Council, whose nine members were selected in citywide voting. He finished 10th, but the seeds of his future success were apparent: He had outpolled Raymond L. Flynn, the successful mayoral candidate, in their native South Boston. In 1983, the City Council expanded to 13 members, with nine seats dedicated to individual districts. Mr. Kelly won the District 2 seat -- which also included Chinatown, Bay Village, much of the South End, and a slice of Dorchester -- and was never seriously challenged afterward.

During that first successful campaign, Mr. Kelly spoke to residents' fears that the neighborhood's public housing projects would become substantially integrated, saying he harbored crime-related "concerns about a large influx of blacks moving to South Boston." Later, in 1988, he challenged federally mandated integration of public housing as reverse discrimination against white residents, who previously had received preference for vacancies in their neighborhood.

Mr. Kelly repeatedly insisted that he was not a bigot and that he supported equal opportunity for all races. But he nearly came to blows with Councilor Charles C. Yancey, a black representative for Mattapan and North Dorchester, after an expletive-laden shouting match in 1991. However, a decade later Mr. Kelly engineered Yancey's election as council president knowing he himself could not win an eighth term with the gavel.

"We differed on many key issues," Yancey said yesterday. "But after the debates and the sometimes confrontational discussions, we always came together as friends." The morning after the 1991 shouting match, Yancey recalled, he and Kelly attended the groundbreaking of the South Bay shopping center. "There we were, the best of friends, and having a great time," Yancey said.

Yancey said Mr. Kelly's views on racial issues appeared to evolve over time. Mr. Kelly's support for a 1999 resolution to honor Martin Luther King Jr., Yancey said, would have been unthinkable at the beginning of Mr. Kelly's political career.

To the end, Mr. Kelly was considered a formidable political presence in a city renowned for them. "We worked together for better neighborhoods, and, yes, we often strongly disagreed on issues," Flynn said in a statement. "But he was my friend. . . . Jim Kelly was one of a kind."

Mr. Kelly's son, James M. Kelly Jr., said his father died at 4:19 a.m. surrounded by family and close friends after five days of hospice care. Mr. Kelly last attended a City Council meeting on Dec. 6.

"As he struggled with this disease for the last few years, my father was enormously grateful for the outpouring of love and affection from his friends and neighbors," the younger Kelly said.

Mr. Kelly leaves three children, Sandra J. Walsh of Chester, N.H., James Jr. of Norwell, and Thomas F. of South Boston; two sisters, Margaret Moretto of Wakefield and Elizabeth Lynch of South Boston; and seven grandchildren.

A funeral Mass will be said at noon Friday at St. Brigid Church, South Boston.

Globe correspondent Andrew C. Ryan contributed to this obituary.