Julian T. Houston

Julian T. Houston died on September 10, 2026, at the age of 82. He lived in Brookline, Massachusetts, and his health had been declining, according to The Boston Globe. No cause of death has been made public.

His death was announced in a family obituary placed through Brezniak Funeral Directors of West Newton and a death notice in the Boston Globe in mid September, followed by a full Globe obituary by Bryan Marquard on October 4, 2026. Burial was private; James Carroll delivered the eulogy at the graveside service. A memorial service celebrating his life is planned for the spring, and the family asked that donations be made to Roxbury Youthworks in place of flowers.

Tributes came from across Boston's legal and civil rights communities. Mia Alvarado, executive director of Roxbury Youthworks, said he "dedicated his life to helping any youths who were at risk in the City of Boston." James Carroll called him "the real thing" and said: "He was the best of us." The Superior Court Clerks Association wrote that he "was a favorite of court staff, because he cared." He is survived by his wife, Susan; his children, Elisabeth and Daniel; his daughter-in-law, Mayu; and his grandson, Noah.

Julian Towns Houston was born in Richmond, Virginia, on July 19, 1944. He was the only son of Alice Jackson Stuart, an educator described in his family's obituary as a figure in Virginia's civil rights history, and he grew up with her devotion to teaching and her gift for storytelling. According to The Boston Globe, his parents divorced, and after his mother remarried he lived with her and his stepfather, Dr. J. Earle Stuart, a physician, in New Jersey. He attended the public schools of Richmond and then the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut. "I was miserable there," he told the Globe in 2006. "But it taught me how to write."

He entered Boston University in 1962. Within two months he was spending his weekends in Roxbury working on a boycott of the Wonder Bread factory, which sold its products to the Black community but refused to hire from it. In July 1963 he helped keep order among about a thousand marchers walking to Boston Common for a memorial to Medgar Evers. That fall he left BU for a year to work in Harlem as a community organizer for the Northern Student Movement. He then returned and became the first Black student elected president of the BU student body, winning what the Globe reported in 1966 was the largest plurality ever given to a Student Congress presidential candidate. He graduated in 1968 with a degree in government.

At Boston University School of Law he spent one summer working for the consumer advocate Ralph Nader in Washington and another as law clerk to the Boston trial attorney William P. Homans, with whom he practiced after graduating.

In 1974 Houston became director of the Juvenile Justice Project at the Massachusetts Advocacy Center, now Massachusetts Advocates for Children. There he organized Project Interaction, which brought 36 high school students from the South to Boston to help local students through the first year of court-ordered school desegregation.

In January 1979, in the final hours of Governor Michael Dukakis's first term and after a contested confirmation before the Governor's Council, he was appointed at the age of 34 as an associate justice of the Roxbury District Court, with principal responsibility for its juvenile session. The court had not heard juvenile cases for thirteen years, so he convened a committee of professionals, chaired by Dean Hubie Jones of the Boston University School of Social Work, to advise on the services young people needed. Its recommendations became Roxbury Youthworks, which opened in 1981 and now offers diversion, job training and other programs for young people in Roxbury, Dorchester, Roslindale and Chelsea. He served on its board from the beginning and stepped down as its president about five years before his death.

In 1990, during his third term, Dukakis appointed Houston to the Massachusetts Superior Court, where, as one of a small number of Black judges in the state's trial courts, he presided over criminal and civil trials until his retirement in August 2006.

His work off the bench was just as wide. In 1984 he was instrumental in founding the Justice George Lewis Ruffin Society, now based at Northeastern University, to advance people of color in criminal justice. When its promotional exam course began, the Boston Police Department had a single minority superior officer; in 1986 fifteen minority sergeants were sworn in, all but one of them graduates of the course. Troubled by parents who brought small children into his courtroom because they had nowhere else to leave them, he led a four year effort that opened the first court-based childcare center in New England at the Roxbury courthouse in 1989, and nine more followed across the state. In 1987 he established the Boston Symphony Orchestra's Roxbury Community Program, and he spent four years bringing about the orchestra's 1996 Tribute to Roland Hayes, for which George Walker's Lilacs was commissioned; it won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. He conceived and chaired Long Road to Justice: The African American Experience in Massachusetts Courts, which was permanently installed at the Edward W. Brooke Courthouse in 2018, and helped bring a portrait of Edward O. Gourdin, the first African American Superior Court judge, into a Massachusetts courtroom. He also served on the Massachusetts State Board of Education, as a trustee of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and as a Life Trustee of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

In 2005 Houghton Mifflin published his novel New Boy, drawn from his own boyhood: the story of a Black teenager who leaves segregated Virginia in the late 1950s for a Connecticut boarding school and finds that prejudice does not stop at the Mason-Dixon line. Booklist gave it a starred review. He also wrote for The Boston Globe, the Boston Observer and the Boston Bar Journal, and devoted much of his retirement to writing.

Houston met Susan Levine at Boston University, and they married on September 12, 1971. She later served as executive director of MassEcon, a nonprofit that helps companies relocate or expand in Massachusetts. They were married for nearly 55 years and raised their children, Elisabeth and Daniel, in Brookline, in the former home of Judge Charles Wyzanski, later moving to a Brookline apartment. He delighted in his grandson, Noah.

His family remembered him as a keen cook whose kitchen was a gathering place for friends, a lover of music and fiction, and a devoted owner of four standard poodles. Summers were spent at the family cabin on Lake Luzerne in the Adirondacks. Many of his friendships lasted sixty years, among them with the writer James Carroll.

Houston's name is inscribed among Boston's civil rights heroes on the 1965 Freedom Plaza surrounding The Embrace, the Boston Common memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King. Roxbury Youthworks, which grew from the committee he convened in 1979, continues to serve court-involved young people across Boston, and the Justice George Lewis Ruffin Society he helped found still works to advance people of color in the legal and criminal justice fields. The Long Road to Justice exhibition he conceived remains on permanent display at the Edward W. Brooke Courthouse.

Former governor Michael Dukakis, who appointed him to both of his judicial posts, called him "just an extraordinary human being." Former governor Deval Patrick said that for young lawyers of color, knowing there was somebody like them on the bench was "affirming and aspirational." Houston described himself as "a different sort of judicial activist" who looked for new ways to address society's problems.