Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Workaday trailblazing judge bids goodbye without a fuss

Judge Perry Little was Tampa's fifth black attorney. "I couldn't change the world, but I could have an impact," he said. A Hillsborough judge closes the door - almost - on nearly 30 years of service on the bench.

By COLLEEN JENKINS
Published December 30, 2006

TAMPA - The people who came to say goodbye to retiring Circuit Judge Perry Little told a lot about the man.

They were black, white and Hispanic. Young, old and middle-aged. Lawyers, judges and church folk. They filled the holiday-lit atrium of TECO Plaza, munching on roast beef and shrimp and offering praise for the guest of honor.

All well-deserved attention for a man closing out 29 years of distinguished service on the Hillsborough bench - yet ironic, too, given his predilection for avoiding the spotlight.

"I think that this town owes Perry Little a debt of gratitude," attorney Tom Steele said, "for just doing his job."

Quiet diligence was the only way the Georgia son knew. Long before he heard cases of wayward adolescents and derelict tenants, Little learned the definitions of hard work and humility from people who embodied them.

His parents were college-educated schoolteachers. His mother died when he was 5, and Little and his younger brother went to live for a time with their seamstress grandmother, who charged a dollar a dress, and laborer grandfather, who took a day off from work only to plow sweet potatoes or attend a funeral.

"They excelled in what they were doing," he said. "Failure was not a part of our environment."

In Wrens, Ga., with his grandparents, then back in Savannah with his father, Little didn't know any black attorneys.

So becoming one wasn't part of his career plan until one of his professors at Morehouse College nominated him to attend a Harvard law program during the summer of 1965.

The program opened a new world for Little. He applied for and was accepted into law school at Emory University.

He had never seen an orange tree or tasted a Cuban sandwich when he landed at a legal aid job in Miami after graduation. When he transferred to Tampa a year later with all his possessions crammed into his Volkswagen, he became the city's fifth black attorney.

The small community embraced Little, a favor he would return when other young black attorneys joined their ranks.

"He took me to lunch as a very young lawyer," recalled Lansing Scriven, who practices business litigation in Tampa. "He's one of those persons that has just been accessible and is willing to share the knowledge he has with young lawyers."

Little shared in the community's pride when George Edgecomb became Tampa's first black judge in 1973, then felt the stinging loss when he died three years later. Edgecomb's death left the bench devoid of black judges once again, and Little felt compelled to continue the legacy.

He ran for the position and lost. But a year later, in 1977, he was appointed to the county bench.

County court suited Little. The cases typically didn't make headlines, but they meant everything to the people involved. They required a judge who projected a total commitment to seeking the fair and just outcome, said Don Castor, a retired county judge whose office neighbored Little's for 15 years.

"He came across as someone who was firm but kind," Castor said. "There was never a sense that he treated anyone differently, be they poor or rich or white or black. He was just always even-handed."

His controlled temperament served him well when he took on a juvenile court assignment after being promoted to the circuit bench in 1993.

There, the man who straightened up the instant his grandmother gave him The Look in church listened to parents and grandparents complain that the youths were ungovernable.

The young people who came before him were disproportionately black or poor or both. He thought it important that they see a successful African-American man wearing the robe. He wished he could roll back the clock to instill in them the discipline taught by his grandparents and father.

He stayed five years in the division, longer than most judges can bear. He reveled in the infrequent success stories.

"I couldn't change the world, but I could have an impact," he said one morning this month in his chambers, where an old bowling trophy from a contest between lawyers and doctors sits amid law books and the Scales of Justice.

Lawyers felt at ease in Little's courtroom. Intimidation had no place there, and the judge remedied long-windedness with a gentle reference to the clock.

Steele, who practiced frequently in front of Little in his current circuit civil post and says the judge ruled against him two-thirds of the time, lauded him at the reception for being a "judge's judge."

"If you give him a memorandum, he reads it. If you give him a case, he reads it," Steele said. "Judge Perry Little always ruled, and then he told you why he ruled."

When the limelight found him - most recently when he ruled that fans should not be subjected to patdowns before Bucs games - the judge maintained his quiet, contemplative posture, Steele said. He did what he always had done: gave a decision his best shot, then moved on to the next case without a lot of worry and fuss.

Now 62, his next phase will include more time with his wife, two grown children and 12-year-old daughter, Josie, and his 88-year-old father.

There will be more golf, reading and pinochle. But the workaday judge isn't hanging up his robes for good. He has committed to serving on the juvenile bench for five or six months later next year as a senior judge.

It would be a depressing way to kick off retirement for some. For Little, it will be a welcomed opportunity to touch a few more young lives.

[Last modified December 30, 2006, 06:10:07]