ELBERT PARR TUTTLE, 98, `JUDICIAL HERO' FOR CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT.

Byline: The New York Times

Judge Elbert Parr Tuttle, who as chief judge of the old 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the integration of the University of Georgia and played a pivotal role in extending civil rights to African-American Southerners in the 1950s and '60s, died Sunday at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta. He was 98 and lived in Atlanta.

President Carter, in awarding Tuttle the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980, called him ``a true judicial hero'' who had ``helped make the constitutional principle of equal protection a reality of American life.'' On June 4, 1996, The Atlanta Constitution called him ``perhaps the most influential civil rights judge in Southern history.''

Tuttle, who was born in Pasadena, was general counsel of the Treasury Department in 1954, when he was appointed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In those days, the 5th Circuit comprised six Southern states of the old Confederacy: Georgia, where the judge had earlier practiced law, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. He served on that court until 1981 and was its chief judge from 1961 to 1967.

Beginning in the late 1950s, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was a legal battleground for the civil rights movement. Tuttle once told an interviewer, ``We became what I consider a great constitutional court, and I think we largely have to thank the black plaintiffs for that.''

For a decade and a half, the 5th U.S. Circuit Appeals handed down a succession of important decisions that amplified the mandate of Brown vs. Board of Education, the epochal decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, on May 17, 1954, that nullified state laws and state constitutional provisions allowing or requiring the segregation of African-American and white students in public schools because of their race.

Tuttle's court struck down discriminatory barriers that had been erected in voting, jury selection and employment, transformed the law on school desegregation, and established standards and procedures aimed not only at ending discrimination, but also at overcoming the effects of past discrimination. Despite great upheaval and vows by many officials to resist desegregation, it made the rule of law prevail.

Tuttle could be highly decisive in ensuring that civil rights were promptly enforced.