Victims Linked by Desegregation Cases : Bombings: U.S. appeals court judge had ordered school busing. Attorney had represented NAACP in school lawsuit.

The two victims of mail bombs in the South had something in common--both were known as civil rights advocates, and both may have died for their activities.

Judge Robert S. Vance, 58, had ordered busing for school desegregation, sided with blacks in suits against white-controlled city governments and reinstated a federal lawsuit against members of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama during his 11 years on the federal appeals court based in Atlanta. He died after the bomb exploded at his home near Birmingham on Saturday.

Robert Robinson, a 42-year-old black attorney and city alderman in Savannah, Ga., represented the NAACP earlier this year in seeking a stronger desegregation program for his hometown school system. He was killed by an explosion at his office Monday.

Federal investigators said Tuesday they suspect a “possible racial motivation” in the two killings.

The civil rights link was heightened Tuesday when a bomb was discovered at the Jacksonville, Fla., offices of the NAACP. A fourth bomb addressed to the clerk of the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals was discovered and dismantled Monday.

Just three months ago, Vance, who was white, spoke for a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Appeals court in reviving a school busing order in Jacksonville. Siding with NAACP lawyers, Vance reversed a district judge who said court-ordered busing should be ended after 18 years.

Vance lambasted Jacksonville school officials for what he called their “consistent failure” to meet the desegregation goals of a 1971 decree. The failure to hire more black teachers and administrators also “perpetrated the effects of the prior system of segregation,” he wrote in an opinion issued on Sept. 15.

The 11th Circuit, which handles appeals from Florida, Georgia and Alabama, has continued to order busing for school desegregation, even as federal judges elsewhere have eased the pressure on school officials.

In October, for example, the court in a highly publicized ruling in Georgia said that DeKalb County schools in suburban Atlanta must consider new busing as a way to remedy increasing segregation. Lawyers said Vance did not sit on the three-judge panel that decided the case.

Attorneys described Vance as a passionate liberal on most social issues, but a tough, accusatory questioner in the courtroom. His aggressive style had gained him a certain prominence among appellate lawyers in the Southeast.

“He was a very aggressive jurist. At one point during the argument, he was shouting at me and was red in the face,” said Cindy Laquidara-Kenney, the attorney who represented the Jacksonville school district. “If he didn’t like what you were saying, he would cut you off in mid-sentence,” she added.

“He liked to pick on lawyers, and a lot of them didn’t like it,” said Neil Bradley, an attorney with the Southern regional office of the American Civil Liberties Union in Atlanta. “He was a liberal across the board, except for capital punishment and the Cuban refugees.”

In recent years, Vance took a hard-line stance against convicted murderers who appealed their death sentences, and he was impatient with lawyers representing them.

But ACLU attorney Bradley noted that Vance was a different person off the bench.

“He was quite likable. Garrulous. A joke teller. He liked to tease you,” he said.

Despite Vance’s prominence in legal circles, Bradley and other attorneys say they find it hard to believe that his court rulings could have prompted the bomb attacks.

“The appellate judges are generally invisible. You hear about trial judges, but not appeals court judges,” he pointed out.

In 1967, Vance became chairman of the Alabama Democratic Party and is credited with wresting control of the party from Gov. George C. Wallace. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter appointed him to the federal appeals court.

Friends of Robinson, the Savannah attorney, say he was not known as a prominent civil rights attorney. They expressed surprise Tuesday that he might have been chosen as a target by extremists.

Robinson practiced out of a modest Savannah townhouse and handled a variety of civil and criminal cases. While he represented black plaintiffs in the Savannah desegregation case, a New York-based attorney handled most of the appellate work, a friend said.

“It was a one-man firm. He was a surviving attorney,” said fellow alderman Willie Brown.

Staff writer Douglas Jehl in Savannah contributed to this story.