“Say her name! Alice Green!” “Say her name! Alice Green!” The chant reverberated off brick buildings flanking South Pearl Street as a procession of mourners—200 strong, men and women, young and old, Black and brown and white — marched northward [on a] Friday evening. Our footfalls matched the incantatory rhythm of the call and response.
As dusk descended on the roadway, it felt like a kind of church, where everyone was welcome, the broken and the fallen, the faithful and heathens alike. The fearless woman whose name we called out had summoned the better angels of our natures by welcoming home formerly incarcerated people, those struggling with substance use disorder, the unhoused, and the abject poor — anyone society chooses to marginalize.
We had come to light a candle, to say a prayer, to sing a protest song, to link arms, to shed tears, to hug old friends and to listen to articulated grief and praise for Dr. Alice Paden Green, Albany’s Mother Courage and a fearless warrior for social justice and racial equality who died of cardiac arrest on Aug. 20 at age 84 after a recent bout of COVID-19.
We marched across Green’s beloved South End, where she had toiled for six decades trying to bend the long arc of the moral universe toward justice. She traveled a hard road, hailing from Greenville, S.C. Her maternal great-grandmother, Cicely Cawthon, was born enslaved circa 1859 on a plantation in Georgia. She learned this history in recent years, after discovering a book of slave narratives collected in the 1930s by the Federal Writers’ Project. It contained an oral history of her great-grandmother in her late 70s. She told the interviewer: “For killing time or being lazy, you got twenty-five licks with a whip; for stealing, fifty licks; and for running away, that was the worst, if they got you back, you got a hundred licks.”
An outpouring of love and light. Throngs of community members paid their respects during a candlelight vigil on Aug. 23 in Albany’s South End neighborhood where Green’s Center for Law and Justice served the community.
Green was raised in part by her paternal grandmother, Alice Moore, born in 1871 into a family of in South Carolina. Green lived in a small two-family house on a dirt road with poor Black families in segregated Greenville. Green’s father, William Paden, worked in a cotton mill, and was a drunkard and abusive. He fought anyone who hurled racial epithets and sheriff’s deputies threatened to jail him and place him on a prison chain gang.
Her mother, Annie Mae Paden, raised seven children and taught them “how to cope with poverty, rejection, and racism,” Green wrote. Feeding her family was a daily struggle. As a young girl, Green’s grandmother took her on pre-dawn foraging trips to scrounge overripe fruit tossed out in a garbage can behind a grocery store.
I learned this history when Green invited me to write the foreword to her 2021 memoir, “We Who Believe in Freedom: Activism and the Struggle for Social Justice.” Her family fled the Jim Crow South and migrated north to the Adirondacks. They settled in the tiny hamlet of Witherbee, Essex County, where her father worked in an iron ore mine owned by Republic Steel Corp. They were one of two Black families in the company-run enclave for mine workers.
Racism followed them north. Green tells the story of being hired at 15 to work as a summer maid at a motel and restaurant in Paradox Lake, along with her best friend and neighbor, Myrtle, who was white. The Southern woman who owned the business set Myrtle up in a nice second-floor room of the main house and made Alice sleep out in a bat-infested barn loft. The next morning, Alice complained bitterly to the owner and quit. Her friend Myrtle, in solidarity, quit too.
I have known Green since the mid-1980s, when I wrote a lengthy Times Union profile. I joined her on an early-morning jog through her Pine Hills neighborhood. It was her routine until just before her death. It was not uncommon for motorists to yell racist slurs at her from open car windows. She had a thick skin, shrugged it off and kept running.
She wrote a blog for the Times Union and anonymous commenters assaulted her with the ugliest and most sickening racist bile imaginable — sometimes also issuing threats. She told me it did not shock her. It did not scare her.
It reinforced what she knew from growing up: that racism lurks just an inch below the surface, even in what we tell ourselves is the tolerant and progressive Capital Region. She endured these attacks and gutter language for months before she gave up her blog. “It just wore me down,” she told me.
She also told me she kept a list of prominent local people who had used the N-word in her presence and later apologized — “little slips,” they called them.
Green was unafraid to stand up to power. During a 2021 protest, she positioned herself between a line of Albany police and Black Lives Matter demonstrators.
Green invited me to programs in the South End where I was sometimes the only white person, surrounded by formerly incarcerated people she helped get back on their feet after prison. She always made me feel welcome and comfortable, even though she reminded me of my white privilege. I was a guest at her house for a Martin Luther King Jr. Day party and potluck in 2020. Three members of the 1960s militant Black civil rights group The Brothers — Leon Van Dyke, Earl Thorpe and Persell McDowell — sat on a couch alongside Green, shoulder to shoulder. We all sang “We Shall Overcome.”
“She was always in the struggle, helping The Brothers. She was like a little sister to us,” Van Dyke said.
I know politicians, prosecutors and civic leaders who express an open dislike for Green, a relentless civil rights activist. She had no filter as she spoke truth to power. She refused to soften her outrage or to temper her rebukes whenever and wherever she encountered racism, injustice, discrimination and inequality. She once summed up her life’s work to me: “I will not rest until white people accept me as their equal.”
Green came to Albany in the late-1960s after a teaching stint in Rochester. She was hired as a teacher and social worker by Trinity Institution (now Trinity Alliance of the Capital Region), a South End community services organization where she rose to executive director. She also edited and wrote editorials for a Black community newspaper, South End Scene, beginning in the mid-1970s.
Charles Touhey was teaching at St. Anthony’s Grammar School in the South End after graduating from Princeton. Green was unafraid to stand up to power. He wandered into the Trinity building one summer night while she was painting a room. He offered to help. He was smitten by the beautiful, older woman who wore a miniskirt. They married in 1973. He called her “my best friend for 52 years.”
In 1985, Green, who earned three master’s degrees and a Ph.D. in criminal justice from the University at Albany, founded the Center for Law and Justice in response to her outrage after city police shot to death Jesse Davis, a mentally ill, unarmed Black man, in his Arbor Hill apartment in 1984. The police were exonerated.
She once summed up her life’s work to me: “I will not rest until white people accept me as their equal.”
Alice Green got into good trouble at her Center, hiring college interns and young lawyers from Albany Law School. They published research papers and crafted legislation for police and prison reform. She helped put teeth into the Albany Community Police Review Board and assisted scores of formerly incarcerated people released back to Albany in finding jobs and housing. Green led marches and demonstrations against mass incarceration and the disproportionate number of people of color behind bars in New York’s state prisons. She was a perpetual thorn in the side of the city’s police chiefs, mayors and lawmakers.
I watched as she spoke at curbside memorials and calmed angry community protests following a controversial shooting in 2011 by police following a traffic stop that killed Nah-Cream Moore. She demanded justice for Dontay Ivy, a mentally ill Black man who died in 2015 during a confrontation with Albany police in which he was Tasered, chased and tackled while walking down an Arbor Hill Street. City officials settled with Ivy’s family three years later for $625,000.
Touhey’s father, Carl E. Touhey, also a Princeton alumnus, was a member of the WASP establishment. His son leveraged inherited wealth from the family business, Orange Motor, and the Touhey Foundation to fund ventures spurred by his wife’s passion to combat systemic racism and disinvestment across generations in the predominantly Black neighborhoods of Albany’s South End, Arbor Hill and West Hill.
It was Green’s idea to establish a therapeutic journaling program two years ago with a grant from the Touhey Foundation to bring healing to at-risk teens and incarcerated juveniles. A lifelong journal writer herself, she believed expressive writing could help wayward youths work through their trauma and discover alternatives to violence and self-destructive behaviors, guided by certified teachers and therapists. The program is overseen by the New York State Writers Institute at UAlbany, where Touhey and Green also supported the Educational Opportunity Program, or EOP, and the School of Education’s efforts to recruit young Black men to teach in the city’s public schools.
At the conclusion of Friday’s march, Touhey spoke briefly about his wife. “This was her South End,” he said. He recalled holding one end of a large banner she unfurled before Gov. George Pataki’s speech at a Martin Luther King Jr. celebration in the Empire State Plaza Convention Center a few blocks away. “If they’re going to drag me out, I’m going to make some noise,” his wife said, as state troopers moved in.
In 2022, when UAlbany honored Touhey and Green with its highest honor as Community Laureates during its Citizen Laureate award dinner, Green delivered a lengthy harangue about racial injustice and the need for prison reform. I noticed some eye rolls among the black-tie crowd of civic and business leaders, especially when she broke protocol to circulate a petition calling on the Albany County district attorney to drop charges against Jordan Young, an Albany man who was badly injured when he was shot by a police officer as he ran toward the officer with a knife on Jan. 24, 2022. (Young later pleaded guilty to a felony menacing charge that required him to serve two years in prison.)
“Nobody tells Alice what to say,” Touhey told me afterward. “Not even me.”
This article was previously published in the Albany Times Union and is reprinted with permission.
Photos: Patrick Dodson, ’12, ’23; Albany Times Union/Jim Franco; and Paul Grondahl
