Dr. Alice P. Green experienced a traumatic instance of racism as a Black teenager growing up in the lily-white iron-ore-mining hamlet of Witherbee in New York’s Adirondack Mountains. She devoted the rest of her life to fighting injustice wherever she found it.

In 1985, she founded and served as executive director of the Center for Law and Justice in New York’s capital city of Albany. She established the Center in response to the killing of Jesse Davis, an unarmed and mentally ill Black man who was shot to death in his apartment in 1984 by three white Albany police officers, who were later exonerated.

Dr. Green and her Center provided support and assistance to formerly incarcerated individuals who struggled to find work and a place to live as they tried to re-integrate into their hometown communities. She wrote academic papers and lobbied state legislators for prison reform, on behalf of prisoners of color who were disproportionately incarcerated in state correctional facilities.

In the dedication to her 2021 memoir, We Who Believe in Freedom: Activism and the Struggle for Racial Justice, Dr. Green wrote: “My heart aches for all those who have and continue to be harmed by a legal system blinded by injustice and racism and dedicated to punishment and suffering instead of love and caring.”

Dr. Green’s fierce and tireless advocacy work extended to efforts to reform the Albany Police Department and its policing policies, which undermined trust and created animosity in Black communities. Her research argued that police have caused disenfranchisement through racial profiling; by arresting Blacks significantly more often than whites; and by engaging in police brutality against Blacks with distressing frequency, including fatally shooting unarmed Black men. Her reform efforts led to the creation in 2016 of Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD), a program in Albany that diverts low-level criminals away from jail and into treatment services for addiction and mental illness. Through Dr. Green’s leadership, Albany became the third city in the nation, following Seattle and Santa Fe, to establish a LEAD program— which have had proven success in reducing high rates of recidivism.

In addition to publishing numerous journal articles and lecturing widely on these issues, she co-authored the scholarly book Law Never Here: A Social History of African American Responses to Issues of Crime and Justice (1999) with Dr. Frankie Bailey, a professor in the University at Albany’s Criminal Justice Department.

Dr. Green has been on the front lines fighting for social justice and racial equality in Albany since the civil rights movement of the late-1960s. She serves as the conscience of Albany’s Black community by giving voice to the voiceless and speaking truth to power in the political arena. Some have called her “Albany’s Mother Courage” for the way in which she never wavered in putting her convictions into practice despite a steady stream of racist attacks.

Alice Paden Green was born in Greenville, South Carolina. Her maternal great-grandmother, Cicely Cawthon, was born enslaved circa 1859 on a plantation in Georgia. A paternal grandmother, Alice Moore, helped raise Green in a tiny, two-family house on a dirt road alongside other poor Black families in segregated Greenville. Green’s father, William Paden, worked in a cotton mill and her mother, Annie Mae Paden, raised seven children.  Her parents fled the Jim Crow South and were part of the Great Migration of Blacks from the rural South in search of economic opportunity and a better life in the North and beyond. The family relocated to the Adirondacks, where their father joined his brother working in an iron ore mine. Racism followed them north.

In a second memoir, Outsider: Stories of Growing Up Black in the Adirondacks (2023), Dr. Green recounted a painful episode. She and her friend, Myrtle, who was white, were hired at age fifteen as summer help at a motel and restaurant in a neighboring town. The owner showed Myrtle to a nice room in the main house, while Alice was told she would sleep in a barn alongside farm animals, with bats swooping around her at night. The next morning, Alice confronted the owner. “You are segregating Black people, and I will not do this,” she said. The woman replied, “Well, you’re fired.” Alice shot back: “You’re too late, because I already quit.” Myrtle quit in solidarity. The two friends walked more than twenty miles back home.

Raised by parents with almost no formal schooling and who were not literate, Green understood the power of an education and was a strong-willed, self-reliant example of upward mobility. She earned four degrees at the University at Albany: master’s degrees in education, social work and criminal justice; and a doctorate in criminal justice.

Green came to Albany in 1968 for a job as a teacher and social worker at the Trinity Institution (now Trinity Alliance) in the predominantly Black South End neighborhood. That is where she had an awakening to the harmful impact incarceration had on the lives of the struggling families with whom she worked. As a young woman new to the city, she founded and edited a free community newspaper The South End Scene and later distributed at The Advocate, a monthly community newsletter, to people imprisoned across the state, keeping them in touch with what was happening in their neighborhoods back home.

In addition to writing and teaching as an adjunct professor at UAlbany and local colleges, Green served as legislative director of the New York Civil Liberties Union in the early 1980s and was appointed in 1986 by Governor Mario Cuomo as deputy commissioner of the state’s Division of Probation and Correctional Alternatives.

Among her many honors, Green’s community advocacy and civil rights work were acknowledged by President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama at a White House ceremony in 2015. She received the John Brown Lives! Spirit of John Brown Freedom Award in 2016 and UAlbany’s highest honor, the Citizen Laureate Award, in 2022, along with her husband of fifty-two years, philanthropist and affordable housing developer Charles Touhey.

The mother of two and grandmother of three was a passionate gardener and dedicated runner into her eighties. She also established the Paden Retreat for Writers of Color, where writers can pursue summer projects in furnished cottages on a secluded ten-acre compound owned by her husband’s family on the shores of Lake Champlain in the Adirondacks – the place where the racist incident in her teenage years had spurred her lifetime commitment to fighting racial injustice.

The Dr. Alice P. Green Papers are housed in the UAlbany Libraries’ special collections and archives. They are being processed for use by students in their classes through a grant from the Touhey Foundation, “so that we can teach the next generation of young people how to be activists like Alice,” her husband said.

-authored by Paul Grondahl