The face of George Everett Greene

[Image description: head-and-shoulders photo of a 14-year-old boy, taken in 1894--he has close-cropped sandy hair and is wearing an ill-fitted collarless shirt under at least two other layers]

Back last May, for Blogging Against Disablism Day, I wrote up a post about George Everitt Green (1880-1895), an English child who was apparently killed by his foster mother in Canada after he didn't match her expectations for what a teenaged boy should be able to do--he was described as small for his age, "backward," and as having "defective vision." The foster mother was never convicted, and the case was used to spur feeling against immigrants, especially young disabled immigrants, as the "diseased offscourings of the hotbeds of hellish slumdom."

In that post, I wondered if there was a photo of Green anywhere--the Barnardo emigration program that brought him to Canada was famous for photographing each boy before he set sail. Well, thanks to a new comment on that post from sarahquay, I now know there is a photograph of Green, in the Library and Archives Canada, and it's online.

"Death through ill-usage" is the wording of the crime in his file (where the name is spelled "George Everett Greene," thus the spelling in my title above). Above is George Green, age 14, about to board a boat to North America. Hopeful, maybe; confused, maybe; wary, probably; young, definitely. Not much older than my own son. Within the year, he would be dead from abuse, malnutrition, exposure, exhaustion, and gangrene. He's looking out across more than a century, and I wish we could look back and say "things have changed." But they haven't, or not nearly enough.

Wheelchair tipping?!?!

In not one, but two, countries, intentionally tipping someone's wheelchair has come up in the news lately. What's the deal? In the London Times in January, Rod Liddle suggested in an opinion piece that

"Next time you see a young person in a wheelchair, tip it over and drag the occupant to the nearest job centre, lecturing him or her all the while on the dignity of labour."

Because the only reason a young person would use a wheelchair is to avoid employment, right? (Liddle has a long record of horrid statements about disability, but this one explicitly incites violence against disabled people, an escalation on his part.)

Moving across the Atlantic, the idea is already being put into practice--by one deputy sheriff in Hillsborough Co., Florida. Brian Sterner, a quad, was stopped on a traffic violation on 29 January and taken to the station for booking. Deputy Charlotte Marshall Jones didn't believe he was really paralyzed, so she dumped his wheelchair forwards, and he (surprise!) fell to the ground. The incident was caught on the office surveillance camera (video here, but be warned--it's distressing to see), and she has been suspended without pay. Brian Sterner, it turns out, is the former director of the Florida Spinal Cord Injury Resource Center, based in Tampa. He plays wheelchair rugby with the Tampa Generals, and he's working on a PhD.

So, to recap, some young people use wheelchairs AND work AND drive. And throwing someone to the ground is a dangerously stupid way to prove anything.

Another citizen detained, slated for deportation

MercuryRising and other blogs have the story of Thomas Warziniack, and how officials didn't expend the very minimal effort that would have protected his rights as a US citizen. Warziniack was born in Minnesota and grew up in Georgia. Although family members have produced Warziniack's Minnesota birth certificate, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials have been holding him in an Arizona detention facility pending deportation--because, they say, Warziniack claimed to be a Russian citizen upon arrest for minor drug charges. Warziniack has a Southern accent, does not speak Russian, and has never been to Russia. He is a former heroin addict who may experience mental illness, and he has no memory of making such claims. But "the immigration agents told me they never make mistakes," explained Warziniack.

"Proving citizenship is especially difficult for the poor, mentally ill, disabled or anyone who has trouble getting a copy of his or her birth certificate while behind bars," notes reporter Marisa Taylor. And because of such cases, immigration and citizenship are disability issues.

Falling through the net

Brent Martin's brutal, pointless death --why don't we hear more about it?

Shane Graham disappeared about eight years ago--and apparently nobody in any position of authority noticed until recently? (There's not even a photo of Graham available to authorities, and his care needs were such that it's unlikely he's still alive but unknown somewhere.)

Bloggers are telling these stories to a wider audience when no one else will--please, keep telling the stories, keep them from falling through the net. Brent and Shane were human beings who deserve to be remembered and mourned, and nobody could deserve the treatment they got.

Junius Wilson and Floyd Brown

I posted almost a year ago about Susan Burch and Hannah Joyner's research on Junius Wilson (1908-2001)--a deaf African-American man who was arrested at age 17 but never tried, was labeled insane, was placed in a state hospital in North Carolina, castrated, and held for more than seventy years. The extraordinary book Burch and Joyner co-wrote will be released this fall, as Unspeakable: The Life Story of Junius Wilson (UNC Press 2007).

It would be nice to think that stories like Wilson's are safely in the past, but they're just not. Floyd Brown is another North Carolina man, also African-American, also disabled, also arrested under shady circumstances and never tried, held in the state hospital for the last fourteen years now. Carolina Legal Assistance is on the case, trying to get the murder charge against Brown dismissed, so he can be freed. "Mr. Brown has fallen through the cracks," says the CLA's Greg McGrew. No doubt about that.

Smuggled Iguanas + Prosthetic Leg = News?

This story is local, so maybe I'm seeing and hearing it everywhere this morning for that reason. (On the other hand, the BBC's website already has the story up.) Or maybe it's just that, for some unfathomable reason, any crime becomes "quirky" news when a prosthetic leg is involved. (Neon-green iguanas are just a bonus element.)

It's still a federal crime, folks.

(Hat tip to Abe Munder, the Wheeled Wonder, for some of those news links.)

In the News in Southern California

A comment here at DS,TU alerts us that Pedro Guzman has turned up alive in a jail in the Antelope Valley--I'm still looking for some news coverage of this development, but if it's true, it's great news. And I hope the whole strange story can be explained now, somehow.

But while I was looking for that, I noticed that the LA Times had a story yesterday about the disability community and AB 374, the assisted suicide bill recently defeated in California. It features quotes from Paul Longmore, Marilyn Golden of DREDF, Ann Guerra, and Laura Remson Mitchell (against the bill) and Alan Toy and Lloyd Levine (supporting the bill). It's a good piece; thanks to the writer, James Ricci, and all involved for presenting the issues clearly and respectfully.

UPDATE (7 August): Our commenter had the scoop--Pedro Guzman has apparently turned up alive--but it took till late this morning to find confirmation at the LA Times (thanks to Stephen Drake for the tip). Seems Guzman was found trying to return to the US (he is an American citizen) at Calexico. The ACLU is starting a press conference about Guzman's reappearance in a few minutes (1pm California time).

UPDATE (8 August): NBC 7 in San Diego has a new photo of Pedro Guzman after his return to California: "His family said he ate out of garbage cans, bathed in rivers, and was repeatedly turned away by US border agents when he tried to return to California." So, US authorities were seeing him repeatedly during this time--and nobody suspected that he was the Pedro Guzman that was urgently sought? He was an American citizen, lost, confused, and in trouble in Mexico for almost three months.

June 30: Derek Bentley (1933-1953)

The short descriptor for Derek Bentley in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is "victim of a miscarriage of justice." Hard to argue with that. Bentley was born on this date in 1933, in London (his twin didn't survive). He and his sister Iris were children during the Second World War, and had to be dug out of the rubble of their house during a bombing in London. He was considered "borderline feebleminded," and had a history of seizures. He never learned to read or write. Derek Bentley attended a few schools, with little success (one headmaster described him as "the most irregular boy I have had in my career"), and at fifteen was convicted of petty theft, and sent to reform school. He tried to work as a mover and a road sweeper, but couldn't manage long in either job.

In 1952, Bentley was caught trespassing in a warehouse with a sixteen-year-old named Christopher Craig. Fifteen minutes after Bentley was in police custody, Craig fired a gun and killed a police constable. Because Craig was a juvenile, he was sentenced to ten years in prison; Bentley, who never touched the gun, was sentenced to death. Despite protests, Derek Bentley was hanged on 28 January 1953, at the age of 19.

His parents (who died in 1976 and 1993) and his sister Iris Bentley (1931-1997) never gave up trying to clear Derek's name. In 1966, they succeeded in having his remains removed from the prison cemetery. The tombstone was eventually inscribed "a victim of British justice." A 1991 film about Bentley revived interest in the case, and in 1992, Iris convinced the police to re-examine the case. Derek Bentley was pardoned in 1993, and the conviction was overturned in 1998. Too late for Iris Bentley to see; and far too late for Derek Bentley.

[Image: A waist-up image of a blonde teenaged Bentley, wearing a black turtleneck, holding a cigarette in his mouth, a packet in his hands.]

In Memory of George Everitt Green (1880-1895)

[A May 1 post in observance of the second annual Blogging against Disablism Day, organized by the Goldfish. Go check Diary of a Goldfish for links to scores of other blogs posting today on the topic of disablism.--PLR]

Last year, my Blogging Against Disablism Day post was about disablism in the American suffrage movement, and the consistent invisibility of disabled women in a current US women's history text. This year, I want to consider another big story in North American history--the great waves of immigration from Europe in the late 19th/early 20th century. Where's the disablism? In sum, exclusionary laws required officials to identify people with various disabilities at various points of arrival, and forbid them entry into the US and Canada, under the assumptions that (a) they would be a drain on the public purse, and/or (b) they would weaken the "national stock" with their faulty constitutions. At Ellis Island today, you can see photographs and artifacts of this inspection process. Note that, discrimination against disabled people wasn't a benign oversight, nor an unforeseen consequence of broader policy--disability discrimination was the policy. As Douglas Baynton has explained,

"One of the fundamental imperatives in the initial formation of American immigration policy at the end of the 19th century was the exclusion of disabled people. Beyond the targeting of disabled people, the concept of disability was instrumental in crafting the image of the undesirable immigrant." (Baynton 2001: 45)

(This statement is made in regards to US immigration history, but would apply to the Canadian case as well.)

But what if you passed through the inspection without being detected? One of the most haunting stories in the history of disability and immigration policy is the tale of George Everitt Green (1880-1895), an English teenager who was transplanted to Canada as part of the "Barnardo scheme" to settle orphaned and destitute boys with Canadian and Australian foster families. (There were parallel schemes for girls.) He was born in London, and left to the care of the local parish at the age of 6. When he was 14, George and his brother Walter went to live at a juvenile home, and in March 1895 the Green boys were on a boat for Canada.

George Green was placed with Helen Findlay, a single woman who had a farm outside Wiarton, Ontario. Her brother had recently died, and she needed help with the farm work; a teenaged boy seemed like a good match. But Green couldn't match Findlay's expectations: he was small for his age, he had "defective vision" and was called "backward." On the evening of 8 November 1895, seven months after his arrival at Findlay's farm, George Green died. An autopsy found signs of malnutrition, frostbite, gangrene, and frequent beatings (neighbors confirmed that Findlay hit Green, often). Findlay was charged with the death, and her trial was front-page news in much of Canada. A hung jury couldn't reach a conclusion on Findlay's guilt. She was never convicted. (A later effort to convict her of child abuse and neglect was also unsuccessful.)

But there were consequences paid in the wake of Green's death. Instead of seeing the Green-Findlay story as a crime against a vulnerable foster child placed in the home of a violent adult, the Canadian press spun Findlay's violence as extreme but understandable, and framed immigrant children as "diseased offscourings of the hotbeds of hellish slumdom" (quoted in Wagner 1982: 150-154). To review:

• George Green was killed because he was disabled and didn't meet the expectations of his foster mother;
  
• Helen Findlay's crimes against him were excused because he was disabled, and
  
• his story was made the basis of further discrimination against disabled immigrant children.
  

On Blogging Against Disablism Day, I'm remembering George Green, whose short sad life was ended not by any underlying medical condition, but by one woman's hatred and intolerance for his disability status, in a world that pretty much agreed with her.

IMAGES:
Upper, left: immigrants undergoing medical inspection at Ellis Island, found here.
Lower, right: A photo of some Barnardo boys still in England in 1905, showing some with crutches; this was taken a few months before Thomas Barnardo's death that same year, and is found here.

POSTSCRIPT: Barnardo was famous for photographing every boy he emigrated, before they set sail for their new homes. So there must have been a picture of George Green, taken at age 14. Anyone have any leads? There were probably newspaper images in the Findlay trial coverage, but I haven't found those yet either.

ANOTHER POSTSCRIPT: We posted last Canada Day about two recent cases before the Canadian Supreme Court, in which families immigrating to Canada were initially turned away because their disabled children might impose "excessive demands" on state services. The majority ruled that such broad interpretation of immigration law was not in keeping with the law's intent and purpose. So that's what's been happening lately on the subject. (Caughtya asked.)

WORKS CITED:
Douglas Baynton, "Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History," in Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky, eds., The New Disability History: American Perspectives (New York University Press 2001): 33-57.

Gillian Wagner, Children of the Empire (Wiedenfeld and Nicolson 1982).

A FEW SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING:
June Dwyer, "Disease, Deformity, and Defiance: Writing the Language of Immigration Law and the Eugenics Movement on the Immigrant Body," MELUS 28(1)(Spring 2003): online here.

Michele Langfield, "Voluntarism, Salvation, and Rescue: British Juvenile Migration to Australia and Canada, 1890-1939," Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 32(2)(May 2004): 86-114.

Howard Markel and Alexandra Minna Stern, "The Foreignness of Germs: The Persistent Association of Immigrants and Disease in American Society," Milbank Quarterly 80(4)(2002): 757-788.

Penny L. Richards, "Points of Entry: Disability and the Historical Geography of Immigration," Disability Studies Quarterly 24(3)(Summer 2004).

Intersections

Blue at Gimp Parade has a really good post up this morning about the complicated murder trial of Daphne Wright, a "deaf, black lesbian" whose access to a fair trial in South Dakota has been questioned. For a broader historical discussion of the idea that a "whirlwind of lesbian drama" can drive someone to murder, check out Christine Coffman's new book, Insane Passions: Lesbianism and Psychosis in Literature and Film (Wesleyan University Press 2006--the book's cover is shown at right, a black-and-white image of two young white women embracing). Coffman traces the cultural roots and expressions of the stereotype of the "insane lesbian" across the 20th century, from a murder trial in 1930s France, through film and literature.

And while I'm on the subject of intersections between criminology, GLBTQ history and disability history in the 20th century, I read an old friend's new book recently, Jackie Blount's Fit to Teach: Same-Sex Desire, Gender, and School Work in the Twentieth Century (SUNY Press 2005), in which she follows the struggle of gay and lesbian teachers against widespread employment discrimination in the US. One story (p. 113) is from the world of Deaf education in 1970:

Only a year after the Stonewall riot, a counselor at the American School for the Deaf in West Hartford lost his job immediately after he discussed gay rights on television. The young man, who had served as an officer of the Kalos Society: Gay Liberation, Hartford, had agreed to participate in a televised panel discussion on gay liberation and society. He would attempt to fight his dismissal. However, around this time, the Journal of the American Bar Association released poll results indicated that respondents 'considered homosexuality a crime second only to murder or to murder or to murder and armed robberty.' Despide this considerable public hostility, other educators besides the West Hartford counselor would begin standing up as well, even if termination were inevitable.