November 30, 2004

Her experience of life is different from most judges

By AUDREY PARENTE
Staff Writer

Shirley Green, who picked cotton as child, had to live on a bus and struggled back from bankruptcy, will be sworn in as a Volusia County judge in January.

As a schoolgirl, she hid under a bus seat from angry segregationists brandishing rifles and pitchforks.

She's the first black woman ever elected a Volusia County judge. It was no easy race. There was a recount and a request for a second recount, although the county's elections canvassing board ruled her opponent failed to meet the state deadline for the request.

But the New Smyrna Beach woman, a legal aid attorney most of her career, is no stranger to adversity. She said she wasn't ever worried about winning or losing -- only about the good she could do in her job.

"When I came to Community Legal Services, I tried to determine the problems and what was keeping people from getting accesses to justice," Green said. "When I am sworn in as judge, I will look at what is happening and help people get access to justice."

Bill Abbuel, executive director at Community Legal Services, said his nonprofit organization would miss Green but the community is getting a very good judge.

"What she has brought to our firm and what she will bring to her position as judge is her life experience -- different from most middle-class people in judiciary and law," Abbuel said.

Alabama-born Green, 49, began life on her grandparents' sharecrop farm. As a child she picked cotton, watermelons and sugarcane.

"What I remember from that time is that the house was up off the ground, and my grandfather loved to hunt. He kept his hunting dogs under the house. We had two rooms and no inside plumbing and separated the rooms with cardboard and newspapers," Green recalled.

"The house had a fireplace, and my grandmother also grew sweet potatoes, and I remember putting them under the hot coals in the fireplace so they could cook."

Then, one summer when Green was about 6 or 7, her mother came and moved her to South Florida, where she and nine brothers and sisters picked vegetables as migrant farm workers.

"I remember crying all the way from Alabama to Florida on the bus and I didn't eat for several days," Green said.

Green attended public school while her mother did house cleaning, but on weekends and holidays, the whole family picked whatever vegetables were in season.

In summer, the whole family traveled aboard a bus, from a labor camp in Princeton, South Florida, throughout Florida, Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia.

"Some locations didn't have housing, so we would live in the bus," she said.

Integration came during high school in South Dade County.

"They called it KKK country," Green said. "Right after the start of school, all the black kids were let out of school early so the buses could take us home, but when we walked out, there was a big red 'nigger' painted on the wall. And as the bus drove down the street, I saw people blocking the street with rifles, pitchforks and scythes."

"We were scared out of our minds and thought those people would come on the bus and kill us."

"The bus stopped and the driver told us to get under the seats. He opened the door and a police officer came up into the bus and I was so relieved."

Green had two babies during high school but did not marry the fathers. She did marry at 17 before graduating. Green, her husband and the children worked as migrant farmworkers until he became an Orkin exterminator and she was a cashier.

The couple had four more children and decided life had to change.

"My manager told me a woman with children could not be trusted to be loyal to a company, so I decided at that point -- about in the mid 1980s -- that if I ever was going to get ahead, I would need more education," Green said.

They struggled financially to get her a college education, first at Miami-Dade Community College and then the University of Miami. Green's husband died of leukemia when she was in her junior year at the University of Miami. She struggled on, finishing college, still going to school while rearing six children.

She graduated and passed the Florida Bar. But while in the throes of moving to New Smyrna Beach for a job with Community Legal Services, her South Florida home was hit by Hurricane Andrews.

"Eighty-five percent of my house was gone," she said. "My kids packed their suitcases and came up to an apartment with no furniture."

Green rented a house in New Smyrna Beach and after a long ordeal dealing with insurance, repairing her South Florida house and selling it, she started to build a new house here.

Then the fires of the late '90s burned down the Bunnell factory building parts of her new home, Green explained. The construction schedule fell behind and by the time construction was completed, she was in financial trouble.

"I was locked into a loan, and at the point I needed to close, but there were liens that needed to be paid. The mortgage company had started fining me," she said. "I filed Chapter Seven -- liquidation -- to get some of the liens off. I still had my mortgage and student loans. The majority of the creditors got paid later, but I had lost my husband and I didn't want to lose everything we had worked and saved for."

She began at Community Legal Services around 1992. Among her accomplishments there, Green found ways for attorneys to provide free service to the community through such outlets as mediation and guardianship programs, or through a senior citizen unit preparing advance directives and wills.

"When I first came, there were 400 attorneys on our list but fewer than 100 actually gave us service -- covering clinics or taking cases," Green said. "Now we have nine ways (for private attorneys to provide free public assistance) and are using 250 attorneys."

As a legal aid attorney, she defended evictions, helped people with subsidized housing problems, filed law suits against the housing authority and car dealers, defended foreclosures and represented the homeless.

Meanwhile, Green also served on several boards, including Central Florida Community Development Corp., a non-profit organization receiving funds from the State Front Porch Loan Program for loans to area businesses.

From 1997 to 1998, Green worked for a private law firm in Daytona Bach, handling criminal, landlord/tenant and discrimination cases, but she returned to legal services.

In 2000, she ran unsuccessfully for county judge.

"It cost me $12,000 to $13,000 -- of which probably $2,000 was my own money," she said. She "saw it as a learning experience" and added: "I am not a person to quit."

Green, who won the 2004 county judge's race with 50.19 percent of votes, begins a six-year term on January 4, 2005, earning $121,325 a year.

"I think I am going to make a good judge," said Green, who has 16 grandchildren. "I know how to be fair."