No longer overlooked: Joyce Brown, whose struggle has redefined the rights of the homeless

This article is part of overlooked, a number of death ads about remarkable people whose death was not reported in Times from 1851.

Joyce Browns New York Minute lasted longer than most others. Brown, a former secretary, became homeless in 1986 and started camping on a heating grille in the Second Avenue and the 65th Street in Manhattan.

About a year passed about a year before it was picked up by city officials, involuntarily a psychiatric hospital – in which she was declared mentally ill – and forced medication. Brown, who was better known as Billie Boggs, was the first homeless person who became the focus of the newly expanded initiative of Mayor Edward I. Koch to fix the increasing visibility of homelessness and untreated mental illnesses on the streets.

But as she would say later in interviews, the city chose “the wrong”. In contrast to the other dozen other people who were exposed to similar fates, she said she knew her rights and she would start exercising her the next day.

What followed was a pioneering lawsuit that focused on mental health, bourgeois freedoms and the involuntary psychiatric treatment of homeless people. “I'm not crazy,” Brown would say. “Only homeless.”

Soon Brown from the sidewalk was acquainted with a whirlwind from interviews to talk and news programs.

When Brown died of a heart attack on November 29, 2005 with 58, she was forgotten for a long time.

But the effects of their temporary glory are still reflected on the city's sidewalks and U -Bahn, as Governor Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams introduced their own initiatives to combat homelessness in New York, including involuntary hospital units in the psychiatric crisis.

Joyce Patricia Brown was born on September 7, 1947 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, the youngest of six children, most of whom were born in South Carolina and Florida.

Her father, William Brown, said in 1950 that he was unemployed. Her mother, Mae Blossom Brown, worked in a factory luggage.

Some time after his Abitur, Joyce Brown worked as a secretary for the Elizabeth Human Rights Commission, where she may have learned one or two things about her own constitutional privileges. She also worked as an employee for Elizabeth's mayor, Thomas G. Dunn, and for Thomas & Betts, a manufacturer of electrical devices, according to a death notice from the Nesbitt Funeral Home in Elizabeth.

At 18, however, she was dependent on cocaine and heroin and stole money from her mother. Her mother died in 1979, which, as her relatives said, could have triggered another downward spiral emotionally.

She had lost her job until 1985. She lived alternately with her sisters in New Jersey and was briefly treated in clinics and hospitals. The efforts of her sisters to help her led to arguments, and in 1986 she moved to Manhattan, where she had her home on the sidewalk near a Swensen Eisdallos on the Upper East Side and trudged outdoors outdoors and outdoors.

She adopted the name Billie Boggs, a twisted homage to Bill Boggs, a television for Wnew (now Wnyw) with which she was thrilled.

For some neighbors and regular passers -by, she became a New York fixture that you cannot find in the travel guides. You would talk to her about the news. For others, it was a threat – cursed and screamed racist names, especially in black men, and even people.

Her sisters tried to have brought them to the hospital. But the doctors said that they had no danger and released them.

On Oct. 12, 1987, After she Had Been Monitored for Months Under a Koch Administration Strategy Known As Project Help (The Initials Stood For Homeless Emergency Liaison Project) – Inarted to Remove Severely Mentally Ill Homeless People from Manhattan's Streets and Forcibly Thema. She was Taken to the Emergency Room at Bellevue Hospital, Where Admitted and Injected with a Tranquilizer and Anti-Psychotic Drug.

The next day, according to an article in 1988, she referred to the New York Magazine the New York Civil Liberties Union from a coin phone in the hospital. Norman Siegel, the managing director of the organization, was one of the lawyers who were assigned to her case. A Bellevue psychiatrist presented a diagnosis of “chronic paranoid schizophrenia” in court.

That night one of her sisters recognized her from a courtroom sketch in the TV news.

This picture was in a strong side by side to a photo made by her family, which showed a smiling brown and wore a red dress and golden earrings when she was hugged by a man in a tuxedo with a pink fly. Her sisters smiled in the camera nearby.

“It used to be my sister,” one of the sisters told Newsday. “That used to be.”

A judge of the state's Supreme Court ruled that Brown was “unable to take care of their essential needs” and ordered to be released, but it remained in Bellevue while the city introduced the decision. The city won the appeal, but after a subsequent calling of Brown's lawyers, a judge decided that it could not be medically medical. This complaint was dropped when Bellevue Brown let go, and said it had no sense if she could not receive the hospital care. She had spent a total of 84 days there.

She soon developed into a media star, a symbol of justice that, as her lawyers said, in her clear and articulated interviews as a more or less rational example of urban bivouacking, which was “monitoring” for months, presented “how I was a criminal” for months.

“In a civilized society, they not only use people against their will and take them to the hospital if they are only healthy because of the program of a mayor,” she said to Morley Safer for a segment of the CBS news program from 1988 “60 minutes”. “All of this is political. I am a political prison for Mayor Koch.”

In the same segment, Mayor Koch insisted that the emptying on the street was “bizarre” and said that Brown's ability to speak articulated in front of the camera showed the effectiveness of her hospital stay and the medication she had received.

This year Brown also performed in “The Phil Donahue Show” after he was equipped by Bloomingdale, and gave a lecture to a forum for the Harvard Law School, in which she offered “a street view” of homelessness. The books and films offer the New York Civil Liberties Union offices. The Associated Press called it “the most famous homeless in America”. On his Moscow summit with Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, President Ronald Reagan, unlike Moscow's politics, referred to political dissident by claiming that they were mentally ill.

“Instead of talking about me, why does the president not help me to get permanent apartments?” Brown was quoted.

According to Brown's case, Project Help was confronted with public examination and criticism. The dynamics of the program remained and was finally discontinued. Brown's lawsuit continues to serve as a precedent in debates about mental health, homelessness and bourgeois freedom.

After Brown was released, she briefly worked as a secretary of the Union Civil Liberties. But she quit because she didn't like the job.

“The spunkiness that I had always admired,” said Siegel in an interview about her.

She pulled weight; Their gear slowed down; She could have been medically medically again for a while. Around 1991 she moved to an supervised group house for formerly homeless women, but also returned to the street to Panhandle and said that her sisters would have delayed them to direct them more than $ 8,000 to social security controls. She continued to live from $ 500 per month in disabilities and avoid the press.

When Brown was originally released from Bellevue, it was against the recommendation of two different judges from the state's Supreme Court. “We can approach the time,” she wrote, “if the problem of the homeless is confronted with sincere and realistic attitudes and resources.”

“Now,” said Siegel, “35 years later, the hopes of the deviating judges are still not still.”