With Taylor, we had a new hearing in front of a three-judge court in
Charlotte. Judge McMillan was one of the judges. The district judge from
the Asheville division was the
Page 19 second district
court judge. Then [James] Braxton Craven from the Fourth Circuit Court
of Appeals was the third judge. They heard all of this evidence that we
put in front of them about the historical racial discrimination in the
AFDC program in North Carolina and we argued that the current policy
that we were attacking was the outgrowth of that same policy and that
they could infer that and should infer that because there was no
rational justification for it articulated by the state. They never gave
any sensible explanation.
I had done a deposition of the secretary of the state department and
asked him why, with North Carolina having the second highest infant
mortality rate in the country and no free health clinics available
throughout the state, would the state choose not to accept the federal
money and cover these unborn children. His answer was something to the
effect of, "My wife didn't need any more money after
she was married than before she was married." That was his
answer to that question. We argued to this three-judge court that that
was an irrational basis for making a policy decision that adversely
affected thousands of people's lives in the state.
Unfortunately, the two judges other than Judge McMillan voted to deny our
claim and Judge McMillan dissented with a very strong opinion. We
appealed that decision to the Supreme Court of the United States and the
court chose not to hear the appeal, as they have their power to decide
which cases they will consider important enough to hear. They accept
about one of a hundred and ours was one of the ninety-nine they chose
not to hear. By 1977, I think that that case had been declined for
review by the Supreme Court. Two more years later, our lobbyist in the
General Assembly, who was Leslie Winner, who's now the
general counsel for UNC, I think by it was probably 1981, she was able
to convince a couple of key legislators that it was irrational and
damaging to not cover the unborn children. So through legislative
action, we got the state to opt in to cover the unborn children.
Page 20
As for Alexander v. Hill, the processing case, the
state departments at the county level basically just seemed to not want
to have enough competent staff to make the decisions in a timely manner.
So similar to what happened in Harris and Kannon v. HUD, about every two
years, we would keep monitoring their progress and find that they were
not complying. We filed a motion for contempt of court in front of Judge
McMillan and he decided that after three years of not coming into
compliance, and in some counties, like Mecklenburg particularly was
doing worse than better in many instances, he got mad enough to enter a
new order that said for every single application that was pending over
the deadline without good cause that was documented in the file, the
county would have to pay a fine to the applicant in the amount of fifty
dollars per week for every week the application was overdue without good
cause.
The state appealed that decision the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals and
that appeal was heard in Durham, which is an unusual place for the
Fourth Circuit. It usually doesn't sit in any place other
than Richmond, but they had a panel in Durham. They heard the
state's arguments there and completely dismissed them and
upheld Judge McMillan three to zero. The state then petitioned the
Supreme Court of the United States to review that decision and we wrote
a brief in opposition to that petition. The Supremes declined to review
the Fourth Circuit's decision that upheld Judge McMillan. I
think that decision was made in 1979. So we had a permanent injunction
that required all the decisions to be made within the federal time
guide.
By then, the federal rule had been amended from thirty days to forty-five
days, so they had fifteen more days to make the decision than when we
started in 1974 and most of the counties still were not doing it. Then
we would have a series of other motions in front of the court. There
were so many creative ways that the state and some of the counties
figured to
Page 21 subvert their obligation. In many
counties, they just started denying every application that had not been
approved on the forty-fourth day so they would show no cases that were
pending over forty-five days. And we would go into the counties and we
would go through file drawers to see what had happened in those files
and we would see hundreds of files where they didn't make a
decision based upon anybody's being ineligible because they
had too much money or they weren't cooperating by providing
information necessary to finish the application. They would just deny
every application that was still pending on the forty-fourth day that
they couldn't otherwise approve, that they hadn't
approved for some reason. When they were just overworked or
hadn't gotten to it, they would just start denying people.
So we had to go back in and get supplemental orders to prohibit their
denying people arbitrarily to avoid having the deadline come and being
overdue and having to pay the fines. This went on for twenty-five years.
After about the first seven years, I couldn't stand it
anymore. I got out of it shortly after the Fourth Circuit decision. I
was pretty much totally into housing work and doing this work with these
neighborhood organizations and things like that, and doing legislative
work.
I could not do the day-to-day guerrilla warfare, but I do remember this
one thing. There was one county in the state that finally got its act
together and consistently accepted people on the same day that they came
to apply, which was another part of the order. They would process all
the applications within the forty-five-day time limit. They wanted to be
exempt from the fifty-dollar per week fines, because they just said,
"Well, we're the only county that's doing
well." This was Davie County.
So the attorney general made a motion before the court to exempt Davie
County from the class action that covered all a hundred counties for the
purposes of the fine. We had sort of
Page 22 a lukewarm
opposition to that. We thought, you know, if this county was really
doing what it needed, it would never be fined and so there was no point
in exempting them, so we sort of made kind of an offer to Davie County.
We composed a song, "The Ballad of Davie County," and
we offered to record that and have it played in their lobby to honor
their compliance with the order and tendered that to Judge McMillan. In
his opinion, which was printed in the
Federal
Supplement, he recited "The Ballad of Davie
County" that we had offered and printed it in the
court's opinion, but granted the state's motion
and let them out. So we were able to get a little bit of humor in this
otherwise terrible, seemingly endless struggle. It was a very difficult
time.