This article is part of MissingA series of deceased for remarkable people whose deaths, starting in 1851, did not mention the Times.
The minute of New York of Joyce Brown lasted more than most. A minister of support, Brown, became homeless in 1986 and began camping on a heating grill on the second avenue and 65th in Manhattan.
A year that passed before receiving them from city officials, unintentionally dedicated to a psychiatric hospital – where he was mentally ill – and violently gave medication. Brown, who was best known as Billie Boggs, was the first homeless to become the focus of Mayor Edward I. Koch’s newly established initiative to tackle the increasing visibility of the lack of housing and the unseen mental illness on the streets.
But, as he would later say in interviews, the city chose “the mistake”. Unlike the dozen people who would face similar degrees, he said she knew her rights and start practicing them the next day.
What followed was a milestone treatment that focused on mental health, political freedoms and unintentional psychiatric treatment of homeless people. “I’m not crazy,” Brown said. “Just homeless.”
A long time ago, Brown came out of the sidewalk to the prominent position, with a tornado interview on speech and news programs.
By the time Brown died of a heart attack on November 29, 2005, at 58, he had long been forgotten.
However, the effects of its transitional reputation continue to resonate on the sidewalks and basements of the city, as Governor Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams introduced their own initiatives to tackle the lack of housing in New York, including the nursing home.
Joyce Patricia Brown was born on September 7, 1947, in Elizabeth, NJ, the youngest of six children, most of whom were born in South Carolina and Florida.
Her father, William Brown, told 1950 censuses that she was unemployed. Her mother, Mae Blossom Brown, worked in a luggage factory.
Shortly after graduating from the Gymnasium, Joyce Brown worked as secretary of the Elizabeth Human Rights Committee, where he may have learned something or two about her own constitutional privileges. He also worked as an employee for the mayor of Elizabeth then, Thomas G. Dunn, and for Thomas & Betts, an electrical manufacturer, according to a Nesbitt Funeral Home death announcement in Elizabeth.
Until 18, however, she was addicted to cocaine and heroin and steals money from her mother. Her mother died in 1979, who, as her relatives said, could have caused a subsequent spiral emotionally.
By 1985, she had lost her job. She took turns living with her sisters in New Jersey and were soon treated in clinics and hospitals. Her brothers’ efforts to help her lead to arguments, and in 1986 she moved to Manhattan, where she made her home on the sidewalk near Swensen’s ice cream lounge on the upper east side, screaming and abstaining outdoors.
He named the name Billie Boggs, a twisted tribute to Bill Boggs, a television host on WNEW (now WNYW), with whom he had become enruptured.
In some neighbors and regular passers -by, it became a New York accessory, the species you do not find in the drivers. They would talk to her about the news. For others, it was a threat – cursed and shouting tribal patches, especially in black men, and even punching people.
Her sisters tried to be hospitalized. But the doctors said she did not show herself for herself and released her.
On October 12, 1987, after watching for months under a Koch administration strategy, known as the aid to the project (the initially stayed in the emergency project at Hosperty Hospital at Manhattan Hospital and to provide them with and enhance their patients from their Major and Psychiatrics. Bellevue, where medicines, where medicines, where medicines, where the drugs were violent, where Manhattan medicines, where Manhattan medicines, where Manhattan medicines, where manhattan medicines and manhattan medicines and were provided with medical and medical medical medicines and medical medical medicines and Bellevue.
The next day, according to an article in 1988 in New York magazine, he called on the New York City Political Association from a Payment Payment Phone to the Hospital. Norman Siegel, executive director of the organization, was one of the lawyers entrusted to her case. In court, a psychiatrist Bellevue presented a diagnosis of “chronic paranoid schizophrenia”.
That night, one of her sisters recognized her from a sketch of the court in television news.
This picture was in the stark contrasting in a photo produced by her family, which showed a smiling coffee, wearing a red dress and gold earrings as they were embraced by a man in a pink tuxedo, her sisters smiled at the camera nearby.
“This was my sister,” one of the sisters on Newsday said. “That was us.”
A judge of the State Supreme Court decided that Brown was “unable to take care of his basic needs” and ordered to be released, but remained in Bellevue, while the city appealed to the decision. The city won the appeal, but after a subsequent appeal by Brown lawyers, a judge decided that it could not be violent pharmaceutical. This appeal fell when Bellevue released Brown, saying it made no sense to remain if he could not take care of the hospital. It had spent a total of 84 days there.
It soon became a media star, a symbol of justice, which, according to its lawyers, was presented in its clear and articulated interviews as a more or less rational example of urban production that was, he said, “under surveillance” for months.
“In a civilized society you are not just going around the receipt of people against their will and bringing them to the hospital when they are reasonable only because of the program of a mayor,” he told Morley Safer for a 1988 section of the News CBS program “60 minutes”. “All this is politically. I am a political prisoner because of the Mayor Koch.”
In the same section, Mayor Koch insisted that the removal on the road was “weird” and said that Brown’s ability to speak articulate to the camera showed the effectiveness of the hospitalization and the drug given.
That year, Brown also appeared on “The Phil Donahue Show” after being equipped by Bloomingdale’s and leased a Harvard Law School forum in which he offered “a view of the road” of the lack of roof. The book and the film are flooding the offices of the New York Civil Liberation Union. The Associated Press called her “the most famous homeless in America”. At Moscow’s summit with Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, in 1988, President Ronald Reagan cited her case as an example of freedom as opposed to Moscow’s policy of preserving politicians claiming that they were mentally ill.
“Instead of talking about me, because the president doesn’t help me get a permanent housing?” Brown reported.
Following Brown’s case, Project Help faced public control and criticism. The momentum of the program stopped and eventually interrupted. Brown’s education continues to serve as a precedent in discussions on mental health, lack of housing and political freedoms.
After the liberation of Brown, he soon worked as secretary of the Union of Civil Freedoms. But he left because, he said, he didn’t like the job.
“The inability I always admired to dissolve,” Siegel said of an interview.
He put weight. Her gait slowed down. It may have been pharmacized again for a while. Around 1991, she moved to a supervised group of teams for former homeless women, but also returned to the streets at Panhandle, saying her sisters had been delayed to promote more than $ 8,000 to social security checks. He continued to live with $ 500 a month in disability remuneration and avoids the press.
When Brown was originally released by Bellevue, it was opposed to setting up two judges of the Supreme Court. “We may approach time,” they wrote, “when the problem of the homeless will face honest and realistic attitudes and resources.”
“Now,” Siegel said, “35 years later, the hopes of disagreeing judges unfortunately have not yet been implemented.”
