This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about surprising people whose deaths have not been reported in the era in 1851.
Joyce Brown's New York minutes lasted longer than most. Former secretary, Brown became homeless in 1986 and began camping on heated gratings on Second Avenue and 65th Avenue in Manhattan.
It was about a year before she was invited to a city official, and she was reluctantly committed to a mental hospital that was declared mentally ill and was forced to give her medication. Brown, known as Billy Boggs, was the first homeless figure to become the focus of Mayor Edward Koch's newly expanded initiative to address the increased vision of homelessness and untreated mental illness on the streets.
But as she says in an interview later, the city chose “the wrong thing.” Unlike dozens of other people facing similar fates, she says she knows her rights and will begin to exercise them the next day.
It was then a groundbreaking lawsuit focused on mental health, civil liberties and the unwilling psychiatric treatment of homeless people. “I'm not insane,” Brown would say. “Just homeless.”
Eventually, Brown was lofted to excellence from the pavement, and a whirlwind of interviews about stories and news programs.
By the time Brown died of a heart attack in 1958 on November 29, 2005, she had been forgotten for a long time.
However, the impact of her temporary fame still reverberates on city sidewalks and subways as Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams introduced their own initiative to address homelessness in New York, including involuntarily hospitalising people with mental illness.
Joyce Patricia Brown was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey on September 7, 1947, and was the youngest of six children, most of whom were born in South Carolina and Florida.
Her father, William Brown, told the census enumerator in 1950 that he was unemployed. Her mother, May Blossom Brown, worked in a factory that assembles luggage.
Some time after graduating from high school, Joyce Brown worked as secretary to the Elizabeth Human Rights Commission. There, she may have learned a thing or two about her own constitutional privileges. She also worked as secretary of the then Mayor of Elizabeth Thomas G. Dunn and Thomas & Betts, an electrical equipment manufacturer, according to a death notice from Elizabeth Nesbitt Funeral Home.
But by the age of 18, she was obsessed with cocaine and heroin and was stealing money from her mother. Her mother passed away in 1979. Her parents said it could have caused a spiral further downward emotionally.
By 1985, she had lost her job. She took turns living in New Jersey with her sisters, and was easily handled in clinics and hospitals. Her sisters' efforts to help her brought debate, and in 1986 she moved to Manhattan, where she built a house on the sidewalk near Swensen's ice cream parlor on the Upper East Side, urinating and defecating in the nearby outdoors.
She adopted the name Billy Boggs. Billy Boggs has hired in honor of WNEW (now WNYW) television host Bill Boggs.
For some neighbors and ordinary passersby, she has become the kind of New York equipment that you won't find in guidebooks. They will have conversations with her about the news. To others, she was a threat – cursing and screaming at the racial admiration that was especially black men and even punching people.
Her sisters attempted to hospitalize her. However, the doctor said she had released her, saying she would not pose a risk to herself.
On October 12, 1987, the aim is to remove severely mentally ill people from the streets of Manhattan and to force medical and psychiatric care after being monitored for several months under the Koch Management Strategy (the initials of the Homeless Emergency Contact Project stood), known as Project Help.
The following day, according to a 1988 article in the New York Magazine, she called the New York Civil Liberties Union through a hospital's paid phone. Norman Siegel, the organization's executive director, was one of the lawyers assigned to her case. In court, Bellevue psychiatrist presented a diagnosis of “chronic delusional schizophrenia.”
That night, one of her sisters recognized her from a courtroom sketch on TV news.
The image was juxtaposed with photographs produced by her family. It showed a smiling brown, wearing a red dress and gold earrings, a man hugged him in a pink bow tie tuxedo, with the sisters smiling at the camera nearby.
“This was once my sister,” one of the sisters told Newsday. “This was us once.”
A state Supreme Court judge ruled that Brown “cannot care about her essential needs” and ordered her to be released, but she remained in Bellevue while the city appealed the decision. The city won the appeal, but after a subsequent appeal by Brown's lawyers, the judge ruled that she could not forcefully apply the drug. When Bellevue released Brown, its appeal was dropped. She spent a total of 84 days there.
She quickly evolved into a media star. She was a symbol of justice that her lawyer said, and in her clear and clear interview, she described as a more or less reasonable example of a city's bivouac who has been “under surveillance” for several months, “like a criminal.”
“In a civilized society, it's not just about picking up people against their will and taking them to hospitals when they're insane because of the mayor's program,” she told Morley Safer about the 1988 segment of the CBS news program “60 Minutes.” “This is all political. I am a political prisoner for Mayor Koch.”
In the same segment, Mayor Koch argued that defecation on the streets was “strange” and said Brown's ability to speak clearly on camera indicates the effectiveness of her hospitalization and the medication she was given.
That year, after being equipped with Bloomingdale, Brown also appeared in the Phil Donohue Show, giving lectures at the Harvard Law School Forum, which offered “street views” for the homeless. Book and film offers are flooding the offices of the New York Civil Liberties Union. The Associated Press called her “the most famous homeless person in America.” At the Moscow Summit with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, President Ronald Reagan called her case as an example of freedom in 1988, in contrast to Moscow's policy of binding political opposition by claiming that they were mentally ill.
“As opposed to talking about me, why don't you help the president get permanent housing?” Brown was quoted as saying.
The Brown incident led to the project being faced with public scrutiny and criticism. The program's momentum halted and was eventually cancelled. Brown's lawsuit continues to serve as a precedent for debates over mental health, homelessness and civil liberties.
After Brown was released, she worked briefly as a secretary to the Civil Liberties Union. However, she said she didn't like her job, so she quit.
“The bravery I always admired has dissipated,” Siegel said of her in an interview.
She gained weight. Her walking has slowed down. She may have been taking the medicine again for a while. Around 1991, she moved to a group home that was once supervised for homeless women, but she also returned to the streets for the Panhandle, saying that the sisters delayed transfers of over $8,000 with a Social Security check. She stayed alive at $500 a month on a disabled salary and avoided the press.
When Brown was first released from Bellevue, it opposed the two opposed state Supreme Court's recommendations of justice. “We may be closer to time,” they wrote, “when the issue of homelessness faces honest, realistic attitudes and resources.”
“Now,” Siegel said, “Thirty-five years later, the hopes of the opposing judges have not yet been realized.”
