[Frederic Green and his lawyer Nancy DeVetter, courtesy Savannah Morning News]
Prologue
It’s a bright, sunny April day in 2022 in Savannah, Georgia on the campus of Savannah Technical College in Pooler. Frederic Green is the sharpest dressed man in the room. Green’s sky blue sports coat and lemon yellow shirt—the colors of Savannah Technical College— greets people at the door and he asks everyone to sign in.
As 11 a.m. approaches, the room fills with a mixture of people finding seats in executive chairs. The lecture hall fills with smooth jazz and lunch tables in the corner are topped with a nice spread. The crowd of around 30 people includes former and current prison wardens, politicians, lawyers, local non-profit managers, and several justice-impacted people.
The path to real social change, to restorative justice, begins in rooms like this where people invested in positive change have conversations that turn to policy, that turn to action and push the slow ball of bureaucracy towards permanent change within a community.
Green paces around the front of the room with a nervous excitement and the confidence of a man on a mission. He’s so sure of his mission, it’s infectious. Everyone in the room knows his story, but he’s not here to tell it today.
Carl Betterson opens the meeting and introduces his team; among them he recognizes Green as a case manager for the new Pathway Home initiative he helms.
Long before today’s introduction, before the Mayor of Savannah knew his name, before Green was a community leader, he wasn’t known as Fred or Frederic. When Fred Green sold crack cocaine on the streets of Savannah, people knew him by his middle name, Tory.
The Cycle
Tory sat at his grandma Ottie’s kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon in the late 1980’s. On the table was a toy train, hauling shot glasses as cargo. The 1000-foot concrete brick square on the corner of 32nd and railroad tracks was isolated enough, with a large enough yard, to accommodate guests on Sunday afternoons and not attract much attention.
As the train with its empty cargo hold made a turn around the table, it stopped in front of the young boy. Tory refilled the shot glasses with liquor and then sent the toy with its fresh cargo back around to the waiting customers. The bootleg house, built as a single-family residence in 1950, hummed with conversation while the record player kept the Sunday vibes just right.
Tory, at 10-years-old, juggled bartending and DJ’ing while grandma Ottie collected cash—fifty cents or a dollar per shot—and cooked food for the visitors. Ottie raised Tory while his mother was mostly absent. In months ending in R, there would be oysters roasting on a fire in the backyard, near a garden. Neighbors strolled in from the packed row houses on nearby streets, looking to get some booze on a day when the city decided no one should be able to buy it. The money earned from the bootleg house helped with Tory’s grandfather who was an invalid. When no-one was looking, Tory would sneak himself shots of liquor.
The neighborhood today looks much like it did then. Gentrification has yet to reach it, but if you toss a rock across the railroad tracks you’ll smash into the full bloom of transformation. New construction, restored houses, fancy restaurants, businesses and a host of upscale new residents. But grandma’s house remains much as it did thirty years ago.
Tory remembers a time when there was a sense of community around Ottie’s house. Ottie would grow food in the back yard and sell it each week at the farmer’s market, taking Tory with her. She would tell Tory to head on down the street to a neighbor’s house to borrow some eggs. When he arrived, the neighbor would recognize him as Ottie’s grandkid and welcome him right in.
Over the garden beds, she would show him how to plant and grow food. Tory’s father had moved back north, leaving behind a myriad of step-siblings Tory had no connection to as the product of an affair.
Green knows the term P.I.E. now—an acronym used in clinical social work that means Person In Environment Perspective. It states that “a person is heavily influenced by their environment; therefore problems can be understood by understanding the environment.” He didn’t know that term then. What he knew of his little world in Savannah was a cycle of generational poverty, where bending or breaking laws in order to survive was not only approved behavior, but necessary because the very laws that governed were designed to oppress.
According to the Washington Post in 2019, “The typical black American family has 1/10th the wealth of a typical white one. In 1863, black Americans owned one-half of 1 percent of the national wealth. Today it’s just over 1.5 percent.”
“The system isn’t broken,” Green says now. “It’s working exactly how it was designed.”
The day grandma Ottie died, 14-year-old Tory was inconsolable. He bolted from the back of the house on 32nd and hid for hours in the line of trees at the back of the property.
For two full days, he didn’t utter a word. Green now understands there is a term for his behavior that day, selective mutism, which often affects children who experience sudden trauma.
The Game
When Tory answered the door of the row-house, his best friend Delvecchio Cummings entered with trouble. His brother owed the wrong people some money. On Bolton Street, several blocks over, a coffin had been placed on the street. The brother’s name was written inside it.
After Ottie’s death, Tory’s mother moved him and his brother to the west side of Savannah. They had a brief stay in the Simon F. Frazier affordable housing units before moving into a row-house on West Park Avenue, within eyesight of the housing development, surrounded by blight and deep poverty.
The crack epidemic of the 1980’s that gripped major cities in America had reached Savannah. Where there was demand, there was supply. Whole communities became infected with addiction while the dealers grew rich, hoping to break their own cycles of generational poverty.
The new home on the west side had put him in proximity of kids his own age and older. But without any real parental guidance, Tory was drawn to peers who were drawn to crime.
“My grandmother was very dear to my heart,” Green remembers. “After her loss that was the beginning of me acting out.”
By 14, Tory had learned how to steal a Cadillac. He knew what alcohol and cannabis did for him. Having watched his grandmother skirt the legal edges, he felt he had permission to do the same.
Cummings and Tory worked on a plan to save Cummings’ brother who owed the dealer $1,000. Cummings’ idea: get in the game.
By 1991, homicides in Savannah had tripled. When a major drug dealer called someone out by name, everyone knew it was serious. The neighborhood witnessed fights and shootings on a regular basis. The sound of sirens blaring became known as the Savannah Song.
“We could sell some dope, man,” Cummings told Tory.
“What do we need?” Tory asked Cummings.
“We can get started with $50,” he replied.
“I wondered if my mommy had $50,” Green remembers. “So I went and looked in her pocketbook and she had a 50 dollar bill and I stole the 50 dollar bill.”
Tory and Cummings headed down the street to the trap house. Faking a confidence they didn’t yet possess, ordered up a 50 pack—five pieces of crack cocaine.
“It took us four days because we got shitted (stolen from) by people who smoked crack, because we didn’t know what the hell we were doing,” Green said.
But they learned quickly how to navigate this new world. And they turned were good at it. Four days later, they had amassed $850 in profit. While the brother remained in hiding, Tory and Cummings set out for Bolton Street. Whey they arrived, the drug dealer was not in, but his first lieutenant was. They offered up what they had and asked for debt forgiveness. The lieutenant handed the money back to them and with it a bag of drugs.
“I respect what y’all did,” he told them, offering an alternative deal: Keep selling crack, but only buy from him from now on and the debt would be forgiven. Tory and Cummings agreed to the deal. They saved the brother’s life and in the process found a new hustle.
“There was honor among thieves on the street,” Green said. “Basically, if I look out for you, you come back and spend your money with me.”
A study done by The Racial Equity and Leadership Task Force in 2020 found that the projected income of children living in nine African-American neighborhoods in Savannah, including the one Green lived in during his teen years, would only reach about $20,000/annually by the time they were 35. The same report noted 25.6% of Savannah families of color live in poverty, below the federal threshold and 30% of households of color have a net worth of zero.
The kingpin, who Tory and Cummings missed that day, was the infamous Ricky Jivens. His gang was responsible for the majority of drug sales in the city, as well as one-third of the city’s homicides in 1991. Jivens is now serving a life sentence at Supermax Federal Penitentiary in Florence, Colorado.
With the confidence of their new job, Tory and Cummings’ strut caught the eye of a young girl next door, Melissa. Her favorite aunt lived in the row-house next to Tory.
She would walk down Park Avenue from her own house on the east side to visit with her aunt. She wasn’t allowed to hang outside as much at her home and her aunt’s house provided what felt like freedom at the time. At first, Melissa and Cummings had a thing, Green recalls.
One day on her aunt’s stoop, Tory made fun of Melissa’s earrings, a gift from Cummings. She laid into him until Tory and Cummings eventually walked off.
Although she gave him a hard time, Melissa actually thought Tory was cool. She liked his street smarts. She liked his demeanor and the way he carried himself. It wasn’t long before the puppy love between Cummings and Melissa faded and Tory began noticing her back. But Melissa’s aunt didn’t like it, nor did her mother. They warned her to stay away from Tory. They thought he would be a bad influence. And that was what Melissa liked about him. Tory offered adventure, the bad boy persona. They began dating.
“He was public enemy number one to them,” Melissa remembers. “If they found out I was with him or I skipped school to be with him it was bad. But when I looked at him, it was like cupid’s arrow. I just knew he was the one. And I was right.”
For a while, selling crack cocaine worked out fine for Tory. Underage and unable to secure a legitimate job, the money was alluring, but more than that he had earned the respect of his peers.
As a freshman at Jenkins High School, Tory was involved in a huge brawl and was expelled. His mother was outraged and kicked him out of the house. For a while, he lived on the streets, selling drugs and rotating in and out of juvenile detention for a variety of crimes. He would find shelter in crack houses or on the streets or with Melissa. He did his best to shield her from the world he moved inside.
“I never involved my mother, my brother or Melissa in my various criminal activities,” Green said. “She always asked me why I wouldn’t let her hold my drugs or cash.”
One night, Melissa called Tory and told him to come over. Her mother was at work, and her step-father was busy with his alcohol addiction and listening to his music loudly.
Tory snuck into her two-story brick house on the corner of Ott and East Park Ave, as he had done several other times. Late into the night, Melissa noticed eyes watching them through a crack in the door. She thought it was her brother, at first.
“Hey Tyron, what are you doing?” she asked the eyes. But there was no answer. Then she realized the eyes were her step-father’s. Tory was lounging around in his underwear. Melissa panicked and told him to get out. Tory scrambled to find his clothes and tucked his pistol in his pants. Melissa forced him out the window onto the balcony.
“We’re two stories up,” Tory said. He dropped his hat to gauge the distance.
“Hurry! Jump! The bushes will break your fall,” Melissa said.
“Man, fuck that,” Tory said as he climbed back through the window.
In a second, he realized he had nothing to fear.
He uncovered the pistol in his waistband, said goodnight to his girlfriend and walked right through the middle of the house, the young, confident, street-wise kid, daring someone to mess with him.
While most teenagers in Savannah attended high-school, working towards graduation, Tory spent his high school years dealing drugs. He was warned by older dealers that one day he would get busted. It’s just part of the game. They taught him how out to handle himself in prison. What the rules were.
And then it happened. Tory, at 17, sold drugs to a confidential informant. He was arrested for trafficking crack cocaine and possession of a firearm and sentenced to five years in state prison. Melissa was pregnant at the time with their first child.
The Vet
Tory stepped out of the back of truck in a black and white striped uniform and was handed a bush ax. It was the late 1990’s, during his second stint in prison after violating parole. He and his fellow prisoners, would sharpen the axes on the side of the truck before hand trimming a pathway alongside the road.
Penal labor in the United States is legal under the 13th Amendment. The idea was born during the time of slavery and Jim Crow. By recent estimates, nearly 60 percent of the current prison population—which is majority Black and male—work while incarcerated. In federal prisons in 2021, they earned somewhere between $0.23 and $1.15 an hour.
At a lunch break one day, Tory and his crew tried to make the best of the situation. They noticed a big oak tree. They decided to take turns chopping at the tree to see how many licks it would take to drop it. Green remembers this moment, somewhat cheerfully. But now, he understands the undertones of what he experienced while incarcerated.
“If you want to talk about the historical things, the 13th Amendment needs to be rewritten,” Green says. “It’s slavery by another name.”
Toward the end of his three year sentence in the late 1990s, Tory was transferred to Ware State Prison in Waycross, Georgia. Unlike his first years in prison, where the world he entered was similar to the world he lived in on the streets of Savannah, Ware was a different place.
The population was older and now Tory was older, too. Melissa was pregnant again when he violated. He would miss the remaining months of her pregnancy and the birth of his second child. While at Ware, he met Mr. Dunbar, the prison minister.
“The stereotype of jailhouse religion is true,” Green says. “Everyone wants to make a change when they’re locked up. Some people. Some people just say no, no, I am me. I know I needed to make a change.”
During his first round in prison, he earned his G.E.D. and during his time at Ware he began to see that education was a path to true freedom.
One day at Ware, Tory was paired with an older vet and given a job mopping floors. Green doesn’t remember the man’s name now, but just called him The Vet. On a coffee break, the two started chatting.
“Son, I got two life sentences running wild, “The Vet told Tory. “Let me tell you something: when you get back out, I want you to stay out. The only doors that are going to open for me are the doors to other prisons. For you, when you get out, many doors will open for you.”
During his final years at Ware, the jailhouse religion he attempted during his first stint, took. “It surprised me, the change,” Green recalls. “I still can’t believe it to this day or explain it.”
One day, during his final days inside, Melissa picked up the ringing phone and an automated voice on the other end asked her if she would like to receive a collect call from an inmate at Ware State Prison.
As the automated voice paused to share the name of the person calling, Tory’s voice came through “Baby, I love you.” Melissa smiled and put the phone down, denying the call. Moments later, the phone rang again and again in the pause Tory’s voice would say “God loves you.” And again Melissa would hang up. And again the phone would ring, and Tory’s recorded voice would share a scripture, or a thought.
Tory had turned his street-smart, hustling spirit, the same attitude that landed him in prison, to good. He talked to Melissa during the collect call pauses so it didn’t charge her account. He didn’t want to waste money, but he wanted her to know he was thinking of her. He wanted to share the gospel he was learning.
One day, Melissa opened a letter from Tory and inside was a solid gold ring. She put it on and wore it everyday until he returned home from prison.
Home Again
In 1997, Fred Green, now 21, stepped into the row-house on E. Anderson, back in his old neighborhood, less than a mile from his grandmother’s old house. Melissa and their three young children were waiting for him. Melissa was wearing the ring he sent from prison and the house was furnished with furniture Green helped purchase from prison.
But Mellissa was nervous. Over the years, they had communicated regularly, but now they would be living together again. She wasn’t sure how it was going to work. Her house was in a rough area and she was worried he might fall back into the streets if not careful.
The children didn’t really know him. He had spent most of their young lives in prison. But she doubled down, moving past her fears, believing as she always had since they were 14, that Fred was her man, the one. Upon her insistence, the next week, the two went to the courthouse and were married.
On a Sunday morning shortly after being released, Green helped dress his two little girls for church. He struggled with their ponytails, and remembers now with a laugh, how he couldn’t quite get them right.
The prison chaplain, Mr. Dunbar picked him and the kids up and took them to church while Melissa worked her job at a hotel on Bay Street. It was the beginning of his life as a father. He decided he wanted to be an electrician.
The manager of the affordable housing unit Melissa had secured learned of the new occupant and immediately raised the rent. Melissa refused to move back in with her mother. There was no other option, so she put the burden on Green to start helping. And Green responded. He got a job at Roger Woods Sausage factory because they hired convicted felons, but after a while, it fell through.
Green’s mother-in-law, who once wanted nothing to do with him, helped him secure a job at Cracker Barrel. But he soon realized that the pay wasn’t going to be enough.
Green headed to a newly opened Chili’s. He got an application and sat down to fill it out. As he got to the portion of the application that asked if he had been convicted of a felony, he checked no, knowing they wouldn’t run a background check and thinking that if he made himself important enough to them, they wouldn’t fire him. He was hired in the kitchen.
For four years, Green would open Cracker Barrel at 5 a.m. After working all day, he would drive down Highway 80 to the Chills and close the restaurant, leaving around 1 a.m. or 2 a.m. He worked 18-20 hours a day for most of the week.
Green knew that education would be the great equalizer. He applied to Savannah Technical College for a certificate in electrical technology. As he filled out his Free Application For Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), he got to Question 35, ““Have you ever been convicted of possessing or selling illegal drugs?” Green checked no, thinking he would simply finish his education before they found out.
“I thought, if I can go to school and get the education, they couldn’t take that away from me,” Green said.
During President Reagan’s War on Drugs in the 1980’s, laws were passed to prevent anyone with felony drug charges from receiving federal student loans. In 1994, President Bill Clinton enforced the measure as part of a major crime bill that restricted felons from receiving the Pell Grant. The measures have been fought over in court ever since, with the ACLU taking lead.
In 2020, Congress reversed the measure regarding Pell Grants. The New York Times called it a “watershed moment for the criminal justice overhaul movement.”
As Green worked the kitchen at Chili's, now a shift-manager, his supervisor Josh called him into the office. Josh sat Green down and explained that his probation officer had called the restaurant.
Green and Josh had become friends over the years and Green had made himself an indispensable member of the crew, working tirelessly. He came clean with his boss about his past.
Josh reached into the cabinet and pulled out a fresh application. He told Green to fill it out and this time, check yes on the felony question. While Green filled it out, Josh shredded the original application. Green worked for the restaurant for five more years.
When it got rough, when the hours were too long and the days were hard, when he felt like quitting and the streets looked like they could offer monetary refuge, The Vet’s words would come back to him—the metaphor of open doors, the pathway home, kept him moving forward.
Restaurant jobs were only a few of the places where re-entering citizens could find work in the early 2000s. Now the Ban the Box campaign, which aims to eliminate the question from applications, has spread to 30 states so people like Green, won’t be forced to lie.
Breaking The Cycle
The two-story beige house sits on the corner of a wealthy subdivision in Pooler, Georgia—one of the fastest growing cities in America, just outside Savannah. A work truck and two vehicles are parked in the driveway, the spitting image of regular, hum-drum Americana.
It’s the second house Fred and Melissa Green have owned since he was released from prison in 1997. As they worked their way through thankless service industry jobs, they began taking home buying classes. They still own their first house, which Green is looking to transform into a halfway home for reentering citizens.
Now, the older couple, who have been together for over 30 years, and married for 22, are empty nesters who rarely have company. They talk about how they should host more parties, but they are so used to working long days they haven’t adjusted to life with just the two of them.
They offer food to any guests who do come by, echoing the hospitality Green witnessed in his youth. On the living room wall are family portraits with their children. All four of their children are successful, three are college graduates. Their youngest is currently enrolled in dental school in Atlanta.
Fred and Melissa became the first generation of their families to graduate from college and to buy a home. They both earned graduate degrees and gave their children lives they never had.
“My mother still doesn’t own anything,” Melissa says.
“We came out of the mud and concrete,” Green adds. “It’s still a struggle. We try to keep loving each other and caring for each other.”
One recent day, before a crowd of inmates at Ware State Prison, Green introduces himself as a case manager for a new program out of Savannah Technical College.
He tells them, you can get your forklift certificate, or welding certificate now, while you’re still in prison. Green tells them, this program could be life changing. They stare at him, not really buying what he’s selling.
Green knows he has to adjust his approach. Part of his job is to sell the program to likely candidates. So he starts his introduction over. This time, he introduces himself not as Fred Green, but he introduces himself with his old inmate number. Now he has their attention. And now he tells them about Tory.
He tells them about how he served time just like them, but how he has had his record expunged, how he has a master’s degree from Savannah State, how he owns two houses and sent his kids to college. He tells them, at one time, the only skills he had were selling drugs. He uses the same language The Vet used in that conversation so many years before, “When you get out, many doors will open for you.”
He tried to be an electrician. It didn’t pan out. But he found his calling in social work.
During a break, one of the inmates approaches Green and pulls him aside. He tells Green, “I see hope in you.” Over the next year, the program will serve over 500 inmates.
Back on the campus of Savannah Technical College, the meeting of minds continues. After the introductions by Carl Betterson, he turns it over to his right-hand man, Fred.
“We’re breaking for lunch now. This is the part where we can all participate in,” Green says with a sly grin.
Today is the first stakeholder’s meeting for the Pathway Home program. The initiative was born out of a federal grant from the U.S. Department of Labor which gave the school nearly $4,000,000 to began the program.
After lunch, Green takes over. He paces down front, a dynamic and engaged speaker. Green’s cadence rises as he speaks, quoting Malcom X and the Bible, his voice growing sharper as he ends his sentences with authority.
He sounds frustrated but clear and concise, there’s a warmth and energy to his vernacular that exposes his passion for seeing real change in the world.
“I don’t like that word,” Green says referring to recidivism. “I take the next letter, S, for success.”
Green introduces the day’s panel, all four of them are successful former felons who now hold positions as community leaders, just like Green. They share with the room the challenges re-entering citizens face and how they, as leaders, can impact reformed individuals seeking a better life.
Green makes sure the partner of one of the men has time to speak. He wants her to speak about the challenges that families have when a returning citizen comes home, the same challenges Melissa faced.
As the day breaks, and people stand to leave, Green reiterates his favorite quote:
“Remember, the system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly how it was designed to work. We need to break the system.”