
          The Making of A Judge
          By Callahan, NancyNancy Callahan
          Vol. 9, No. 4, 1987, pp. 9-13, 16
          
          In 1816, North_Carolina planter Joseph Gee bought a massive tract
of land in a bend in the Alabama River, in Wilcox County. On his death
in 1824, his plantation-Gee's Bend-fell to his nephews, Sterling and
Charles Gee. Charles managed the behemoth holdings; Sterling returned
to North_Carolina to run another family inheritance. And it is thought
by some that in the ensuing years they used Gee's Bend to run a
slave-trading network between Alabama and North_Carolina.
          By 1845, the two were in debt to their nephew, Mark H. Pettway, for
$29,000. Pettway's payoff was Gee's Bend, thousands of acres of dark,
fertile soil, an agricultural dream illustrating why that region of
Alabama came to be called the "Black_Belt."
          Pettway and his family rode to Alabama in a caravan in
1846. Traveling with them were more than one hundred slaves who,
except for a cook, walked every step of the way. The episode set in
motion one of the most powerful black histories in all the South.
          Mark Pettway changed the names of all his slaves to "Pettway."
After Emancipation, they became tenants or 

sharecroppers--on that same,
white-owned Pettway land. In 1895, ownership of Mark Pettway's
original four thousand acres left the family, but his name remained
with his former slaves and their children, who continued to work the
soil . In 1900, the VandeGraaff family of Tuscaloosa bought the
Pettway land plus three thousand adjacent acres. Still, the black
Pettways stayed.
          Leaving would have been hard, if not impossible. As the crow flies,
Gees Bend is only seven miles from Camden the county seat. But a ferry
across the Alabama River was unreliable, and by land the trip was
forty miles each way. Staying where they were, in a totally black
culture save for  the few white landowners and their families, was the
practical thing for the Pettways to do. Practical, but isolated.
          The Great Depression had a shattering impact on the black farmers
of Gee's Bend. Cotton prices were too low to sell, and when a Camden
merchant who had given credit died, his widow liquidated sixty Gee's
Bend families, her agents collected everything from hogs and chickens
to still standing sugar cane. With a diet of plums and nuts during the
winter of 1932-33, Gee's Bend residents would have starved had it not
been for staples shipped in by the Red Cross.
          In 1935, isolated, poverty-stricken, all-black Gee's Bend became a
focal point of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Resettlement Administration,
which became the Farm Security Administration (FSA). In came the
federal_government with its blueprints and money to fashion an ideal
community, the archetype for future projects nationwide.
          In 1937, the VandeGraaffs sold Gee's Bend to Farm Security's state
branch, the Alabama Rural Rehabilitation Corporation. With the bend in
government ownership, Roosevelt's people put together a cooperative,
Gee's Bend Farms, Inc. The result was a hundred new farms of sixty to
one hundred acres, each with a new house, barn and modern
trimmings--such as pressure cookers. It was a life like that outside
the bend. Co-op members acquired the homesteads through low interest
government loans, and rented crop land from the government and farmed
it cooperatively.
          From the government drawing boards also came a school, health
clinic, canning center and blacksmith shop; fresh-faced experts
appeared with knowledge about medicine, home economy and
agriculture.
          However, in 1945, Congress ended the FSA, which in turn had to get
rid of the Gee's Bend government-owned farms. The land passed to a new
agency, Farmers Home Administration (FmHA), which by 1947 enabled
Franklin Roosevelt's friends, the Pettways, to buy that government
land-the land their ancestors had begun to work after walking from
North_Carolina a hundred years earlier.
          The government still wasn't through. In 1949, a post office was
erected, and by mandate the community's name was changed to "Boykin"
as tribute to its congressman, Frank Boykin of Mobile, whom none of
the Gee's Benders had ever seen. In 1962, Congress authorized a lock
and dam at nearby Miller's Ferry, and in 1968, when that expensive
facility opened, a third of "Boykin" was turned into a lake. Then in
1974, federal_courts closed the high_school in this all-black
enclave-because the school was segregated. Thus, Gee's Bend students
began daily one-hundred mile bus rides to another school which, due to
white flight, was by then also all-black.
          Despite its isolation, Gee's Bend citizens participated in the
civil_rights movement. Even Martin_Luther_King came one rainy day to
preach at a local church. Through his urgings, people joined the civil
rights movement centered in Selma, and were on hand for the
lesser-publicized protests in Camden. They marched, went to jail, and
finally registered to vote.
          Perhaps the most momentous political event came in the summer of
1984, when one of their own was sworn in as district judge of Wilcox
County. Jo Celeste Pettway, an honors law graduate of the University
of Alabama, was appointed by then-Gov. George C. Wallace, who
twenty-one summers earlier had attempted to block a black from
enrolling at his alma mater.
          Judge Pettway, now thirty-five years old, is the first black_woman
judge ever in Alabama. To those of her name, she is history's way of
correcting itself. She is the final granddaughter who has given
meaning to those hundred slaves who in 1846 would never have even
dreamed of her possibilities. She is the ultimate Pettway.
          Dressed in a solid, bold-pink dress behind her office desk at the
courthouse annex in Camden, Judge Pettway is sensitive to her family
heritage.
          What does it mean to be a Pettway?, she is asked.
          "It means being a member of perhaps the best family in the
world," she replies, "because there is a great history in that
name that goes with this region of the country. When 

I go places and
people ask me, 'Where are you from?,' I say, 'My folks are
from Gee's Bend, a small town in Alabama.' Then they say, 'I
know a Pettway from such-end-such,' and I always say, 'If
they're a Pettway, they had to come from Gee's Bend because it's where
all the Pettways come from.'
          "When you go to that place and you see it, you say,'Well,
it's not the best place in the world because they don't have a lot of
facilities and luxuries, but it's where my father was taught by
his grandmother who raised him that you're supposed to work and strive
and earn a living and do good. It's something that community instilled
in its children and they in theirs. I wasn't raised in Gee's Bend but
having a father and a great-grandmother who were, those traits are
instilled in me and hopefully will be passed down to the children I
have."
          Pettway also links herself with a heritage beyond Gee's Bend or
mid-19th century North_Carolina-to the "Middle Passage," when slaves
were brought to the United_States from Africa.
          "You always hear about how many who voyaged across the Atlantic
Ocean did not survive, and you always think that those who actually
survived the Middle Passage and landed on this continent had to have
been the strongest and the best.
          "That would mean those hundred who came from North_Carolina
would have to have been stronger and better. So we're talking about a
good stock of people; they survived the Middle Passage. Whether they
were actually the ones who came from Africa or descendants of those
who Came, that strength and that blood enabled them to
survive."
          Still other survival stories note the strength of Judge Pettway's
ancestry. She says her maternal great-great-grandmother, also a slave
from North_Carolina, was the mother of six children. When she was sold
to Alabama bringing all her children with her was not part of the
deal. Four had to stay behind. And of the two who accompanied their
mother on the journey to Mobile, one died.
          "Just one survived, but that one child had 16 children who, in
turn, had so many more."
          Likewise, Judge Pettway's great-grandmother had 10 children. She
and her husband divorced. She was a sharecropper and raised the
children by herself.
          "And she was a successful woman. So on both sides of the family
there are horrible stories where people blossomed and multiplied out
of adverse circumstances. Just knowing that you come from people who
are strong and did well compared to circumstances makes you feel good
about yourself and makes you believe you can do things when other
people think you can't."
          Judge Pettway's parents are Joseph and Menda Gamble Pettway, who
have long lived in the community of Alberta, 24 miles north of
Camden. Her mother had wanted to be a nurse, but in her day, there
were no Alabama nursing schools for blacks, so she graduated from
Alabama State Teachers College in Montgomery, with tuition paid by her
mother's egg and chicken money, and became a teacher. On the birth of
her daughter, she left the classroom and ran the family store,
Pettway's Place. Joseph Pettway started as a laborer in 1940 with
Southern Railway and had worked his way up to foreman when he retired
in 1968.
          Celeste herself attended Alberta Elementary School, then Catholic
schools in Selma and Birmingham, and finally Alabama Lutheran Academy
in Selma, where she graduated. Much of her growing up took place on
weekdays in the homes of various Selma relatives, followed by weekends
with her parents, then return trips to school in Selma on Monday
mornings.
          When Judge Pettway was a child in the late Fifties and early
Sixties, the Dallas/Wilcox region, as it had for a century, had a
black-majority population but white-dominated politics.
          "I don't know as a child that you thought so much about things
like that. The schools I attended were black schools, but they were
never talked about as being inferior. The attitude always was: We are
not getting the money that we need, but we're doing well with what we
have; and I always thought that if we had gotten a very proportionate
amount of money, our schools would probably have been excellent
because I started off in a one-room school with a partition that
separated the one room into two rooms. There were eight grades in
those two rooms. One teacher taught four grades and did a wonderful
job, I think."
          The word "discrimination" was not in her childhood vocabulary,
largely because her parents never taught it to her.
          "My parents never said, 'You can't go to this place.' We
would go shopping in Selma. The water fountains said 'white' and
'colored.' As a child you don't know there's a difference, and a lot
of times I would head over to the fountain marked 'white.' Mother
would let me drink out of it. She would say, 'She's a child; she
doesn't know.' And my folks never said, 'You're different,'
or 'You're inferior.'"

          The first time she remembers being hit in the face with segregation
was in 1962 on a thirty-mile Greyhound bus trip by herself from Selma
to Alberta.
          "When I got on, there was one seat open and it was a front
seat. I sat there and when the bus driver came on, he made me get up
and move to the back. I had to stand up for 30 miles. All the way home
I looked at the faces of the people on the bus and wondered why he
made me get up, why those people allowed him to do that, why wouldn't
they stand up and say, 'Let this child sit down.'"
          As Celeste grew older, she asked questions.
          "My folks would say, 'This is what the law says. That doesn't
mean it's right, but you abide by the law.' I felt the law was
wrong because my folks said it was wrong and I knew my folks wouldn't
lie to me. It was a feeling that somebody for probably selfish
economic reasons made those laws to discriminate against us. We had to
endure them but it didn't mean we were inferior. It just meant we
would probably have to work harder and do better.
          "What kept us going was our faith that God wouldn't let us stay
like that always. You know, people deserve to be free and
deserve an opportunity to do as much as they can. All our parents knew
that sooner or later, things were going to change."
          Prior to Martin_Luther_King's campaign to achieve voting_rights for
blacks, Menda Pettway had become a registered voter in Dallas County,
but Joseph Pettway had been denied that right. So they joined
Dr. King's movement. It became common practice for Celeste's father to
go to Selma on days when the voter_registration office was open and
take the test. She said he had been determined to achieve his right to
vote since the 1952 presidential election, because at noon on that
election day, the whites with whom he had been working left to vote,
while the blacks had to stay behind.
          "Daddy said it just incensed him that he was an American, living
and working here, but could not participate as a first-class
citizen."
          Consequently, every time the voter office was open, Joseph Pettway
would be there to take the test. His daughter estimates that he was
refused registration at least 75 times, the letters always saying he
had flunked the literacy exam, when, in fact, he could read. And for
his efforts, his grocery store was boycotted one summer by white
wholesalers.
          When the Selma campaign peaked in 1965, Celeste, age 13, was a
student at St. Elizabeth's in Selma. The family plan was for her
mother and brother, eight years her junior, to be in the marches, for
her father to march when he did not have to work, and for Celeste to
stay in school and attend only the night-time rallies.
          "My folks said,'We'll do the marching. You go to
school.'"
          At Brown's Chapel and First Baptist Church, she saw and heard the
stars of civil_rights: Dr. C. T. Vivian, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth,
Rev. Hosea Williams-and Dr. King.
          "There's nothing to compare with hearing those great orators and
then seeing Dr. King enter the church. The crowd became as one. It was
as though this was the anointed one who was going to lead us from
slavery to freedom, like with Moses. But Moses probably did not
command the respect, attention and obedience that Dr. King did,
because the children of Israel constantly battled against Moses and
disobeyed. With Dr. King, everybody knew, 'Now this is the man
who's gonna do it.' His presence was something I have never
experienced before or since."
          Judge Pettway says from the time she was six years old she knew she
wanted to be a lawyer even if she didn't know exactly what it
meant. Her early role models were Orzelle Billingsley and Peter Hall,
black Birmingham attorneys who handled civil_rights cases in the
1950s, and Constance Motley, the first black_woman appointed to the
federal bench in New_York. Billingsley and Hall would associate with
local white lawyers and try cases in courtrooms filled with blacks,
including the Pettways, who learned, if nothing else, that it was
possible for a black person to become an attorney
          "Sometimes my folks would go sit in courtrooms and listen to
them. They would come back home and talk about how they sounded and
how the crowds reacted to them. To my folks, the law was seen as the
way things were going to change. It was going to be the instrument by
which things were going to change. And it was seen as a way of helping
people to make things happen. So I always wanted to be a lawyer,
always, my entire life. And it didn't change. I got
side-tracked but it never changed."
          Her first side-track was Auburn University, where she enrolled as a
freshman in 1969. Of fifteen thousand students, Celeste was one of ten
black_women and about fifty-five black males.
          "I had some bad experiences at Auburn," she relates with
great sadness. "I had a professor in my major, political science,
who said, 'I use nigger, negro and black interchangeably. Whichever
word I choose on this particular day, it all means the same
thing.' I had to sit in that class with that man saying nigger and
negra for a quarter. I talked to the chairman of the department and
said, 'I can't sit in here with this man saying that. It doesn't
make any sense. Why is he still using these words this day and
time?' He said, 'Well, he's tenured. There's nothing I can do
about it.' I had a girlfriend who graduated from Auburn in
1979. She said he was still doing the same thing then.
          "And I remember sitting through a history class and the
instructor trying to tell me that my ancestors enjoyed slavery, it was
a wonderful state and purely economical. Nobody was ever branded. No
one was ever beaten. Children were never taken away from their
parents. It has always been in somebody's imagination. Having to sit
through that crap for a quarter leaves a bit to be desired, but I got
through it. I wouldn't go through it again, I don't think. It was a
balancing act. There were good people and bad people, but you live and
learn, you grow and go on."
          The future judge received her B.A. from Auburn in 1973, and, unable
to find a job with her political science major, 

went back to Auburn
for a teacher's certificate. When she still could not obtain
employment she enrolled at the University of Alabama, where she earned
a bachelor's degree in social work, then joined the staff of the
Children's Aid Society, in Birmingham, an adoption agency; she later
worked for the Alabama Department of Pensions and Security.
          By 1977, she was back in school working toward a master's degree in
social work from the University of Alabama. She got her diploma in
1978, and spent 1978-79 teaching social work at Miles College in
Birmingham. Finally, in 1979, she entered law school at the University
of Alabama, where she received her degree in 1982.
          Of some 550 law students during Pettway's three-year stay, possibly
thirty-five were black. But her experiences as a black were totally
different from the ones she encountered at Auburn. She does not recall
even the first racial incident during her study of law.
          ~What helped in law school was anonymous grading. Each semester
we were assigned a different number. When we took our exams at the end
of the semester, the only thing on there was our number. Supposedly,
no one knew who's paper they were grading. I had heard some professors
there did not like women or blacks. I think that is the reason they
started using that system."
          In 1982, Celeste Pettway, 30, entered law practice with the black
Tuscaloosa firm of John England and John Bivens. Two years later she
set up a solo practice in the same city, not making much money but
doing lots of juvenile case work, traditionally thrown by judges there
to the lawyers with fresh careers.
          But events were transpiring in Wilcox County that would change her
life and Alabama history.
          Circuit Judge Edgar P. Russell Jr., who had presided over the five
county judicial circuit that includes Wilcox County, announced his
impending retirement. A few months later, Gov. Wallace elevated Wilcox
County District Judge Anne Farrell McKelvey to the circuit judgeship
and named Jo Celeste Pettway to fill the district judgeship vacated by
McKelvey.
          Pettway did not campaign for the job, but many others did on her
behalf, including a Wilcox delegation that met with the governor's
office and argued that the time was ripe for such an
appointment. Supporting that mission was the Rev. Thomas Threadgill, a
black Presbyterian minister from Camden, who had brought Dr. King into
Wilcox to lead voter_registration after the Selma-to-Montgomery
March.
          "We let it be known to the governor that we wanted her
appointed," says Threadgill. "In fact, I just insisted through
Hollis Curl (publisher of the weekly Wilcox
Progressive Era) and everybody I thought who had any pull in
any way. I just insisted that she was the person for this
position.
          "I had heard of her ability and of the decency of the
person. Her parents are very strong, sound people, always making
contributions to the church and the community. That was one of the
reasons I just knew even before I knew her well that she would be the
person."
          On August 9,1984, Jo Celeste Pettway, who remembers standing for a
thirty-mile bus ride because her skin is black, was sworn into
office. Holding the Bible for the ceremony was her father, Joseph
Pettway, who in 1952 had watched his white co-workers leave work to
vote for president while black workers stayed on the job.
          The courtroom where she now presides was packed with people of both
races. Giving the invocation was Rev. Dennis Nolen, a white
Presbyterian minister in Camden. "That was unusual," says
Threadgill. "The white ministers here get so much pressure from their
congregations and their peers, they can't do a lot of things they want
to do."
          In 1986, Judge Pettway ran for election to a full term; she had no
opposition, but campaigned anyway.
          "Some people said they might run," she said of her lack of
opposition, "and I just told 'em if they wanted a good kicking to
come on, 'cause I was in the kicking business. It didn't matter with
me who came out 'cause I enjoyed what I was doing and I was gonna try
to keep doing it."
          Although black lawyers practice in Wilcox County, the handful of
those who live and work in Camden are white. One is Donald M. McLeod,
the assistant district attorney, who grew up in the town. He is before
Judge Pettway's bench at least weekly and often daily.
          "She has a good legal mind," he says, "and she's prepared
when she sits on the bench. In a number of cases that I've handled
before her, she's been appointed as an acting circuit judge. At that
level the cases are more difficult, but I've found that she's done her
homework before she gets there. In one case in particular, I could
tell she had researched the law because she had the same cases and
citations that I did. A lot of judges don't do that. I guess I deal
with her more than any lawyer here and I've never considered race to
be a factor. It's a non-issue."
          Nor has Judge Pettway seen any racial problems stemming from her
being black in this county of seventeen thousand (83 percent
black).
          "I think there's a respect for the judicial system," she
offers. "I had a white attorney say something to the effect, 'I
don't particularly respect YOU . but I respect the position ' And
I don't have any problems with that. I'm not here for people to like
me or love me. I'm here to do a job, and as long as I think I'm doing
a good job, I want to stay. As long as they follow the rules of the
court, they can hate me; I don't care."
          "I realize," says she, "that being the first black_woman
district judge in Alabama is historically significant, but my attitude
is that it could have been anybody. I know a lot of black_women
lawyers who could have been the first and they 

would have done a good
job. I really feel blessed that I'm a district judge.
          "Sometimes people look at me skeptically when I say this but I
think it's all part of God's plan for what I'm supposed to be doing. I
feel like I have a real purpose and a special opportunity to help
children. I've been a social worker. I've always loved children, and
being a district judge, I get to work with juvenile court and try to
help change lives while they're young."
          Part of her motivation, too, is in being a member of her family.
          "My parents always told us about the sacrifices made by
grandparents and great-grandparents to give us a strong idea of where
we've come from and a hope for where we could go. My maternal
grandmother never let her children go hungry because she would work
the entire summer to get 'em through the winter: canning plums,
putting up muscadines and pears. And she would make quilts from old
clothes. When those quilts wore out she would use them to start making
other quilts, so everything was recycled. And inside their home they
would look up at night and see the stars, look down and see the
animals through the cracks in the floor. Lots of times they had
nothing to show for it because my maternal grandfather was a
sharecropper who never owned property. They moved from one place to
another. But my grandmother always wanted the children to have an
education. She would sell things to get a little money to help.
          "And when Mother went on to college, she said she had two pairs of
socks. She knew she had to wear one and wash the other so she would
always have a clean pair. And she had one dime a day to spend for
lunch.
          "Knowing that gives you a sense of purpose. To me, it says you
can't let your ancestors down. When I think about my maternal
grandmother and my paternal great-grandmother, the kind of women they
were, the kind of man my Daddy is and the kind of woman my Mother is,
you don't let people like that down. You don't get to a point and
say,'I can't do it.' You look back at them and you say,
'Whatever I want to do, I can do it, because look what they
did.' And you just go on, and it's good. Yeah, it's good." 
          
            Nancy Callahan is a freelance writer from
Montgomery. Her book, The Freedom Quilting Bee, will be
published this fall by the University of Alabama Press.
          
        
