I Spent 30 Years on the Bench in Atlanta, and Saw What Happens When You Give People a Different Path

Clinton Deveaux, 80, was born and raised in Jamaica, Queens, to a Bahamian family. In 1969, at 23 years old, he moved to Atlanta to work on Andrew Young’s first congressional campaign just as integration was beginning to take hold. By the time he graduated from Emory Law School in 1975, Deveaux had become fully enmeshed in the local political scene. Following a brief stint representing District 28 in the Georgia House of Representatives, he sat on the Atlanta Municipal Court bench for 30 years. After he retired in 2011, he went on to chair the board of Atlanta’s Policing Alternatives and Diversion Initiative. This is the story of his judicial appointment.

This account has been condensed and edited for clarity.

I was working at a firm called Harmon and Smith when Maynard Jackson (Atlanta’s first Black mayor) and friends in the mayor’s office told me that there was going to be an opening on the Municipal Court bench.

I think a member of the bench had been elevated to either the State Court or the Superior Court. And the way the process worked in Atlanta was that a nominating committee or the Municipal Court would nominate three names to the mayor, and the mayor would choose the candidate.

If it’s longer than a year before the next city election, then the judge would serve until that first election. In my case, Maynard made his decision about appointing me but decided to wait to actually swear me in until the next year because it would mean that I would not have to run in November of ’81 because I would not have served a full year. That would give me a chance to establish a record on which I could run four years later, in 1985.

So — and this is typical Maynard — he held the swearing-in on the 20th of January, even though he had let me know that I had been selected in late November or early December.

This is after Ronald Reagan had won the presidency in 1980, and Maynard swore me in on the 20th of January, 1981, which was also the day that Ronald Reagan was sworn in to the presidency.

And Maynard announced, in his classic, humorous way, that this was the alternative swearing-in for Democrats, and he got a good chuckle from that.

What happens in elections is that you run on an up or down vote. In other words, the question on the ballot is a yes or no. There’s no opposition in judicial elections; they’re trying to make them as nonpartisan as possible. And it meant that I had that opportunity to prove myself worthy in a full five years — slightly longer than one term.

In ’85 there was no opposition, no campaign to oppose me or any of the other judges, because we were able to, in our work, not worry about the politics of reelection.

It made a big difference, because Atlanta was already doing lots of referrals by police officers directly into alcohol and drug treatment and mental health assistance. And we were beginning to refer people to family violence counseling to help families figure out how to live as families without letting anger and confusion create violence and harm.

It’s where I began my work to make a difference in the lives of people who were defendants or victims, and it was quite extraordinary. I really found a good part of my reason for caring about politics and the legal community in the work I did on the bench.