Rosalie Nevins-Alderfer ’15 was never interested in practicing law in the usual way.
“When I entered the traditional legal curriculum, I realized pretty quickly that the typical, adversarial process didn’t align with my values,” said Nevin-Alderfer, Director of Quality and Compliance for a large non-profit, community mental health center in southern Vermont.
“I felt like everywhere I went it was hard to make change and I got more interested in trying to work to change the structure of the system,” she said, in a recent interview with CRRJ.
And so began a lifelong journey that would take Nevins-Alderfer through Northeastern Law, the Civil Rights and Restorative Project’s Clinic, and into a successful career in social work.
“I liked Northeastern Law because the whole curriculum was focused on social justice,” she said. “It felt like where I wanted to be, where the people I wanted to be interacting with were.”
Nevins-Alderfer, who graduated from Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, participated in CRRJ’s Clinic in 2013. Her original files contained snippets of information, many simply one or two lines from a newspaper clipping detailing a killing but with scant detail, all of which she investigated but found mostly dead ends. Until she came to the case of Otis Newsome.
Otis Newsome Sr., an auto mechanic and WWII veteran, was killed in 1948 by a service station operator in Wilson County, North Carolina. Newsome and two companions went to the station’s owner, a man named Strickland, to purchase brake fluid but were not able to put it in their vehicle. When they asked Strickland if they could borrow a funnel, Strickland refused to assist them and demanded that they pay 80 cents. While one of the men was reaching in his pocket to pay, Strickland fatally shot Newsome.
“There definitely were some strategic decisions to make,” said Nevins-Alderfer about the legal proceeding in Newsome’s case. The trial was scheduled during tobacco season, which led inevitably to problems with jury selection. “There seemed like a lot of convenient inconveniences,” she said, “which meant ultimately nothing came of the trial.” At trial a jury acquitted Strickland.
“The first thing I remember was sitting in the basement of the Boston University’s library because they have an extensive periodical collection on microfiche,” she said. “I spent quite a lot of time down there trying to find details on the case.”
Through family members and a local librarian in Wilson county, Nevins-Alderfer was eventually connected with Newsome’s sister, brother and daughter, Betty Jean Newsome, a singer and songwriter, who co-wrote “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” with James Brown in 1966.
Research Newsome’s death in the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive
About the Archive
The Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive houses case files and documents for more than 1,000 cases of racial homicides in the Jim Crow South. Co-founded by Melissa Nobles, professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Margaret Burnham, CRRJ director and professor of law at Northeastern, these uncovered stories highlight how violence affected lives, defined legal rights and shaped politics between 1930 and 1954.
While Betty Jean Newsome was reluctant to speak with Nevins-Alderfer, she said her son, Newsome’s grandson, Miguel A. Núñez Jr. was keen to learn more about his family history.
“I was able to contact him through his agent,” said Nevins-Alderfer, for Núñez Jr. is an actor, best known for his roles in The Return of the Living Dead and Life.
She travelled to Wilson County and, with CRRJ staff and faculty, participated in a community meeting hosted at the local library. It was the first event in the library’s history dedicated to African American history, she said.
“Tobacco, that’s my other strongest memory of Wilson. Endless tobacco fields with tobacco barns that are long and airy. It’s a beautiful drive in with the rolling fields.
“The interviews are the pieces I remember the most,” she said. “We went to folks’ houses and sat in their living rooms. Those are the pieces, 10 years later, I can remember — what they looked like, what the smells were.”
While in Wilson, Nevins-Alderfer located Newsome’s surviving son, Otis Newsome JR., and visited the elderly man in his home. During their interview, he showed Nevins-Alderfer a photograph of Otis with his wife, in uniform shortly after his return from the battlefields of WWII. “It’s really beautiful and really sad,” she said.
While visiting Otis Newsome Jr.’s home, Nevins-Alderfer recalled his “small house very much like my grandfather’s house, with duck green tweed upholstery on the recliners, wooden shelving with a million family photos, trophies and nick-nacks.”
Although she said that she gave it her all, Nevins-Alderfer still has some lingering regrets about how her involvement with the Newsome case. She wishes she could have secured more concrete restorative justice for the Newsome family, be it a historical marker or perhaps facilitating Veteran’s Day events in honor of Black soldiers and veterans like Newsome whose deaths resulted from Jim Crow violence.
“Looking back now ten years, being somebody closer to my 40s than I am to my 20s, if I think about what has been meaningful in my career, this is something I wish I had been able to continue,” she said.
“Professor Burnham has created this incredible legacy, and so I wanted to put everything I had into this because it’s so special to be a part of his. You become emotionally invested and you just want it to be meaningful, I wanted to walk away feeling like I did everything I could for the family, which meant that I worked really hard.”
The CRRJ clinic “was the first place in the legal world where I felt like I could be myself and bring my social work experience, and a human lens to the work,” she said.
But the barriers to restorative justice in Wilson remain significant. “It would have required a lot more relationship building and talking with law enforcement,” she said. Even in 2013, Nevins-Alderfer experienced Wilson as a segregated and polarized community.
The lessons she learned in the clinic live on through Nevins-Alderfer’s work in Brattleboro, Vermont, where she said poverty, housing, substance use, and trauma are having the biggest impacts on health in the area.
“The clinic really made me think about how we come to terms, as a community, with terrible things that happen, how do some folks take ownership, how do some folks heal from incredible losses,” she said. “Having folks tell their own stories, even bearing witness to storytelling, can be powerful and restorative.”
Without the work of the clinic I wouldn’t think about those community pieces, and I wouldn’t think about healing it the same way.”
Nevins-Alderfer is part of the senior leadership team at Health Care & Rehabilitation Services of Southeastern Vermont, a non-profit that serves about 4,000 clients a year, over 2 counties, with about 500 employees.
“It’s healing from systems and trying to make the systems better, having the awareness that we are the system, and continually working with the resources we have to do better by folks -that’s what I really enjoy,” she said.
With serious crime on the rise, Nevins-Alderfer said the community’s views on how to handle the situation are mixed. One avenue for healing in Brattleboro, Nevins-Alderfer suggests, is through the creation of a memorial dedicated to those who have died from overdoses. “If we change the narrative around substance use and the harm in our community, if we valued these lives and saw it as a community loss and grieved that instead of living in this space of anger,” she said, “then perhaps there could be social change.”
A decade later, and Nevins-Alderfer is still unwavering in her commitment to overhauling legal and social systems so that they better support marginalized people. “The systems don’t seem much better now than they were in 2013, when we were working on Newsome’s case, and that’s hard to live with,” she said.
“I’ve learned, now that I’ve spent 15 years in the social work field, people just want to be heard and validated,” she said. “So much of trauma is not knowing what happened not being able to name it … But the work of the CRRJ clinic offers a possibility of change through education.”
Read more...
Robert Sanderman (NUSL ’14) reflects on his time in CRRJ’s Clinic, his investigation on the Malcolm Wright case, and on the many forms of restorative justice.
When Tara Dunn ’17 graduated from the Air Force Academy and applied to law school she was one step closer to realizing a childhood dream. “My mom found the letter that I wrote…
Throughout her childhood, in the small village of Port Jefferson, Long Island, Kyleen Burke ’18 loved to play soccer and basketball. As she grew older and travelled to neighboring schools for games, she…
Join our mailing list
Receive the latest news about CRRJ's work, events and programs.
By submitting this form, you are consenting to receive email communications from The Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project https://crrj.org. You can unsubscribe any time by using the SafeUnsubscribe link found at the bottom of every email. Serviced by Constant Contact.