Judge Alford Dempsey '65 Named Commencement Speaker

The 62-year-old jurist never aspired to the law as a youth, but planned instead to follow his father’s path of a career in the Army. On a wall in his Atlanta Court chambers he keeps a reminder, a picture of a uniformed Alford J. Dempsey Sr., walking with Gens. Dwight D. Eisenhower and Omar Bradley after World War II in Europe. “My father was assigned to Gen. Eisenhower's honor guard after the war,” recalls Dempsey, nodding to the photo.

But New Hampton School alumni Al Dempsey was born and raised and has remained in Atlanta for most of his life.

“As my friend Judge Marvin S. Arrington Sr. likes to say, 'Atlanta born, Atlanta bred, and when I die I'll be Atlanta dead,' ” he laughs. Al still lives in the neighborhood where he grew up.

When his father retired from the military, he returned to Atlanta where he went to work for the Georgia Labor Department's equal employment opportunity division; Al’s mother was with the state Department of Education, where she worked to develop schools in African-American communities throughout Georgia. After researching books on “other opportunities for education,” Al said his mother was attracted to New Hampton School’s mission and decided to enroll him as a freshman. For young Al and two of his friends from the Atlanta area, their trip to central New Hampshire was their first time seeing NHS.

Always pushed to excel academically, Al received excellent marks at New Hampton. But his involvement in the school's daily life didn’t end in the classroom. Al seemed to take a part in every aspect of student life. A three-sport starter, he earned six varsity letters in football, basketball, and baseball; was awarded the Scott McLeod Trophy for MVP in football; and started on NHS’s 1964-65 Lakes Region Basketball Championship Team. In his junior and senior years, he was designated a proctor by the faculty. He was also elected to the student council in his sophomore, junior, and senior years. The highlight of Al’s tenure at NHS was receiving the Meservey Medal for Study, Sport, and Spirit.

Upon graduation, he enrolled at Columbia University, where he would soon become swept up with the anti-war protest that seized much of the nation in the mid-1960s—and would see young Al Dempsey hauled off to jail with dozens of other protesters. “In 1968,” he recalls, “there were two or three things going on at Columbia.”

Students were upset that the school was involved with a defense-related think tank, he says, and there was also unease that military recruiters were allowed on campus. Then the school announced plans to build a new gymnasium in nearby Morningside Park.

“The park was Harlem, and the black students and black community didn't want to lose part of the park to a gym,” says Al. Rallying under the cry of “Gym Crow Must Go,” he and other members of the Student Afro-American Society faced off with police in the park, eventually dispersing peacefully after meeting with a “police sergeant with some common sense,” he says.

“But we were still frustrated,” he says. Joined by mostly white members of the Students for a Democratic Society under the leadership of Mark Rudd, a decision was made to take over Hamilton Hall, where many administration offices were located. Hamilton and several other buildings were soon occupied by protesters but, says Al, the 70-odd African-American students in Hamilton Hall were not interested in emptying filing cases and other vandalism that some SDS members were committing elsewhere.

“So the black student steering committee asked the white students to leave,” he says. “We knew each other, but we didn't know them, and we knew there were police informants among them. As it turned out, Mark Rudd's right-hand man was police.”

And while other buildings were being trashed, he recalls, Hamilton Hall was kept up, its floors mopped and trash emptied every day of the week-long occupation. The other buildings eventually were emptied, in some cases by baton-swinging police officers, but the Hamilton Hall demonstrators negotiated a peaceful handover of the building.

“Other kids were getting beat and gassed,” says Al, but “to my everlasting relief, we decided getting our heads cracked would not help our cause.” The students were led out and booked into jail, but the charges were dropped eventually and an amnesty granted, he says. “And Columbia did not build the gym,” he says.

Al was a pre-med student at Columbia, “but physics got in the way,” he says. “I was okay with math and science, but physics? No way.”
While at Columbia Al also joined a band, The Soul Syndicate.

“We were an R & B and blues outfit,” he says; “We could play anything the way anybody wanted to hear it—five singers and a 10-piece band; I sang bass, did the choreography, and drove the truck. I could also play the trumpet well enough to join the horn section when we needed it.”

The band played all the hits of the day—Otis Redding, Ray Charles, a “45-minute James Brown medley”—and performing with the group gave Al a chance to meet many of his music heroes, and some artists who would become national acts.

“We played this club called The Cheetah a week after the Commodores played there,” he says. “”They were just a bunch of college kids from Tuskegee [Ala.] back then.” (He was not referring to the local strip club of the same name.)

“I met Dizzy Gillespie, James Moody, and Pharaoh Sanders; sat in one night with Duke Ellington's band for a song after he had died, playing harmonica on “Rainy Night in Georgia”; had a drink with Billy Eckstine and his wife after I picked him up at the airport one night; that blew me away. There I was, 21 years old, drinking with jazz royalty!”

But family life caught up with Al, and he gave up the bar and band life and returned to Atlanta.

“I got married and enrolled in Morehouse [College], taking a full load of courses,” he says. He also got a job working at Hartsfield International Airport, driving a truck for a catering service.

He majored in economics at Morehouse and found himself being pushed to perform as he had not been at Columbia.

“That's one thing about the black colleges,” he says. “Their mission is, and always has been, to nurture black talent. And I needed some extra attention.”

With the forceful help of an economics professor known as “the toughest woman in the Atlanta University Center,” he ended up graduating with honors.

“I tried to get a job, but no bank would hire me,” he says. “By then I was still driving a truck at the airport, making $2.56 an hour, trying to raise a family. So what now?”

An older confidante suggested that a legal career might be a good move.

“I just laughed,” he says. “The last thing I ever thought I'd be was a lawyer or a preacher. But here I am; and I ended up being a deacon in the church some years later.”

Although not really convinced, Al applied for law school at the University of Georgia, New York University, Columbia and Harvard.
“I got accepted at all but Columbia,” he smiles.

So he packed his young family off to Cambridge, Mass., and enrolled at Harvard Law School. He struggled to make ends meet, he says, but eventually earned his law degree. “I had a wife and two kids coming out of law school,” he says. “We couldn't even afford another month's rent to stay for graduation; I got my diploma in the mail.”

Dempsey didn't immediately begin working in his new profession; he got involved with Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign in 1976, and then took a position with the city of Atlanta's law department in 1977, where he stayed for 15 years.

“I did all kinds of legal work there,” he recalls. “I defended police officers, condemned property, all sorts of litigation… It was excellent preparation for a general jurisdiction judge. As I used to say, I worked A to Z: from the airport to the zoo. When I left, they split my old job up between seven lawyers.”

It was while he was city attorney that a Municipal Court judge gave Dempsey advice that stuck in his head.

“I knew Clarence Cooper when he was on the municipal bench and I was a rookie city attorney,” says Dempsey. “He knew my family, and one day he told me, 'Opportunities are going to be coming for blacks in the judiciary, and when they come, we need to be ready.' I understood what he meant; that we needed to be ready to handle those duties responsibly, so nobody could say, 'See, we gave 'em a chance and they screwed it up.'”

Now sitting on the federal bench, U.S. District Judge Clarence Cooper doesn't precisely remember that conversation, but he does remember counseling Dempsey. “I do recall talking to Al,” says Cooper. “I was impressed by him as a city attorney; when he appeared before me, he was always well-prepared and did a superb job.”

Cooper knew Al Dempsey’s father, who was an older fraternity brother, he says, and was himself a mentor to Cooper. “I always looked up to his father,” says Cooper,” and I knew what sort of environment [Dempsey] grew up in; they were good people.”

Al Dempsey “was a good lawyer back then, and I think he's become an even better jurist,” says Cooper, who remains in contact with the younger judge.

In 1992, former Fulton County State Court Chief Judge Charles L. Carnes appointed Dempsey to the Magistrate Court, where he served until 1995, when Gov. Zell Miller appointed him to the Superior Court bench.

Dempsey is one of 19 Superior Court judges in Fulton County in Atlanta. He's been a judge for 17 years, and has at least two-and-a-half years left. He's not sure what he'd like to do afterwards, but he's considered teaching and writing a book.

Judge Dempsey says that, unlike some jurists who aimed for the bench their entire lives, his goal has been to live up to the standard his father set: to serve.

“I never had that passion for the law that some have,” he says. “I don't take great pleasure in writing opinions or anything like that. This is my way to serve. My father said, 'I don't care what you end up doing, as long as it's honorable.' ”

“To be a general jurisdiction judge, you have to know a lot, and a lot about life,” he says. “I was around the street life, but not in it. I've been engaged enough to know what goes on. I've been in the music game a little bit, played some sports; I also understand what it is to be a blue-collar worker struggling to make ends meet.”

Al's wife died of breast cancer in 2003 and he currently is involved with breast cancer awareness and fundraising in the Atlanta area. He has twin daughters; one is a minister and one is a track coach at the division I college level. Al's son lives at home and attends Morehouse College.

As he reflects on his 17 years on the Superior Court bench, Judge Dempsey says he's still amazed at the path that led him there. “So often in my life,” he says slowly, “the Lord sent somebody when I needed it. When I look back, that's happened repeatedly. The Lord has taken a hand in the journey I'm on. If I can look back and say 'things are a little better because I came this way,' it was worth it.”