HPOD Fellow Alex Green Receives Marie Feltin Award

On April 28th, HPOD Fellow Alex Green was recognized by the Boston Center on Independent Living at its twenty-seventh Marie Feltin Award Ceremony, an event honoring individuals exemplifying the spirit of the late Dr. Marie Feltin, a tireless advocate for persons with disabilities and chronic health conditions.

Green was instrumental in the Massachusetts legislature's establishment of a Special Commission on State Institutions in July of last year. This first-of-its-kind commission, led by persons with disabilities, will undertake historical human rights work, including identifying the names of thousands of people buried anonymously in institutional graves. The commission arose in response to Green's community organizing efforts in 2021, when together with the BCIL and other disability rights organizations, he led protests of the City of Waltham's decision to allow the Lions Club to host a month-long holiday light show on the grounds of the Walter E. Fernald Developmental Center. Now, Green will serve as a member of the Commission he helped to create, alongside HPOD's Anne Fracht, and several other staunch disability rights advocates.

Green has also advocated for vital legislative measures aimed at ensuring that the lessons of history is not lost on the next generation. Last November, the Massachusetts legislature passed a bill making it mandatory to teach about genocide in schools, including the topic of eugenics, genocide’s pseudoscientific underpinning, which has led to the sterilization and murder of disabled and marginalized people under the guise of public health and “race betterment.” Thus, reckoning with historical disability rights abuses is a critical part of a larger societal project of remembering the past, so as to avoid similar mistakes in the future.

As an educator, Green has instilled this message to his students. As part of his history course at the Gann Academy in Waltham, from 2017-2020 he led students in a project to identify 298 former Metropolitan State Hospital and Fernald Developmental Center residents buried anonymously at MetFern Cemetery. Before Green and Gann students began their work, these 298 graves were marked with only a number and a "C" or "P" to indicate the interred individuals' religion. Using census data, Ancestry.com, and old and new town records, students built profiles for every single individual buried in the cemetery. Green and one of his students later testified before the Massachusetts legislature about the urgent need to investigate and memorialize these sites properly. 

His biography of Dr. Walter E. Fernald will be published by Bellevue Press in 2024.