Regina Rogoff and Legal Aid
mining the archives
Regina Rogoff started working for Legal Aid as a Vista Volunteer in the summer of 1972. She originally planned to become a Movement Lawyer and was thought of joining the Austin Law Commune, but she sadly discovered that “movement law, which was mostly the anti-war movement, involved criminal defense and that just wasn’t my cup of tea.” Oops!
But in law school, she took the legal aid clinic with Jack Sampson and "was taken with the work with the community, with the whole process of Legal Aid and decided this is where I wanted to be.”
In the early days, before she became Executive Director, she did a lot different types of things—social security disability, unemployment insurance, small claims, and family law.
“Everybody did family law.”
She also was involved in some important work on health care. If you will recall the previous substack, her second career was managing People’s Community Clinic. At Legal Aid, she worked with some health activists, “that I still know to this day.”
“We worked on access to Brackenridge and specifically on concerns about access…about the ability of the people to get access there.”
Brackenridge Hospital was the first public hospital in Central Texas. It opened in 1884. Brackenridge, of course, no longer exists. The Dell Seton Medical Center now is sited on the land that Brackenridge used to own. Plus quite a few more city blocks. The Dell Seton Center is humungous.
Even though the original Brackenridge was a public hospital, it did not serve the entire public. In 2010, PHIT interviewed Leon McNealy for the Stand-ins Documentary. So let’s take a little detour and explore exactly what equal access means.
Doctor Leon McNealy was a Black student from Houston. He became very involved with integration activities in the late 50’s and early 60’s. He participated in the Stand-ins successful effort to integrate the State Theater on Guadalupe just across from the University of Texas.
Leon McNealy also told us a story about Brackenridge Hospital when we interviewed him on his role in the Stand-ins. We didn’t use his story for the
Stand-ins Documentary, but it is a powerful Austin story that should be told.
After the Paramount was integrated, Leon McNealy continued the process of integrating Drag businesses. He was proud that he personally integrated Hank’s Grill.
“Hanks Grill was in the same block as the Y, across from the University, just before you got to the University Co-op. And so I integrated it. I went in one day and I had a big porterhouse steak, fries, and an RC cola.”
But a racist thug, who had harassed the Stand-ins students, had previously told Dr. McNealy that he would kill him if he ate in Hank’s Grill.
On that momentous day, there had been a huge thunderstorm outside while Leon was eating his freedom steak and his freedom fries and drinking his freedom RC cola.
“I walked out and I was thinking about stepping over this current of water.
And the guy who had threatened me was in a car with his lights off and the motor running. And so when I stepped out, he ran me down. But miraculously, I came out of it with only a concussion and a scar on my knee.”
“I landed there in the streets and there were just hundreds of people and no one seemed to notice me.”
“But there were two young men, must have been about my age. I'm just totally hazy. I can't remember. But they picked me up and carried me. And I know we were at some hospital." [That hospital was Brackenridge Hospital.]
“I don't know how we got there. There were police officers that came. But I don't remember them talking to me.”
“All I know is that the doctors wouldn't touch me. So the two boys carried me to their home. And they put me down on a couch and I don’t know how long I was there or anything. Only thing I remember that was this old woman who must have been 35 to 40 in a rocking chair knitting. I got up one morning and left.”
“That was a life warming event in my life, because how can you hold hatred against a whole group of people when two people you didn't know picked you up and carried you? And I recall feeling safe even though I didn't know them. I don't know anything about their politics…or even their names.”
Note…Not so life warming was that Brackenridge Hospital did not accept blacks. They didn’t do what we now call— “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion.” Hank’s Grill was now integrated but Brackenridge wasn’t. Leon McNealy got his porterhouse steak, but not medical care.
Brackenridge ultimately integrated, partly due to the Federal creation of Medicare and Medicaid. You couldn’t get the Federal health money unless you were a public hospital and unless you admitted everyone. You know… the inclusion part of DEI.
Legal Aid spent a lot of years making sure that access to all became part of the mandate of Brackenridge, which is now the Dell Seton Medical Hospital.
Unraveling that story of Brackenridge is a story that PHIT has not collected. I have been told that mining the Harry Akin archives might be a good start.
People had to agitate and work to change that process of inclusion at a public hospital. PHIT is doing what we can to help people remember their history. But we have very little on that particular effort. Please chime if you have resources or archives. We want to tell as many stories of resistance and success as we can.
What we do know is that access is not granted without a certain amount of persistence and effort. That is where Legal Aid came in.
It was Medicaid money that finally helped desegregate St David’s Hospital and it was Regina Rogoff who took that case.
“In the late '70s, we had a lawsuit against St. David's Hospital because St. David's wouldn't accept Medicaid. It accepted Medicare. St. David's was kind of the upper-crust hospital in Austin at the time, and Medicare had the largely elderly Anglo patient population. Medicaid was for poorer and often minority patients, and St. David’s didn't particularly care to have them in the hospital. St. David's had accepted and had taken federal Hill-Burton modernization money and the Hill-Burton Act said they had to be a community service to get that money.”
Which meant taking any form of third-party government payment.
“We had some clients, one elderly woman who had both Social Security Medicare and had Medicaid, and an African American couple, who had only Medicaid, and when the woman went into labor, her OBGYN, sent her to St. David's to deliver.”
“In both cases, these plaintiffs were being billed for services that would have been covered by their Medicaid. We filed a case in federal court and actually prevailed on Summary Judgment. I have since learned, now that I work in the health community, that the St. David's new CEO, at one of his first board meetings, was asked what they should do now that they had lost their Medicaid case.”
“He, to his credit, said the hospital is a community hospital. Its name actually was St. David's Community Hospital and they should not appeal.”
“In hindsight, you know, today that hospital relies on Medicaid. It's kind of ironic that they had to be forced to.”
Ohh! And she also was involved in a case in which 250,000 young people in the state of Texas had their dental services restored.
When asked about the significance of Legal Aid, Regina Rogoff responded with this…
“Early on there was a belief that through the legal process, we could help end poverty. That was part of the war on poverty, the idea that through the legal system, through bringing justice to poor people, that we could really change history. We thought we would be able to improve the lives of individual clients.
I think Legal Aid has had significant impact really in both ways. I think there are thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of clients who have been served through the course of the history of the Legal Aid of Central Texas.”
First career Legal Aid
Second career People’s Community Clinic
Third career It will something important I am sure
Regina Rogoff People’s Hero