November 21st, 2000. A baby boy is born in a local hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. He is taken home by his parents and is loved and cared for throughout his childhood. That baby was me. This may not seem like some incredibly astounding story, but that is the point of this article. Because in Memphis, Tennessee, from 1924-1950, a woman named Georgia Tann withheld this seemingly standard scenario from thousands of families. This is a narrative of tragedy. A nightmare swept under the rug. A largely unknown and forgotten tale to those of us lucky enough to not have been a part of it. This is a testament to those who lived to tell their stories, and a memorial to the children who would never get the chance. This is the true story of Georgia Tann. Unless otherwise specified, all information and quotations regarding Miss Tann come from Barbara Raymond’s book, “The Baby Thief.” Today, I hope to enlighten you through understanding Georgia’s World, Georgia’s Crimes, and Georgia’s Legacy.
Before we can go into the immense pain and fear caused by Georgia Tann, and the motives behind her actions, we must first understand the world she grew up in. Beulah George “Georgia” Tann was born on July 18, 1891 in Hickory, Mississippi. Even in the small-town she grew up in, the name Tann was widely known and recognized. Georgia’s father, George Tann, whom she was named after, was a federal court judge, and her mother a social butterfly and the most prominent woman in town. Georgia was expected to do, think, and say precisely as her parents did, and continue their legacy as she matured. Early on, though respected for her lineage, Georgia was not well liked. She was perceived as “arrogant, argumentative, and domineering.” She was always arguing, usually these clashes took place between her and her father. Many of said arguments stemmed from Georgia’s unusual ambitions and Mr. Tann’s discomfort over her sexual orientation. At that time, gender roles were severely scrutinized, and Georgia never conformed to the image of Southern womanhood. “She constantly appeared in public wearing flannel shirts and mens trousers. She wore her hair severely pulled back, and often had it cut as a man would. She evidenced no interest in traditional marriage.” Unlike most girls of her time, Georgia desired to pursue a career in law, while her father wanted her to become a concert pianist. She was little more than a baby when she began suffering the insults and pressure that would shape her future, as well as millions of others. Georgia wanted to run and play, her father forced her to practice piano for hours on end. She resented her father, and long despised being under his heel. It is possible that she became so preoccupied with self-protection that she grew selfish and narcissistic. She learned to never entertain the idea of empathy, which made her dangerous. It seems that Georgia, feeling robbed of choice by her hometown and family, may have used her power and influence through her private baby market to try and attain the autonomy she lost early in her life.
Unable to pursue law, and unwilling to pursue music or marriage, Georgia Tann left her hometown and pursued a career in social work, which was in its infancy at the time, in Memphis, TN. This is possibly due to her fascination with the lower class, particularly single mothers. Utterly unappreciative of ambiguity, she considered the world to be inhabited by two, widely divergent types. The poor, including the women whom she would one day take extensive advantage of, were the first group. She was contemptuous of their fertility and in private would often refer to them as “cows.” Yet I believe, whether she realized it or not, Georgia envied them for their ability to give birth, as her sexual orientation withheld that prospect from her future. The second group, the “higher type” as she called them, were considered good. These were the wealthy and prominent folks, people esteemed in their communities as her family was. Georgia argued that the poor were incapable of proper parenting, and that it was her moral obligation to rescue their children, by stealing them and placing them up for adoption. “Georgia considered poverty the worst possible condition. It was her upbringing; she was from a very snobbish family that looked down on people in those shanty houses who got their hands dirty for a living.” In her eyes, the end justified the means, leaving her undisturbed by the deaths of scores of children in her care. The city to which Georgia moved perfectly matched her needs. Ravaged and left destitute by the devastating yellow fever outbreaks of 1878, and left spineless in the aftermath by the cruel and ruthless Edward H. Crump, Memphis was the ideal target. She was blunt, assured of her right to do anything she wished, with Mayor Crump protecting her and Judge Camille Kelley handling any legal issues, she was required to make little effort to hide her crimes. “She was relentless, a cold-blooded demon, a very wicked woman. She got bigger and bigger the more power she had. She was pompous, self-important—she was like Hitler, riding around in her dreaded black Cadillac. She terrorized everyone.” Georgia seemed immune to guilt, denying any accusations of abuse, neglect, or death among any of her wards. Former adoptees from many of her children homes recalled the punishments they were subjected to as unproportionate and haunting. Punishments ranged from being beaten with belts to being hung by their wrists in closets for days at a time. Oftentimes these lead to the further verbal and sexual abuse they later experienced, both from Georgia directly as well as many of her staff, both males and females. No child was safe while under Miss Tann’s care.
According to Judge Wade S. Weatherford Jr., “Mankind is possessed of no greater urge than to try to understand the age-old question, ‘Who am I’.” Although Georgia Tann’s reign of terror ended on September 15, 1950, when she succumbed to Uterine cancer at age 59, the endurance of her legacy of secrecy has allowed her to harm many more than the thousands she directly touched. She has hurt every American adopted since. In order to ensure that the children she stole could not be traced back to their birth parents, Georgia began a trend of falsifying adoptees birth records, changing everything from the child’s age and name to their birthplace and parental information. America, which is already stingy with adoptees original records, has continued the trend of withholding all but essential health information, a fact that has outraged innumerable members of those both directly and indirectly affected by Georgia’s actions. It deprives them of their sense of connection. She continues to hurt most of the 6 million adoptees and their approximately 12 million birth parents alive today. Both adoptees and their parents lament of the family they cannot know, wishing to understand, as Judge Weatherford wisely stated, “Who am I?” The outright theft of children is relatively uncommon in the US now, compared to a time where if your child left your sight they were in severe danger of encountering one of Miss Tann’s “spotters” or her feared black Cadillac, both in Tennessee and throughout the country. Today, most of these fears and dangers exist in poor countries like Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, Samoa, and China, in the form of baby brokers, many of whom are “Georgia Tann Clones.” Brokers like Lauryn Galindo, who made 8 million dollars by arranging over 800 adoptions between 1997-2001 to unwitting Americans, including actress Angelina Jolie. China disclosed that it rescued over 3000 children in 2004 from baby brokers, according to the official New China News Agency, and it is estimated that these statistics are only a fraction of abductions in china, as well as in other poor countries.
“The evil that men do lives after them…” Change the gender of the protagonist, and Shakespeare could have been anticipating the pain caused by Georgia Tann. Over the course of 26 years, she kidnapped, abused, and sold over 5,000 children throughout the United States. It is estimated that she made around 1 million-dollars, which according to DollarTimes.com, would be equal to about 13 million dollars in todays money. Because of her actions, an unknowable number of parents died without learning if their children survived through to adulthood. Many did not. From 1924-1950 Georgia Tann silently terrorized our nation with her black market baby adoption scheme. Those who knew her in her early years made comments saying how much good she could have done with her tenacity and vigor, had she applied herself to something greater. Yet for 26 years, Georgia Tann hurt everyone around her. Whether out of self-preservation or spite, empathy abandoned her, replaced instead with greed, lust, and pride.
