Jordan Friedman | History Correspondent
In 1949, a young, pregnant mother dropped off her three children outside a courthouse in rural Tiptonville, Tennessee, then drove away with a man who’d promised her marriage and a new life.
Three-year-old Sue Nell Dycus and her brothers, ages 5 and 6, sat waiting, confused and uncertain of what was to come. Even before that day, the siblings had endured significant trauma and loss. Food had been scarce, and their mother, unable to read or write, had struggled to find steady work after the murder of their father.
Sometime later, a big, black car pulled up to the courthouse. Out stepped Georgia Tann, a woman in her late 50s. “Come with me,” she said before ushering them into the vehicle. The siblings believed that Tann was a nurse, but she was actually the head of the Memphis branch of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society (TCHS), a private nonprofit that oversaw orphanages in the state but was authorized only to place children in foster care.
At a time when state adoption regulations in the United States were fragmented and loosely enforced, Tann operated an illegal black-market business, selling more than 5,000 children to wealthy families across the country between 1924 and 1950. Some parents willingly left their children behind, but many were forcibly separated from their babies and stripped of their parental rights. Tann was heralded as the “Mother of Modern Adoption” even as she built an intricate network of corrupt politicians and civic leaders who shielded TCHS from legal interference.
As the Dycus siblings traveled from Tiptonville to Memphis, their hopes of remaining together were quickly quashed. Sue Nell was placed at the TCHS mansion, while her brothers went to a separate facility. Tann “knew by the time she got us in the car that my middle brother would have fought her tooth and toenail to not let me out of the car, so she took him out first,” says Sue Nell, who is now known as Sallie Brandon, the name given to her after she was placed with her adoptive parents…