His family stressed education, faith, work ethic
If a single phrase could be said to sum up the life of Alamance County’s soon-to-be superior court judge, Doug Green, it might be a verse from Proverbs: “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”
Green was appointed by Governor Roy Cooper two weeks ago to serve out the remaining two years in the eight-year term of longtime senior resident superior court judge Tom Lambeth, Jr., who retired earlier this year; all three are Democrats. Cooper had appointed Green in February 2024 to complete the remaining term of former Republican district court judge Rick Champion, who resigned to become the county’s first public defender.
Green previously worked as assistant attorney general in the state Department of Justice, handling tort cases involving the state Department of Corrections and State Highway Patrol; as an Alamance County assistant district attorney; and as an attorney with the Smith Giles law firm in Graham. His term as a superior court judge runs through December 2026.
In a recent interview with The Alamance News, Green reflected on how the values he learned from his parents – Christian faith, hard work, and an understanding of the importance of education – formed cornerstones of his youth in Burlington and his subsequent career.
The culture that defined the 1980s – he graduated from Williams High School in 1983 – also helped to propel him toward future success, as he found role models in “buppies,” a variation on the “yuppies” stereotypical of the 1980s used in reference to young, black, upwardly mobile professionals.
“It was simpler in the late 70s and 80s,” says Green, 59. “Education was at the forefront; you wanted to excel and there were all these opportunities. [We had] The Cosby Show, Dynasty, L.A. Law – all these shows where people were excelling; that was what you wanted to do.”
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At Williams, Green lettered in football, basketball, baseball, and track, receiving a football scholarship to attend Duke University, where he was a wide receiver for the Blue Devils. In 1987, he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Duke, before going on to earn a Master’s of Business Administration from Elon University in 1992 and a law degree from North Carolina Central University in 1998.
He met future wife, Julie, in 1983, during the summer between his graduation from Williams and his freshman year at Duke. He was working at Sears – where Julie’s mom, Sandy Dixon, also worked. “She was a beautiful lady,” Green says of Julie, then a freshman at Eastern High School, “and I had to meet her.”
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True love took a hiatus – initially, until 1985, when they began dating and stayed together for a couple of years, and ultimately for another three decades. Julie left Alamance County to attend Carolina and moved to Baltimore, Maryland to begin her career in public relations, while he went on to business school at Elon, law school in Durham, and moved to Orlando, Florida.
Over the next 30-plus years, the future Julie (“Jules”) Dixon-Green became an accomplished journalist and public relations executive for celebrities and national organizations such as the NFL. In 2014, she was inducted into the North Carolina Halls of Fame in Journalism, Advertising, and Public Relations at Carolina, where she now serves as the associate dean for Undergraduate Studies and Curriculum and as a public relations professor in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media.
Green’s future in-laws, Roger and Sandy Dixon, had a long record of community service to Alamance County. Mom Sandy, a retired banker with Bank of America, served 15 years on the school board, both before and after the former Alamance County and Burlington city school systems merged in 1996.
A lifelong Alamance County farmer, Roger Dixon also retired from GKN and served on the state Farm Services Agency for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The couple donated part of their land in northeastern Alamance County for Pleasant Grove Elementary School, where Sandy Dixon has been long known for the sweat equity she invested in the school where each of the couple’s three daughters began their education.
After his mother died in 2019, the woman he’d fallen for 36 years earlier “reached out.” They dated five years before marrying in July 2023.
Early emphasis on education
Growing up in Burlington, sports was dominant in the Green household, he recalls, but at the same time, he and brother Ron – 15 months his senior and now an executive with Wells Fargo Bank – knew they had to work hard and make good grades. “My fondest memories were of watching a ball game with my dad [and] going out in the yard with my brother. It was always the bottom of the ninth inning with two outs.”
Ron Green set a high bar as a standout athlete in high school who received an academic scholarship to attend N.C. State University and majored in electrical engineering before receiving a scholarship to attend the Fuqua School of Business at Duke.
“My family stressed education more than anything,” the county’s newest superior court judge tells the newspaper.
It was his paternal grandmother who set the bar ever higher, graduating from Grambling State University in Louisiana in the 1930s – when the financial devastation of the Great Depression, beliefs about traditional gender roles, and the looming Second World meant that fewer than half of U.S. women went to college.
Green’s maternal aunts were valedictorians and salutatorians of their high school graduating classes at the former Jordan Sellars High School and at Graham High School. His father, Lee Green, got a baseball scholarship to attend Southern University & A & M College in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he enrolled at 16.
In 1963, the patriarch Lee Green joined the Burlington-based Alamance Indians as an outfielder, topping all of the regular-season hitters that year with a .304 batting average for the minor Class A league affiliated with the Cleveland Indians. With two young sons at home, Green’s dad ultimately retired from baseball in 1970, went back to school, earned a master’s degree in business, eventually retiring as a purchaser for AT&T in Guilford County.
DAD TAUGHT A strong WORK ETHIC
“The good thing about Pop is he did teach us a work ethic. Every Saturday during the spring, summer, and fall, you were out there mowing the lawn. You would hear the lawnmower starting about 7:00 in the morning, no matter what. Then you had to rake [because you couldn’t just leave the clippings on the lawn].”
– judge Doug Green
“The good thing about Pop is he did teach us a work ethic,” Green tells the newspaper. “Every Saturday during the spring, summer, and fall, you were out there mowing the lawn. You would hear the lawnmower starting about 7:00 in the morning, no matter what. Then you had to rake [because you couldn’t just leave the clippings on the lawn].”
Involvement in church also took priority in the Green home during his formative years in Burlington, where he, his brother, and parents were active in First Baptist Church on Apple Street, then led by Rev. Dr. Richard W. (“RW”) Styles, who served as the church’s pastor for 37 years and was renowned for his volunteer efforts throughout Alamance County prior to his passing in 2018.
“I was very blessed to grow up and be a part of the church,” Green tells the newspaper. “Every second service [of the month] the children got to run the services, not the sermon, but to pray, read the bible. I remember being eight years old, praying in front of a big congregation in the church. Many churches have good youth programs, so I would encourage parents [to] get your children involved in church because they will learn values that will be carried throughout their lives.”
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‘Do better’
“I myself have gone through valleys, but my faith – that is my center, and I am thankful, my wife – that is her center also,” Green says.
Briefly joining the conversation by phone, wife Julie also looks to the Bible for instruction, quoting Luke 12:48 – “To whom much is given, much is required” – a passage she describes as the couple’s “shared ethos.”
A father of two teenagers from his first marriage, Green leans into his personal experience with divorce when dealing with court cases that center on matters of the heart – such as divorce, child custody, abuse, and domestic violence.
“I have a story,” Green explains. “When you have kids, you have to say, ‘I forgive.’” If they can’t have a traditional two-parent household, the best thing a child of a broken home “is two parents getting along,” he explains. “Sometimes I don’t think parents see what they’re doing to their children.”
For Green, serving as judge isn’t strictly a matter of administering the law; it’s also an opportunity to give hope to others – particularly juvenile offenders and children caught in the middle of custody battles – who are often at their worst when they come before him. “I’ve got to do my job, but it’s also to encourage that child. [I say], ‘It’s not where you are right now, but where you are going to be.’”
In describing his calling to encourage others, Green summons a famous quote by the Presidential Medal of Freedom-winning poet and essayist Maya Angelou: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”
“We have to teach these kids so they can aspire to other things and to know they don’t have to go with that group,” or make the kinds of bad decisions that inevitably lead to the criminal justice system. . .
“One of the saddest things [I’ve encountered as a judge] is when I asked a juvenile, ‘what are your dreams?’ and they said, ‘I don’t have any.’”
– future superior court judge Doug Green
More important than the title, “judge,” is what Green believes is a responsibility to positively influence those who are often at their worst when they appear before him in court. “When you are sitting up there, it hits you, ‘Wow,’ all eyes are on you,” Green says. “When you are dealing with juveniles, with parents who are having some problems, [it helps] to give them an encouraging word.”
“We have to teach these kids so they can aspire to other things,” Green elaborates, “and to know they don’t have to go with that group,” or make the kinds of bad decisions that inevitably lead to the criminal justice system. “I have to take some responsibility, too; Alamance County is my home.”
“One of the saddest things [I’ve encountered as a judge],” Green says, “is when I asked a juvenile, ‘what are your dreams?’ and they said, ‘I don’t have any.’”
Though he originally dreamed of being a corporate attorney, Green took a trial advocacy course at NCCU and soon found that the nature of the courtroom banter instantly complemented his competitive bent as an athlete. “When you get in that courtroom, it gets competitive, and you want to win,” says Green, who spent the next 25 years competing in the courtroom prior to his elevation to the bench.
Old habits…
Outside of the courtroom, Green counts cooking as his favorite pastime and watching Food Network shows such as Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives.
There is of course, the long-running Tobacco Road rivalry between his alma mater, Duke, and his wife’s, Carolina.
Says wife Julie Dixon-Green, “We’ve had it forever, since we were teenagers. Doug was already the hometown hero, the Duke football star. It’s animated [during football season].”
Husband Doug asks rhetorically, “A house divided? No. It kind of means equality – there’s no equality.”
“I enjoy my friends, especially people I grew up with that I’ve been friends with for over 50 years, when we’re able to get together and talk about old times,” Green adds. “Getting together with my cousins, my brother, my aunts and uncles – I value that now that we are getting older.
Then there’s a secret pastime, inherited from his grandmother, who like many women, blocked off 3½ hours every weekday for her “stories.” Not even college helped him kick the habit, Green recalls. In his dorm, one room had the ABC soaps on T.V. every afternoon, while another room had the CBS soaps on, and another, the NBC soaps, he recalls.
“I grew up watching The Young & the Restless,” Green admits with a laugh. “Me and Victor Newman” go way back, he says, referring to the fictional business magnate and leading male villain who’s been a staple of the soap for more than four decade. “My brother’s into it even more than I am. My grandma got us hooked on all that.”
“Julie watches it,” Green adds with a laugh. “I can’t lie – I’m back into it.”
