January 18, 2023 • 39 mins
Reporter Josie Duffy Rice travels to a small town outside Montgomery, Alabama, and tries to visit a juvenile reform school, once called the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children or Mt. Meigs. The school opened in the early 20th century as a safe haven for Black kids, but by the 1960s, it had become something else entirely.
Then one day, in 1968, five Black girls ran away, determined to find someone to help. We hear from one of those girls, Mary, and juvenile probation officer Denny. We also hear from Lonnie, now a world famous artist who was sent to Mt. Meigs at age 11, among others. In Unreformed, Rice investigates this institution, and what happened after someone blew the whistle. It looks at the lasting impact Mt. Meigs has had on their lives and juvenile justice in Alabama.
If you or someone you know attended Mt. Meigs and would like to connect with us, please email mtmeigspodcast@gmail.com.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
School of Humans. This podcast episode discusses historical events that
include physical abuse against children. Earlier this year, I drove
from Atlanta, where I live, to Montgomery, Alabama. It's about
(00:30):
a three hour drive, depending on traffic. I've been to
Montgomery plenty, but this time was different. In fact, I
wasn't going to the city of Montgomery, but to a
little unincorporated part of the county called Mount Meg's. I
was there to set foot on the grounds of an
(00:50):
old Alabama institution that I'd spent the last year investigating.
It was hot outside, over ninety degrees. I drove down
a long road looking for my destination, but other than
a few houses, it was mostly empty until you pull
up to the entrance. You know, it's a long, huge
(01:16):
stretch of land right by the highway in an area
of Montgomery where there's really not much, which is sort
of saying something because Montgomery isn't the most happened in
town anyway. And when you pull in on your right
is a huge stretch of like swampland filled with sticks
(01:39):
and scum and mud. Outside of the entrance to the
actual youth center, you just see gates and barbed wire
fence and it looks like a prison. So I drove
up the long driveway lined with trees. I drove past
(02:00):
the visitors building, past the swamp, and up to this
most double gait, the kind built to keep everyone out.
I rolled down my window and I asked the guard
if he would let me in. I'm Josie Duffie Rice.
(02:23):
I'm a writer and a journalist, and before that I
went to law school. I've spent my career focused on
the criminal legal system, and I've long been particularly interested
in how we treat children accused of crimes. I'm also
from the South. I grew up in Georgia, and a
few years ago my family and I moved back there.
And on this day, I was in Alabama outside a
(02:47):
juvenile correctional facility, trying to get in. Since it was
founded over a hundred years ago, this institution has had
many names. First, it was called the Alabama Industrial School
for Negro Boys, then in nineteen eleven, became the Alabama
Reform School for Juvenile Negro Lawbreakers. Eventually, after it went
(03:12):
co ed, it changed its name again to the Alabama
Industrial School for Negro Children. As you may have figured
from the names for most of its history, this facility
held only black kids. These days, it's technically named the
Mount Meg's Campus of the Alabama Department of Youth Services,
(03:36):
but almost everybody just calls it Mount Megs. Technically Mount
Meg's was a reform school for kids, but what I've
discovered is that it wasn't really a school at all.
Mount Megs with padded after swa the slave camp like
a plantation. We didn't have school, they didn't have anything.
(03:59):
It was just slave draw just played driving Black prison
for teams, penal column for children. This is Unreformed the
Story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, Episode one,
(04:37):
the Lucky Ones. Before we talk about what happened at
Mount Meg's, we have to go back to a boy
named Lonnie in Birmingham, Alabama, in the early nineteen sixties.
In the Alabama summers, you can hear the whisper of
(05:01):
living things, the rustle of tiny creatures and the grass,
the hum of katie DIDs and crickets, the blue jays
flitting from one tree to another. There's a lot to
discover if you're willing to look. And as a kid,
Lonnie Holly was always looking on any given evening in
(05:26):
nineteen sixty one. Back when Lonnie was eleven, you might
have seen him in Birmingham, a young boy looking for
critters or some interesting piece of litter on the side
of the road. It was like an adventure, a child
on an adventure down the ditches on the creeks and
(05:46):
seeing the broken material. The closer you got to downtown,
you got a chance to see more and more and
more and more waste material that had been flushed down
the creek and the ditches. Lonnie was always finding some
unusual thing that someone else had discarded. He loved finding
(06:10):
worms and tadpoles. He had the mud soaked curiosity of
any eleven year old boy, and he did this often,
ran away to explore, to search. Lonnie had literally dozens
of siblings, but legend has it that he was his
(06:31):
mother's scrawniest child. And I'm the seventh of her twenty
seven children, but the last one that had to go
through the most abuse, one of twenty seven. But on
this night in nineteen sixty one, Lonnie is basically an orphan.
He lost touch with his family when he was a
(06:51):
toddler after a local dancer who was a friend of
his mother's, noticed how frail he was. This lady, she
was a burulette dancer at the fair ground, and that
she keep me and she could breath feed me, you know.
(07:12):
So the dancer took Lonnie in so she could feed him,
but then eventually she too was gone. In some tellings
of the story, the burlesque dancer left him with a
couple in exchange for a bottle of whiskey. That couple,
the mcilroys, owned a whiskey house, and they took Lonnie in.
(07:33):
Back then, he was known as Tonky macilroy. Latuki was
the one that was always being mistreated or whatever, but
in a sense, little TUCKI was always the one that
was kept sound. Lonnie was in that house for years.
Missus McIlroy was good to him. She became a surrogate mother.
(07:56):
Even now, Lonnie says that she loved him like he
was her own son. But still these weren't happy years.
He was alone so often, and mister McElroy was an
alcoholic and abusive. And it wasn't just him. There were
others around Lonnie who would beat him, sometimes badly enough
to land him in the hospital. Lonnie remembers one story
(08:20):
from when he was around four years old, when an
old man was at the whiskey house drunk. Lonnie was
eating a plate of food. Was gonna be kicking off
my plate, and I dropped the plate and crawled up
underneath the couch, and he kept reaching under there, and
I think I beat him on the armor on the
(08:41):
hand of something. The man was furious and he got
made and went over there and got the pokeone that
you strew up the hot colds and stuff with in
the heater, and shiwed the pokin in my heat and
put a hole in my head. The field enough and
(09:05):
they had to rush me to the horspital because I
was holling and screaming. That was the first incident of
me having to be involved will hospital, was to get
this pokeraon pulled out of my head. A few years later,
when Lonnie was seven, Missus McIlroy died. Mister McIlroy was
(09:29):
out as usual, running around with his other ladies. It
was unexpected, at least for Lonnie, and he didn't really
get it. No one had taught him anything about death,
so for days it was just him in her dead
body in the house alone. It wasn't until mister McIlroy
(09:53):
got home that Lonnie learned that she was dead. To god,
damn it, you don't killed my wife. And he was
so angry with me, and he just stopped beating me.
Lonnie ran out of the house as fast as he could.
I remembered grabbing my wagon Alfham under the house and
(10:13):
just busting out the fence. And then suddenly Lonnie was
hit by a car and dragged for blocks. And I
remember the car hitting me drugged me up a nap
underneath it. After three and a half months in a coma,
Lonnie woke up in the hospital. He didn't want to
(10:37):
go back to live with mister McElroy, but it was
kind of the only option he had nowhere else to go.
Lonnie got older and every so often he'd hear whispers
or rumors about his birth family. Someone told him that
(10:57):
his mother was living with his brothers and sisters out
by the Birmingham Airport. Lonnie wanted to find them, but
it was too vague, too impractical. It's not like a
young black boy could just knock on random doors asking
people if they'd seen his mother. All I could think
about every day, every hour, or my mama and my
(11:20):
mama having a bunch of children, and they lived at
a crosstown well where was a crosstown So for years
Lonnie coped with the life that he had. He waited
until after dark and then explored where he could when
he could. So no, it wasn't a happy life. It
(11:42):
wasn't care free or joyful, but he had his small pleasures,
like his adventures in the dishes, exploring moments of freedom,
until one night when even that was snatched away from him.
And this particularly evening her hey got all the way
(12:03):
to town. I was out doing carefew and that was
the reason enough for him to teching did jubuna. So
this was a common thing back then. You even see
it now sometimes actually, especially in the South, there were
curfews and laws against skipping school and loitering and congregating,
(12:24):
but almost always these laws were only enforced against black
people and Jim Crow Alabama, these tiny infractions led to
countless black children entangled in the criminal legal system, like Lonnie.
When he was eleven years old, the cops arrested him,
put him in the back of the cruiser, and took
him to jail for being out past curfew. Lonnie wasn't
(12:50):
the only black kid in the jail. He wasn't even
the only one in his cell. The others had been
arrested for their involvement in the civil rights movement that
was brewing in Alabama, especially in Birmingham. By the time
Lonnie got there, they've been planning their escape enjoining the
(13:13):
jailbreak didn't feel like much of a choice. Well, you
either broke out, I got your ass beat because they
wasn't gonna leave you behind and tell one. They had
this ridiculous plan that deering lights out, they'd somehow trick
a janitor into opening their cell door, steal his keys,
and make their great escape. Somehow it worked. We took
(13:37):
his key to his automobile and every time and ran
out the back interest of the juvenile. Juvenile the group
managed to drive away, their tires screeching in the rain,
(13:59):
but unfortunately their getaway driver wasn't as talented as he
let on. We didn't know how to drive real good,
so we was ribbing on the road and then all
of a sudden he went through on drake and hit
the telegram Poe. And once he had the Telegram Poe,
he had a rig. Within moments they heard sirens. They
(14:31):
took us right back to the juvenile put his back
in the sail, and early that morning we was loaded
up in this truck and took to this place called
Alabama in Duster School for Nigro Cheered. By age eleven,
Lonnie had already been separated from his family, endured beatings,
(14:55):
lost his surrogate mother, received a life threatening injury to
his head, been dragged underneath a truck, spent three months
in a coma, and suffered countless other abuses. But now
on the road to Mount Meg's, Lonnie was about to
enter some of the worst years of his life. About
(15:25):
a year ago, I got an email about Lonnie Holly.
Now I had never met Lonnie, but I come from
a family of art lovers, so I had heard about him.
Lonnie Bradley Holly, formerly Tonky the boy playing in the
Ditches in Birmingham in nineteen sixty one, is now a musician,
(15:45):
an arts educator, and most notably, an internationally renowned artist.
By nineteen eighty eighty two, my works had been to
sixty four cities. My works had went to the Smithsonian.
Lonnie's art can be found in many other museums too,
including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery.
(16:10):
I spent time with him recently in a friend's home
in Atlanta, and his work was everywhere. Hanging from the
ceiling was this incredible sculpture he made from wire, wood, paper,
and metal, or, as Lonnie puts it, all the things
that people throw away. On the countertop was a small,
beautiful sculpture made from sandstone. Lonnie is self taught through
(16:34):
and through. His art comes from the kind of things
he used to find in the ditches. Talking to him,
you sense that in his life, art and tragedy are
often inseparable. In fact, the first time he realized he
was making art, he was in his twenties. After the
death of his young niece and nephew, his family couldn't
afford headstones, so Lonnie offered to make them. I didn't
(16:59):
know anything about art or sculpture or did depict all
of those things. I learned after my sister two children
was buried and I started working with this material and
it was a sandstone. I was cutting different shapes and
(17:24):
making baby tombstones. It was a Tuskegee arm and came
by he lived it down the screet for my Grandpels say,
you know what you're doing. I said, no, sir, he said,
I've been almost all around the world and I've seen
(17:44):
a lot of things on he said, but death what
you are doing? He said, you're doing art. Fans of
Liney's art know that his hardships were his tours and
tribulations leave the foundation for all of his work. In fact,
it was those hardships that led to the email in
(18:05):
my box asking me if I was interested in helping
tell the story. The email wasn't about Lonnie's work or
his career. It was about the three years he spent
at the Alabama Industrial School for Negro children. There were
no educational facilities there. You can't stop, you can never
break the line, you can never slow down. If you do,
(18:27):
you we was being treated with dull man. I mean
boys got raped all the time. Amount me. You'd hit
him by the hundred, a hundred the water to tie
with a palace, and she comes down on your back
as hard as you can. Well. Avery also strengthen her day,
beating me to the print that I couldn't even walk.
(18:47):
I couldn't do nothing but crowd. She had hit me
in the head with a bottle in my head was swallowing.
She would make me stay on the stairs so I
wouldn't be seeing. You'll see these graves over to the side.
They won't heed. There's a lot of boys didn't even
make it out amount me. Over the past few years,
(19:12):
we've heard more and more disturbing stories about places like
Mount Meg's, institutions for so called delinquent children, where miners
were brutally abused. These institutions have a long history in America.
For more than a century, children have been shipped off
to quote unquote reform schools. Some of them, like Mount Meg's,
(19:32):
are state run institutions. Others are expensive reform boarding schools
where the wealthiest and their wayward kids. But the thing
that they have in common is the abuse. Many kids
ended up dead. Mount Meg's was one of these places,
and yet it has a particularly unique origin story. It
(19:54):
was started in nineteen oh seven by the daughter of
an enslaved woman. It was an institution that was meant
to reform, to rehabilitate, to get black children out of
adult prisons. But then the state of Alabama took over
the school and it did just the opposite. Honestly, it's
hard to imagine how any kid could have emerged from
Mount Meg's unharmed. Much of Mount Meg's history is unknown,
(20:18):
especially the early years. Part of that is due to
poor record keeping, maybe to avoid oversight. Some of it
can also be chopped up to bad luck, since what
little did exist was burned in a fire in the
nineteen twenties. But mostly it was probably just negligence or
general disregard for the lives of poor black children. Children
(20:40):
are really vulnerable, very vulnerable. They don't vote, they don't
like campaign contributions, they don't have political friends in high
places that can make things happen. They were totally at
the wild of adults. That's Denny Abbott. He's eighty three
years old now, but he was only twenty one when
he started working in youth corrections and visited Mount Meg's
(21:01):
for the first time. That was in nineteen sixty one,
the same year Lonnie was sent there. Danny is a
white guy, like most people working in corrections in Alabama,
and back then, he was responsible for taking both black
and white kids to their respective segregated reform schools. Immediately,
(21:23):
he noticed a disparity between the two. The white kids
had a good educational program and both of the boys
and girls. In the white schools, they had social services,
they had medical services, vocational rehab services, but Mount Megs,
Mountain Megs had none of those. Zero, not one. Picture
(21:44):
the worst environment for children that you possibly can and
Mountain Megs is at the top of that list. Nobody
got a fair shake at Mountain Megs, not one kid,
and it was a disgrace. Danny took this job when
he was fresh out of college. It was decent work, stable,
(22:04):
it came with a pension, but still he didn't like
what he saw at Mount Megs. It bothered him so
much so that he reported the conditions of the reformatory
numerous times to his superiors. Of course, nothing happened, and
there's a very simple reason why nothing happened. Nobody cared.
(22:25):
They were black kids. They almost didn't exist except to
do things for white people. So nobody cared and nothing
ever happened. Mount Megs was started in nineteen oh seven
and it still exists today, and honestly, every era of
its history could be its own series. But there is
a reason we are focused on Mount Meg's in the sixties.
(22:48):
The school sits right outside of what was not just
a battleground state, but a battleground city in the fight
for civil rights. Mount Megs is just a few miles
away from where Rosa Parks refused to get up from
her seat on the bus, where Martin Luther King was arrested,
where civil rights leaders like John Lewis marched from Selma.
(23:08):
And while much of America slowly started to improve throughout
the decade, Alabama refused. Mount Meg's was at its absolute worst.
That is until a few brave people tried to change
things for the kids there, and the civil rights movement
came to Mount Megs's doorstep. Whereas with the help of
(23:42):
Lonnie and Denny, we were able to find other children
who were sent to Mount Megs in the sixties. Throughout
this series, you'll hear from many former students talking about
their time there, including archival interviews recorded in the mid
nineteen nineties, and you'll hear from four survivors in particular.
Among them, they spent almost a whole decade at Mount Meg's.
(24:05):
Each year that one left, a new one joined. Lonnie
Holly was the first to be sent to Mount Megs.
There from nineteen sixty one to nineteen sixty four, Jenny
Knox was there from about nineteen sixty four to nineteen
sixty seven. Then there's Mary Stevens who was there from
nineteen sixty seven to nineteen sixty nine. And Johnny Bodley
(24:27):
who was also sent there in nineteen sixty seven and
stayed until nineteen seventy y. I stand but been tree
right there, that's where I have a breakfast. I stand
any figs. This is Mary Stevens. I don't know. She's
a soft spoken woman, a mother who surrounds herself with
(24:49):
photos of her children. Mary is a gardener, and these
days she enjoys the fruit trees and plants in her
garden in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I love figs. They're just there
coming out. This is a plum tree. That's a lot
of plum have fallen. All have strawberries. As a matter
(25:10):
of fact, my little one, the day that he came
home may be four, the strawberries were blown. And that
was Mary is talking about one of her younger sons.
Her biological children are all grown up now, and a
few years ago she adopted two boys. And this is
a Georgia plum tree. Listening to Mary, you can hear
(25:35):
in her voice, the pride and joy in her home.
She's carved out this quiet life for herself and her children.
It's hard to imagine her at a place like Mount Meg's,
but in the late nineteen sixties she spent eighteen months
at the institution. In nineteen sixty eight, Mary and four
other black girls decided to run away from Mount Meg's,
(25:58):
but they didn't manage to get very far before they
were caught. They were picked up by police and brought
to the juvenile detention center. But it just so happened
that this detention center in Montgomery was also where Denny's
office was. Runaways from Mount Meg's were not unusual. Desperate
kids ran away all of the time, but this time
(26:21):
these girls insisted on speaking to someone in charge. That
someone was Denny and that meeting would change everything. After
connecting with Lonnie and Mary, we were able to find
other survivors of Mount Meg's. Jenny Knox lives in Montgomery.
(26:45):
She's seventy now, and when we went to her house,
she opened the door dressed in her Sunday best. I
was born in the fifties, and that's thou I light.
This one is a red and white flower dress. Amma
red Flower, build Amma sander shoes over there with the
(27:07):
glitter and my necklaces and stuff, and so I just
wanted to dress up for you guys. Jenny is extremely
welcoming a great host. Jenny is also a devout Christian,
and one of the first things you notice when you
walk into her house, other than the countless family photos,
is her large collection of Bibles. Her favorite scripture is
(27:31):
about mercy, something she was searching for when she was
serving time at Mount Meg's. Not just once, but twice.
My favorite scripture was what got me through each day.
It Psalms fifty one. It starts off by saying, have
(27:51):
mercy upon me, Oh God, according to thy loving kindness,
according to the multitudes of thy timber mercies, blot out
much transgressions. Why should meet, thirdly from my iniquities in clears,
I mean for my sins. I acknowledge my transgressions and sins.
(28:12):
Goddamn God, Damn godam. This is Johnny Bodley. He also
(28:32):
was at Mount Meg's in the nineteen sixties. We recently
went to his hometown, about an hour west from where
Jenny lives in Selma, Alabama, to a community center called
by the River Center for Humanity. Johnny, who plays the
keyboard and the guitar, performed several of his songs there.
Johnny spent a couple of decades in Boston as a musician.
(28:54):
I was in a major popular R and B group
band up there called the Hypnotics. I was in Boston.
You know what I was. I had become I'm pretty popular,
you know, because of my green adds. A lot of
girls have liked it me. You know, if you didn't
catch that, Johnny says, the reason he's so popular with
women is because of his bright green eyes. After Boston,
(29:19):
he moved back to Selma. Now Johnny busks almost daily
in Selma. That got Daniel Alabama. I became a church musician,
you know, play for three churches, you know, piano player,
things that I thought I would never do. He plays
Marvin Gay and not King Cole and Billy Holliday on
(29:40):
his Yamaha keyboard or strums on his guitar. But for
the last few years, his main focus has been educating
local youth. I speak throughout the state of Alabama and
other places to young people. You know about Hiba's prevention
because of the hfba's prevented specialists for a long time.
You know, That's why. That's how a lot of young
people know me. Johnny's different than he was when he
(30:02):
was younger. He's more peaceful now, but trying to repair
the damage that was done to him at Mount Megs
was a long road. Mount Meegs makes you worse, makes
you worse. Mount Meegs gave you achilling mentality. Mount meeds
to a gas into murderers. In this mentality that Johnny's
(30:25):
describing instilled in him at Mount Megs, it upended the
lives of countless black children in Alabama. Last year, when
I first heard about Mount Megs, there was one thing
(30:48):
that really caught my attention. It was the way that
this institution shaped the rest of people's lives. Lonnie Holly,
Jenny Knox, Johnny Bodley, and Mary Stevens are still, even
into their late sixties and seventies, dealing with the psychological
emotional trauma of their time at Mount max. It been
(31:09):
with me all of my life. I've never been able
to get the hardest part of that out of my life.
I was told in Mount Megs that you know, we
will never be anything we will never amount to anything.
We wasn't going to Mount to anything. You know, I've
said to myself something that had to be wrong with them.
(31:33):
I don't understand what happened. And they're also all things
considered the lucky ones. For countless others, the trauma Mount
Mags inflicted on them irreparably derailed their lives. Many are
locked up serving life sentences or even on death row,
and others have been executed. Most of the gas that
(31:55):
I knew it was in my Mags a deceased now
and Soma doing life in prison. Song was electecuted, and
it's said, how are you one of the most violable
person that you would ever have in your life? And
those characterisms you will be stealing me when I was
a tweer of thirteen year child in Mount May's reformatory.
(32:20):
That is Johnny mack Young. He's serving life in prison
without possibility for parole for murder. We'll spend some time
with him later in the series. His story echoes the
story of so many former attendees of Mount Meg's. I've
been fascinated by, consumed by even the story of Mount
(32:42):
Meg's for about a year now. In some ways that's
pretty on brand for me, given that my professional focus
is the criminal legal system. But in other ways, it's
a little different than what I usually do. I tend
to focus on things that have happened recently or are
happening right now. But this story, the one we're going
(33:04):
to tell you, it largely takes place a few decades ago,
in the nineteen sixties. But the more time we spent
on this story, talking to people, sorting through archives, putting
the puzzle pieces together, the more we realize that this
is in fact a story about today. After all, at
(33:25):
this very moment, Mount Meg's is still in operation. This
is a story about the people who were children back
then and who they became, but it's also a story
about the ones that are children now in the future
they face. I was surprised and a bit ashamed that
I'd never even heard of Mount Megs. I've spent a
(33:47):
fair amount of time in Montgomery. One of my best
friends from law school lives there. Her name is Rachel Judge,
and she's a federal defender now, meaning she represents defendants
in federal court. But before this, she spent almost a
decade working in the Alabama state court system. As an
attorney at the Equal Justice Initiative. She spent her whole
(34:10):
career representing people facing the most severe punishments. Some of
her clients were kids when they were sentenced to life
without parole. Many of them spent years of their childhoods
in adult prison. Others are on death row. So I
reached out to her to see what she had to
(34:31):
say about it. I wanted to ask you a quick
question about a project I'm working on because I thought
you might have some insight. Do you have a second
to talk? Yeah, okay, great. Have you heard of a
place called Mount Meg's. Oh yeah, I mean that's just
(34:52):
right outside of Montgomery, right, you're talking about that one, Yeah,
the like institution for kids. Honestly, I hadn't heard of
it for a minute. I always saw the signs driving
into Montgomery. But then I had client, one of my
clients who was sentenced to light without the role as
a kid. He spent time there in the late eighties.
(35:13):
So I think tragically, that is a place that ends
up feeding a lot of kids into the adult system,
and then a number of them even end up on
Alabama's death Row. A lot of kids who spent time
there and were likely abused there right then ended up,
like you said, serving life without parole sentences or even
(35:34):
on death row. So it's like crazy to hear you
say that. Well, I had a client. He spoke about
being shackled on his hands and feet and his waist
twenty four hours as day, for days at a time,
and that's right now, that's twenty I'm sure it was
like twenty fourteen something like that. I can't what it
(35:54):
was like in the sixties and seventies. To imagine it
decades ago, it's pretty unfathomable. We've been trying to figure
out how to get into the Mountains campus for over
a year, but we basically got nowhere. Especially given COVID,
no one was willing to let us in. So eventually
(36:14):
I just decided to go on the off chance that
I could just manage to talk my way in once
I got there. But unsurprisingly my plan didn't work. Kay,
I've been working on a project about the Mount Megs
and the sixties, and I was just hoping I could
see the campus. Is there a way we could just
drive around it? So I pulled over outside the gate
(36:40):
and walked around a little. I couldn't stop thinking about
the thousands of children, mostly black children, who'd been stuck here,
especially back in the nineteen sixties. How did it happen
and what did it take to make the abuse stop?
In this season of Unreformed, we look at what Mount
Meg's intended to be when it was founded in nineteen
(37:03):
oh seven and the nightmare that it had been actually became.
This is a story of the abuse suffered by the
children trapped there and what happened after five girls escaped
and found someone who decided to do something about it.
This season Unreformed, they was literally bent over with their
(37:27):
hands pulling grass. This the holloway laid him down right
in front of everybody and almost beat him to death.
Their slogan was lifting as we climbed, this idea that
as you climb a ladder, those folk who were at
the bottom are still yours. This model actually worked in
the case of a Satchel page. I backed up, and
(37:48):
I kept backing up, and I stopped running. I was
not going back without telling somebody, well scoring on with
me now. I think, you know what, I can't be
the kind of father to my own kids if I
walk away from those girls. I was this liberal Jewish
kid coming down from the North, and here I am
(38:09):
in Montgomery, Alabama, doing my thing, and I'm going to
file civil rights cases the absolute denial of basic and
fundamental human rights to Negro children who are incroc Writing
in a concentration camp at Mountain Meg's Alaame gave me
in a foundation for everything that I am, all that
I am now as a thought of a mound me,
(38:31):
all that I would be would always be a pout
of the mound me unreformed. The Story of the Alabama
Industrial School for Negro Children is a production of School
of Humans and iHeartMedia. This episode was written by Taylor Bond,
Lastlie and me Josie Uffie Race. Our script supervisor is
(38:53):
Florence Burrow Adams and our producer is Gabbie Watts. We
had additional writing and production support from Sherry Scott. Executive
producers are Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crowley, Brandon Barr, Matt Ournette,
and sound design and mix is by Jesse Niswaller. Music
is by Ben Soli, with recordings courtesy of the Alabama
Center for Traditional Culture. Special thanks to Alabama Department of
(39:15):
Archives and History, Michael Harriet, Floyd Hall, Kevin Nutt, Van Nuker,
and all of the survivors of Mount Meg's willing to
share their story. If you are someone you know attended
Mount Megs and would like to connect with us, please
email Mountmegs Podcast at gmail dot com. That's mt M
e i g S Podcast at gmail dot com. School
(39:52):
of Humans
School of Humans. This podcast episode discusses historical events that
include physical abuse against children. Earlier this year, I drove
from Atlanta, where I live, to Montgomery, Alabama. It's about
(00:30):
a three hour drive, depending on traffic. I've been to
Montgomery plenty, but this time was different. In fact, I
wasn't going to the city of Montgomery, but to a
little unincorporated part of the county called Mount Meg's. I
was there to set foot on the grounds of an
(00:50):
old Alabama institution that I'd spent the last year investigating.
It was hot outside, over ninety degrees. I drove down
a long road looking for my destination, but other than
a few houses, it was mostly empty until you pull
up to the entrance. You know, it's a long, huge
(01:16):
stretch of land right by the highway in an area
of Montgomery where there's really not much, which is sort
of saying something because Montgomery isn't the most happened in
town anyway. And when you pull in on your right
is a huge stretch of like swampland filled with sticks
(01:39):
and scum and mud. Outside of the entrance to the
actual youth center, you just see gates and barbed wire
fence and it looks like a prison. So I drove
up the long driveway lined with trees. I drove past
(02:00):
the visitors building, past the swamp, and up to this
most double gait, the kind built to keep everyone out.
I rolled down my window and I asked the guard
if he would let me in. I'm Josie Duffie Rice.
(02:23):
I'm a writer and a journalist, and before that I
went to law school. I've spent my career focused on
the criminal legal system, and I've long been particularly interested
in how we treat children accused of crimes. I'm also
from the South. I grew up in Georgia, and a
few years ago my family and I moved back there.
And on this day, I was in Alabama outside a
(02:47):
juvenile correctional facility, trying to get in. Since it was
founded over a hundred years ago, this institution has had
many names. First, it was called the Alabama Industrial School
for Negro Boys, then in nineteen eleven, became the Alabama
Reform School for Juvenile Negro Lawbreakers. Eventually, after it went
(03:12):
co ed, it changed its name again to the Alabama
Industrial School for Negro Children. As you may have figured
from the names for most of its history, this facility
held only black kids. These days, it's technically named the
Mount Meg's Campus of the Alabama Department of Youth Services,
(03:36):
but almost everybody just calls it Mount Megs. Technically Mount
Meg's was a reform school for kids, but what I've
discovered is that it wasn't really a school at all.
Mount Megs with padded after swa the slave camp like
a plantation. We didn't have school, they didn't have anything.
(03:59):
It was just slave draw just played driving Black prison
for teams, penal column for children. This is Unreformed the
Story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, Episode one,
(04:37):
the Lucky Ones. Before we talk about what happened at
Mount Meg's, we have to go back to a boy
named Lonnie in Birmingham, Alabama, in the early nineteen sixties.
In the Alabama summers, you can hear the whisper of
(05:01):
living things, the rustle of tiny creatures and the grass,
the hum of katie DIDs and crickets, the blue jays
flitting from one tree to another. There's a lot to
discover if you're willing to look. And as a kid,
Lonnie Holly was always looking on any given evening in
(05:26):
nineteen sixty one. Back when Lonnie was eleven, you might
have seen him in Birmingham, a young boy looking for
critters or some interesting piece of litter on the side
of the road. It was like an adventure, a child
on an adventure down the ditches on the creeks and
(05:46):
seeing the broken material. The closer you got to downtown,
you got a chance to see more and more and
more and more waste material that had been flushed down
the creek and the ditches. Lonnie was always finding some
unusual thing that someone else had discarded. He loved finding
(06:10):
worms and tadpoles. He had the mud soaked curiosity of
any eleven year old boy, and he did this often,
ran away to explore, to search. Lonnie had literally dozens
of siblings, but legend has it that he was his
(06:31):
mother's scrawniest child. And I'm the seventh of her twenty
seven children, but the last one that had to go
through the most abuse, one of twenty seven. But on
this night in nineteen sixty one, Lonnie is basically an orphan.
He lost touch with his family when he was a
(06:51):
toddler after a local dancer who was a friend of
his mother's, noticed how frail he was. This lady, she
was a burulette dancer at the fair ground, and that
she keep me and she could breath feed me, you know.
(07:12):
So the dancer took Lonnie in so she could feed him,
but then eventually she too was gone. In some tellings
of the story, the burlesque dancer left him with a
couple in exchange for a bottle of whiskey. That couple,
the mcilroys, owned a whiskey house, and they took Lonnie in.
(07:33):
Back then, he was known as Tonky macilroy. Latuki was
the one that was always being mistreated or whatever, but
in a sense, little TUCKI was always the one that
was kept sound. Lonnie was in that house for years.
Missus McIlroy was good to him. She became a surrogate mother.
(07:56):
Even now, Lonnie says that she loved him like he
was her own son. But still these weren't happy years.
He was alone so often, and mister McElroy was an
alcoholic and abusive. And it wasn't just him. There were
others around Lonnie who would beat him, sometimes badly enough
to land him in the hospital. Lonnie remembers one story
(08:20):
from when he was around four years old, when an
old man was at the whiskey house drunk. Lonnie was
eating a plate of food. Was gonna be kicking off
my plate, and I dropped the plate and crawled up
underneath the couch, and he kept reaching under there, and
I think I beat him on the armor on the
(08:41):
hand of something. The man was furious and he got
made and went over there and got the pokeone that
you strew up the hot colds and stuff with in
the heater, and shiwed the pokin in my heat and
put a hole in my head. The field enough and
(09:05):
they had to rush me to the horspital because I
was holling and screaming. That was the first incident of
me having to be involved will hospital, was to get
this pokeraon pulled out of my head. A few years later,
when Lonnie was seven, Missus McIlroy died. Mister McIlroy was
(09:29):
out as usual, running around with his other ladies. It
was unexpected, at least for Lonnie, and he didn't really
get it. No one had taught him anything about death,
so for days it was just him in her dead
body in the house alone. It wasn't until mister McIlroy
(09:53):
got home that Lonnie learned that she was dead. To god,
damn it, you don't killed my wife. And he was
so angry with me, and he just stopped beating me.
Lonnie ran out of the house as fast as he could.
I remembered grabbing my wagon Alfham under the house and
(10:13):
just busting out the fence. And then suddenly Lonnie was
hit by a car and dragged for blocks. And I
remember the car hitting me drugged me up a nap
underneath it. After three and a half months in a coma,
Lonnie woke up in the hospital. He didn't want to
(10:37):
go back to live with mister McElroy, but it was
kind of the only option he had nowhere else to go.
Lonnie got older and every so often he'd hear whispers
or rumors about his birth family. Someone told him that
(10:57):
his mother was living with his brothers and sisters out
by the Birmingham Airport. Lonnie wanted to find them, but
it was too vague, too impractical. It's not like a
young black boy could just knock on random doors asking
people if they'd seen his mother. All I could think
about every day, every hour, or my mama and my
(11:20):
mama having a bunch of children, and they lived at
a crosstown well where was a crosstown So for years
Lonnie coped with the life that he had. He waited
until after dark and then explored where he could when
he could. So no, it wasn't a happy life. It
(11:42):
wasn't care free or joyful, but he had his small pleasures,
like his adventures in the dishes, exploring moments of freedom,
until one night when even that was snatched away from him.
And this particularly evening her hey got all the way
(12:03):
to town. I was out doing carefew and that was
the reason enough for him to teching did jubuna. So
this was a common thing back then. You even see
it now sometimes actually, especially in the South, there were
curfews and laws against skipping school and loitering and congregating,
(12:24):
but almost always these laws were only enforced against black
people and Jim Crow Alabama, these tiny infractions led to
countless black children entangled in the criminal legal system, like Lonnie.
When he was eleven years old, the cops arrested him,
put him in the back of the cruiser, and took
him to jail for being out past curfew. Lonnie wasn't
(12:50):
the only black kid in the jail. He wasn't even
the only one in his cell. The others had been
arrested for their involvement in the civil rights movement that
was brewing in Alabama, especially in Birmingham. By the time
Lonnie got there, they've been planning their escape enjoining the
(13:13):
jailbreak didn't feel like much of a choice. Well, you
either broke out, I got your ass beat because they
wasn't gonna leave you behind and tell one. They had
this ridiculous plan that deering lights out, they'd somehow trick
a janitor into opening their cell door, steal his keys,
and make their great escape. Somehow it worked. We took
(13:37):
his key to his automobile and every time and ran
out the back interest of the juvenile. Juvenile the group
managed to drive away, their tires screeching in the rain,
(13:59):
but unfortunately their getaway driver wasn't as talented as he
let on. We didn't know how to drive real good,
so we was ribbing on the road and then all
of a sudden he went through on drake and hit
the telegram Poe. And once he had the Telegram Poe,
he had a rig. Within moments they heard sirens. They
(14:31):
took us right back to the juvenile put his back
in the sail, and early that morning we was loaded
up in this truck and took to this place called
Alabama in Duster School for Nigro Cheered. By age eleven,
Lonnie had already been separated from his family, endured beatings,
(14:55):
lost his surrogate mother, received a life threatening injury to
his head, been dragged underneath a truck, spent three months
in a coma, and suffered countless other abuses. But now
on the road to Mount Meg's, Lonnie was about to
enter some of the worst years of his life. About
(15:25):
a year ago, I got an email about Lonnie Holly.
Now I had never met Lonnie, but I come from
a family of art lovers, so I had heard about him.
Lonnie Bradley Holly, formerly Tonky the boy playing in the
Ditches in Birmingham in nineteen sixty one, is now a musician,
(15:45):
an arts educator, and most notably, an internationally renowned artist.
By nineteen eighty eighty two, my works had been to
sixty four cities. My works had went to the Smithsonian.
Lonnie's art can be found in many other museums too,
including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery.
(16:10):
I spent time with him recently in a friend's home
in Atlanta, and his work was everywhere. Hanging from the
ceiling was this incredible sculpture he made from wire, wood, paper,
and metal, or, as Lonnie puts it, all the things
that people throw away. On the countertop was a small,
beautiful sculpture made from sandstone. Lonnie is self taught through
(16:34):
and through. His art comes from the kind of things
he used to find in the ditches. Talking to him,
you sense that in his life, art and tragedy are
often inseparable. In fact, the first time he realized he
was making art, he was in his twenties. After the
death of his young niece and nephew, his family couldn't
afford headstones, so Lonnie offered to make them. I didn't
(16:59):
know anything about art or sculpture or did depict all
of those things. I learned after my sister two children
was buried and I started working with this material and
it was a sandstone. I was cutting different shapes and
(17:24):
making baby tombstones. It was a Tuskegee arm and came
by he lived it down the screet for my Grandpels say,
you know what you're doing. I said, no, sir, he said,
I've been almost all around the world and I've seen
(17:44):
a lot of things on he said, but death what
you are doing? He said, you're doing art. Fans of
Liney's art know that his hardships were his tours and
tribulations leave the foundation for all of his work. In fact,
it was those hardships that led to the email in
(18:05):
my box asking me if I was interested in helping
tell the story. The email wasn't about Lonnie's work or
his career. It was about the three years he spent
at the Alabama Industrial School for Negro children. There were
no educational facilities there. You can't stop, you can never
break the line, you can never slow down. If you do,
(18:27):
you we was being treated with dull man. I mean
boys got raped all the time. Amount me. You'd hit
him by the hundred, a hundred the water to tie
with a palace, and she comes down on your back
as hard as you can. Well. Avery also strengthen her day,
beating me to the print that I couldn't even walk.
(18:47):
I couldn't do nothing but crowd. She had hit me
in the head with a bottle in my head was swallowing.
She would make me stay on the stairs so I
wouldn't be seeing. You'll see these graves over to the side.
They won't heed. There's a lot of boys didn't even
make it out amount me. Over the past few years,
(19:12):
we've heard more and more disturbing stories about places like
Mount Meg's, institutions for so called delinquent children, where miners
were brutally abused. These institutions have a long history in America.
For more than a century, children have been shipped off
to quote unquote reform schools. Some of them, like Mount Meg's,
(19:32):
are state run institutions. Others are expensive reform boarding schools
where the wealthiest and their wayward kids. But the thing
that they have in common is the abuse. Many kids
ended up dead. Mount Meg's was one of these places,
and yet it has a particularly unique origin story. It
(19:54):
was started in nineteen oh seven by the daughter of
an enslaved woman. It was an institution that was meant
to reform, to rehabilitate, to get black children out of
adult prisons. But then the state of Alabama took over
the school and it did just the opposite. Honestly, it's
hard to imagine how any kid could have emerged from
Mount Meg's unharmed. Much of Mount Meg's history is unknown,
(20:18):
especially the early years. Part of that is due to
poor record keeping, maybe to avoid oversight. Some of it
can also be chopped up to bad luck, since what
little did exist was burned in a fire in the
nineteen twenties. But mostly it was probably just negligence or
general disregard for the lives of poor black children. Children
(20:40):
are really vulnerable, very vulnerable. They don't vote, they don't
like campaign contributions, they don't have political friends in high
places that can make things happen. They were totally at
the wild of adults. That's Denny Abbott. He's eighty three
years old now, but he was only twenty one when
he started working in youth corrections and visited Mount Meg's
(21:01):
for the first time. That was in nineteen sixty one,
the same year Lonnie was sent there. Danny is a
white guy, like most people working in corrections in Alabama,
and back then, he was responsible for taking both black
and white kids to their respective segregated reform schools. Immediately,
(21:23):
he noticed a disparity between the two. The white kids
had a good educational program and both of the boys
and girls. In the white schools, they had social services,
they had medical services, vocational rehab services, but Mount Megs,
Mountain Megs had none of those. Zero, not one. Picture
(21:44):
the worst environment for children that you possibly can and
Mountain Megs is at the top of that list. Nobody
got a fair shake at Mountain Megs, not one kid,
and it was a disgrace. Danny took this job when
he was fresh out of college. It was decent work, stable,
(22:04):
it came with a pension, but still he didn't like
what he saw at Mount Megs. It bothered him so
much so that he reported the conditions of the reformatory
numerous times to his superiors. Of course, nothing happened, and
there's a very simple reason why nothing happened. Nobody cared.
(22:25):
They were black kids. They almost didn't exist except to
do things for white people. So nobody cared and nothing
ever happened. Mount Megs was started in nineteen oh seven
and it still exists today, and honestly, every era of
its history could be its own series. But there is
a reason we are focused on Mount Meg's in the sixties.
(22:48):
The school sits right outside of what was not just
a battleground state, but a battleground city in the fight
for civil rights. Mount Megs is just a few miles
away from where Rosa Parks refused to get up from
her seat on the bus, where Martin Luther King was arrested,
where civil rights leaders like John Lewis marched from Selma.
(23:08):
And while much of America slowly started to improve throughout
the decade, Alabama refused. Mount Meg's was at its absolute worst.
That is until a few brave people tried to change
things for the kids there, and the civil rights movement
came to Mount Megs's doorstep. Whereas with the help of
(23:42):
Lonnie and Denny, we were able to find other children
who were sent to Mount Megs in the sixties. Throughout
this series, you'll hear from many former students talking about
their time there, including archival interviews recorded in the mid
nineteen nineties, and you'll hear from four survivors in particular.
Among them, they spent almost a whole decade at Mount Meg's.
(24:05):
Each year that one left, a new one joined. Lonnie
Holly was the first to be sent to Mount Megs.
There from nineteen sixty one to nineteen sixty four, Jenny
Knox was there from about nineteen sixty four to nineteen
sixty seven. Then there's Mary Stevens who was there from
nineteen sixty seven to nineteen sixty nine. And Johnny Bodley
(24:27):
who was also sent there in nineteen sixty seven and
stayed until nineteen seventy y. I stand but been tree
right there, that's where I have a breakfast. I stand
any figs. This is Mary Stevens. I don't know. She's
a soft spoken woman, a mother who surrounds herself with
(24:49):
photos of her children. Mary is a gardener, and these
days she enjoys the fruit trees and plants in her
garden in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I love figs. They're just there
coming out. This is a plum tree. That's a lot
of plum have fallen. All have strawberries. As a matter
(25:10):
of fact, my little one, the day that he came
home may be four, the strawberries were blown. And that
was Mary is talking about one of her younger sons.
Her biological children are all grown up now, and a
few years ago she adopted two boys. And this is
a Georgia plum tree. Listening to Mary, you can hear
(25:35):
in her voice, the pride and joy in her home.
She's carved out this quiet life for herself and her children.
It's hard to imagine her at a place like Mount Meg's,
but in the late nineteen sixties she spent eighteen months
at the institution. In nineteen sixty eight, Mary and four
other black girls decided to run away from Mount Meg's,
(25:58):
but they didn't manage to get very far before they
were caught. They were picked up by police and brought
to the juvenile detention center. But it just so happened
that this detention center in Montgomery was also where Denny's
office was. Runaways from Mount Meg's were not unusual. Desperate
kids ran away all of the time, but this time
(26:21):
these girls insisted on speaking to someone in charge. That
someone was Denny and that meeting would change everything. After
connecting with Lonnie and Mary, we were able to find
other survivors of Mount Meg's. Jenny Knox lives in Montgomery.
(26:45):
She's seventy now, and when we went to her house,
she opened the door dressed in her Sunday best. I
was born in the fifties, and that's thou I light.
This one is a red and white flower dress. Amma
red Flower, build Amma sander shoes over there with the
(27:07):
glitter and my necklaces and stuff, and so I just
wanted to dress up for you guys. Jenny is extremely
welcoming a great host. Jenny is also a devout Christian,
and one of the first things you notice when you
walk into her house, other than the countless family photos,
is her large collection of Bibles. Her favorite scripture is
(27:31):
about mercy, something she was searching for when she was
serving time at Mount Meg's. Not just once, but twice.
My favorite scripture was what got me through each day.
It Psalms fifty one. It starts off by saying, have
(27:51):
mercy upon me, Oh God, according to thy loving kindness,
according to the multitudes of thy timber mercies, blot out
much transgressions. Why should meet, thirdly from my iniquities in clears,
I mean for my sins. I acknowledge my transgressions and sins.
(28:12):
Goddamn God, Damn godam. This is Johnny Bodley. He also
(28:32):
was at Mount Meg's in the nineteen sixties. We recently
went to his hometown, about an hour west from where
Jenny lives in Selma, Alabama, to a community center called
by the River Center for Humanity. Johnny, who plays the
keyboard and the guitar, performed several of his songs there.
Johnny spent a couple of decades in Boston as a musician.
(28:54):
I was in a major popular R and B group
band up there called the Hypnotics. I was in Boston.
You know what I was. I had become I'm pretty popular,
you know, because of my green adds. A lot of
girls have liked it me. You know, if you didn't
catch that, Johnny says, the reason he's so popular with
women is because of his bright green eyes. After Boston,
(29:19):
he moved back to Selma. Now Johnny busks almost daily
in Selma. That got Daniel Alabama. I became a church musician,
you know, play for three churches, you know, piano player,
things that I thought I would never do. He plays
Marvin Gay and not King Cole and Billy Holliday on
(29:40):
his Yamaha keyboard or strums on his guitar. But for
the last few years, his main focus has been educating
local youth. I speak throughout the state of Alabama and
other places to young people. You know about Hiba's prevention
because of the hfba's prevented specialists for a long time.
You know, That's why. That's how a lot of young
people know me. Johnny's different than he was when he
(30:02):
was younger. He's more peaceful now, but trying to repair
the damage that was done to him at Mount Megs
was a long road. Mount Meegs makes you worse, makes
you worse. Mount Meegs gave you achilling mentality. Mount meeds
to a gas into murderers. In this mentality that Johnny's
(30:25):
describing instilled in him at Mount Megs, it upended the
lives of countless black children in Alabama. Last year, when
I first heard about Mount Megs, there was one thing
(30:48):
that really caught my attention. It was the way that
this institution shaped the rest of people's lives. Lonnie Holly,
Jenny Knox, Johnny Bodley, and Mary Stevens are still, even
into their late sixties and seventies, dealing with the psychological
emotional trauma of their time at Mount max. It been
(31:09):
with me all of my life. I've never been able
to get the hardest part of that out of my life.
I was told in Mount Megs that you know, we
will never be anything we will never amount to anything.
We wasn't going to Mount to anything. You know, I've
said to myself something that had to be wrong with them.
(31:33):
I don't understand what happened. And they're also all things
considered the lucky ones. For countless others, the trauma Mount
Mags inflicted on them irreparably derailed their lives. Many are
locked up serving life sentences or even on death row,
and others have been executed. Most of the gas that
(31:55):
I knew it was in my Mags a deceased now
and Soma doing life in prison. Song was electecuted, and
it's said, how are you one of the most violable
person that you would ever have in your life? And
those characterisms you will be stealing me when I was
a tweer of thirteen year child in Mount May's reformatory.
(32:20):
That is Johnny mack Young. He's serving life in prison
without possibility for parole for murder. We'll spend some time
with him later in the series. His story echoes the
story of so many former attendees of Mount Meg's. I've
been fascinated by, consumed by even the story of Mount
(32:42):
Meg's for about a year now. In some ways that's
pretty on brand for me, given that my professional focus
is the criminal legal system. But in other ways, it's
a little different than what I usually do. I tend
to focus on things that have happened recently or are
happening right now. But this story, the one we're going
(33:04):
to tell you, it largely takes place a few decades ago,
in the nineteen sixties. But the more time we spent
on this story, talking to people, sorting through archives, putting
the puzzle pieces together, the more we realize that this
is in fact a story about today. After all, at
(33:25):
this very moment, Mount Meg's is still in operation. This
is a story about the people who were children back
then and who they became, but it's also a story
about the ones that are children now in the future
they face. I was surprised and a bit ashamed that
I'd never even heard of Mount Megs. I've spent a
(33:47):
fair amount of time in Montgomery. One of my best
friends from law school lives there. Her name is Rachel Judge,
and she's a federal defender now, meaning she represents defendants
in federal court. But before this, she spent almost a
decade working in the Alabama state court system. As an
attorney at the Equal Justice Initiative. She spent her whole
(34:10):
career representing people facing the most severe punishments. Some of
her clients were kids when they were sentenced to life
without parole. Many of them spent years of their childhoods
in adult prison. Others are on death row. So I
reached out to her to see what she had to
(34:31):
say about it. I wanted to ask you a quick
question about a project I'm working on because I thought
you might have some insight. Do you have a second
to talk? Yeah, okay, great. Have you heard of a
place called Mount Meg's. Oh yeah, I mean that's just
(34:52):
right outside of Montgomery, right, you're talking about that one, Yeah,
the like institution for kids. Honestly, I hadn't heard of
it for a minute. I always saw the signs driving
into Montgomery. But then I had client, one of my
clients who was sentenced to light without the role as
a kid. He spent time there in the late eighties.
(35:13):
So I think tragically, that is a place that ends
up feeding a lot of kids into the adult system,
and then a number of them even end up on
Alabama's death Row. A lot of kids who spent time
there and were likely abused there right then ended up,
like you said, serving life without parole sentences or even
(35:34):
on death row. So it's like crazy to hear you
say that. Well, I had a client. He spoke about
being shackled on his hands and feet and his waist
twenty four hours as day, for days at a time,
and that's right now, that's twenty I'm sure it was
like twenty fourteen something like that. I can't what it
(35:54):
was like in the sixties and seventies. To imagine it
decades ago, it's pretty unfathomable. We've been trying to figure
out how to get into the Mountains campus for over
a year, but we basically got nowhere. Especially given COVID,
no one was willing to let us in. So eventually
(36:14):
I just decided to go on the off chance that
I could just manage to talk my way in once
I got there. But unsurprisingly my plan didn't work. Kay,
I've been working on a project about the Mount Megs
and the sixties, and I was just hoping I could
see the campus. Is there a way we could just
drive around it? So I pulled over outside the gate
(36:40):
and walked around a little. I couldn't stop thinking about
the thousands of children, mostly black children, who'd been stuck here,
especially back in the nineteen sixties. How did it happen
and what did it take to make the abuse stop?
In this season of Unreformed, we look at what Mount
Meg's intended to be when it was founded in nineteen
(37:03):
oh seven and the nightmare that it had been actually became.
This is a story of the abuse suffered by the
children trapped there and what happened after five girls escaped
and found someone who decided to do something about it.
This season Unreformed, they was literally bent over with their
(37:27):
hands pulling grass. This the holloway laid him down right
in front of everybody and almost beat him to death.
Their slogan was lifting as we climbed, this idea that
as you climb a ladder, those folk who were at
the bottom are still yours. This model actually worked in
the case of a Satchel page. I backed up, and
(37:48):
I kept backing up, and I stopped running. I was
not going back without telling somebody, well scoring on with
me now. I think, you know what, I can't be
the kind of father to my own kids if I
walk away from those girls. I was this liberal Jewish
kid coming down from the North, and here I am
(38:09):
in Montgomery, Alabama, doing my thing, and I'm going to
file civil rights cases the absolute denial of basic and
fundamental human rights to Negro children who are incroc Writing
in a concentration camp at Mountain Meg's Alaame gave me
in a foundation for everything that I am, all that
I am now as a thought of a mound me,
(38:31):
all that I would be would always be a pout
of the mound me unreformed. The Story of the Alabama
Industrial School for Negro Children is a production of School
of Humans and iHeartMedia. This episode was written by Taylor Bond,
Lastlie and me Josie Uffie Race. Our script supervisor is
(38:53):
Florence Burrow Adams and our producer is Gabbie Watts. We
had additional writing and production support from Sherry Scott. Executive
producers are Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crowley, Brandon Barr, Matt Ournette,
and sound design and mix is by Jesse Niswaller. Music
is by Ben Soli, with recordings courtesy of the Alabama
Center for Traditional Culture. Special thanks to Alabama Department of
(39:15):
Archives and History, Michael Harriet, Floyd Hall, Kevin Nutt, Van Nuker,
and all of the survivors of Mount Meg's willing to
share their story. If you are someone you know attended
Mount Megs and would like to connect with us, please
email Mountmegs Podcast at gmail dot com. That's mt M
e i g S Podcast at gmail dot com. School
(39:52):
of Humans
Host
Josie Duffy Rice
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