February 1, 2023 • 39 mins
By the 1960s, the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children was an early prototype of the for-profit prison. But it wasn’t designed that way. In this episode, we go back to the early 20th century when a Black woman and student of Booker T. Washington named Cornelia Bowen founded Mt. Meigs. She envisioned a safe haven for Black kids who weren’t being served by the state of Alabama and believed in reform through industrial education. She often was successful, and without her, America might not have had one of its most legendary Black athletes, baseball player Satchel Paige.
If you or someone you know attended Mt. Meigs and would like to connect with us, please email mtmeigspodcast@gmail.com.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
School of Humans. The nineteen forty eight World Series signaled
a new era for Major League Baseball. The Boston Braves
faced off against the Cleveland Indians and the first Championship
to be nationally televised, and in Game five, Leroy Satchel
Page took the mound, the first ever player from the
(00:30):
Negro Leagues to pitch in a World Series. Here's the
moment he walked onto the field, and here's the announcement
about the appearance of sache past the Hall of Famer
remains one of baseball's most celebrated pitchers. Page's pitching remained bold, versatile,
(00:54):
and unpredictable as he was pitching for the Indians in
that historic game some seventy four years ago. In the
nineteen forty eight game, his fast pitching was on full display.
The pitch swung on and I don't think the fast.
Each man who went up to bat against him dreaded it.
(01:16):
And he had stamina. He was eighteen when he began
playing baseball professionally and didn't hang up his hat until
he was almost sixty. Page started in the Negro National
Leagues in the mid nineteen twenties and eventually became the
first black pitcher to play in the American League. All
the best players of the time said Paige was the greatest.
(01:37):
Joe DiMaggio called him the best I've ever faced and
the fastest. Plus the man had more personality than the
rest of the league combined. Here he is in nineteen
fifty eight talking to a reporter in Miami. While he
was playing. It became a running joke that Sachel would
never disclose his age. The truth I don't think of
but a very few people in the United States, nor
my age, of where I come from me because I've
(01:59):
been playing him since I was a kid. I never
had a job. But still this isn't one hundred years
run everybody on feet. This he did played ball with
miss albums one hundred, some of them eighty five and ninety.
Page died in nineteen eighty two. He's buried in Kansas City, Missouri,
home of his beloved Negro League Monarchs. The Page's roots
were further south. He grew up in a poor family,
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the sixth of twelve children, in a segregated neighborhood called
Down the Bay in Mobile, Alabama. Nat You at least
stands a home in Kansas City. He visits down a
mobile as that said one time that I just live
wearing pitcher. Both Satchel Page's birthplace and resting place claim
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him mobile in Kansas City have streets, schools, and scholarships
in his name, but most people don't know that there
was a third place that changed Sachel Page's life. In fact,
if it wasn't for one woman, Cornelia Bowen of Tuskegee, Alabama,
the great Sachel Page might never have been because he
(03:01):
was on a trail to He's gonna either get end
up being lands dead. This is Donald Spivey, an American
historian and distinguished professor at University of Miami. He wrote
the book If You Were Only White, The Life of
Leroy Satchel Page was trouble youth in appollance of black people.
He was hardheaded. He was just a difficult, difficult child,
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and back then, and particularly in the South, they would
tell you go and fetch me a switch. He heard
that so often that that could have been his other
nickname rather than Satchell. He could have been go and
fetch me a switch. That hardheadedness got young Satchel into
trouble outside of the home too. By twelve, he was
known in his neighborhood for stealing, and it's rumored that
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his nickname Satchel came from an incident where he was
caught stealing a bag and he skipped school. Even back then,
though Satchell could throw throw hard, he'd hunt with just
a pile of rocks in mobile train tracks separated down
the bay from the nearby white neighborhood, and sometimes young
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white boys and black boys would meet along the tracks
to battle. They had a ongoing rock bottles with the
Oakdale School, which was a white school across the railroad tracks,
and white students threw rocks up and they threw rocks
back at them, and this became the racial rock wars.
(04:30):
One bottle got out of hand, page trying to hold
off this forward coming mob of white started throwing rocks
with bad intentions, and you know, with his ability to throw,
he was hitting people in the head. And he's lucky
he didn't lock somebody's eye out, and the white Yonsters
luckily didn't complain to their parents about it. Community could
(04:53):
have been wiped out down the bay, might have been spared,
but Sachel's prowess with rocks and his reputation for sticky
fingers soon caught the attention of Mobile's police chief Frank Crenshaw,
a man whose peacekeeping philosophy included the belief that all
black boys between seven and sixteen should be sent to
(05:16):
a detention facility for any minor crime. He said as
much in a letter he wrote to the founder of
Tuskegee University, Booker T. Washington, about quote unquote the juvenile delinquents,
Delinquents like Satchel Paige, who, on July twenty fourth, nineteen eighteen,
at the age of twelve, was sent to the Alabama
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Reform School for Juvenile Negro lawbreakers in Mount Meg's, Alabama.
He would be there for six years or until his
eighteenth birthday, whichever came first. He thinks it's the worst
day of his life, that he's being sentenced to school,
he's being sentenced to prison, so he doesn't realize that
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in fact, this saved his life. What we know now
is that the school, later known as the alabam An
Industrial School for Negro Children, became a place where thousands
of Alabama's black boys and girls were subjected to abuse
and torture in the name of rehabilitation and reform. But
at its inception, the school was something else, entirely a
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safe haven for black children who would have otherwise been
thrown into adult prison. I'm Josie Duffie Rice, and this
is Unreformed the story of the Alabama Industrial School for
Negro Children. Episode three, Cornelia's Dream. Cornelia Bowen was the
(07:09):
founder of Mount Megs. And in order to understand what
Mount Meg's became, you have to understand how it started
Cornelia's vision, and really you have to understand this strange,
remarkable life. She lived a life that was only possible
during that one narrow sliver of history as slavery ended
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in the reconstruction era began. Of myself and the war
I have done, there is not a great deal to say.
I was born at Tuskegee, Alabama. My mother lived the
greater part of her life at this place as the
slave of Colonel William Bowen. The birthplace of my mother
was Baltimore, Maryland. She was taught to read by her
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master's daughter in Baltimore and was never forbidden to read
by those who owned her in Alabama. That's Alabama born
art historian and professor Alvia Wardlaw. You'll hear her reading
Cornelia's words throughout this episode. Cornelia was born on the
Bowen Plantation in Macon County, Alabama, just east of Montgomery.
(08:16):
It's hard to know exactly when. Some say she was
born in eighteen fifty eight, Others think that it was
more like eighteen sixty four, and after going down a
rabbit hole of census records, I'm inclined to agree. This,
of course, is one of the casualties of being black
during slavery and in the years after, records of your
life were sparse and inconsistent. We don't know anything about
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Cornelia's father. Some think he must have been a slave owner,
but there is really no way for us to know.
But what we do know is that her mother, Sophia,
was enslaved. Sophia worked as a seamstress in the home
of her white slave owner, and later Cornelia recalled that
her mother wasn't even allowed to talk to the people
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working in the fields. Another thing about Sophia she could read,
and later, when her three daughters were young, she taught
them to read too. On Sundays, with my sisters gathered
about her knees, we would sit for hours listening as
mother would read church hymns. These days were days of freedom,
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as I do not remember and know nothing of those
of slavery. My mother always refrained from telling her children
frightful stories of the awful sufferings of the slave days.
So Cornelia was the child of an enslaved woman, and
her life turned out drastically different than her mother's. In
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eighteen eighty one, the state appropriated two thousand dollars to
start a black college in Macon County. A white state
senator former Confederate, had pushed for the appropriation himself, hoping
it would get him black votes. This was during the
post Reconstruction period where black people had some voting rights
before they were taken away again, and this was more
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evidence of what the right to vote meant, at least
some political power, opportunity, and sometimes education. Booker T. Washington
himself was the person tasked with building this new college
in Macon County. He ended up purchasing the Bowen plantation
where Cornelia was born, the same plantation where her mother
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was enslaved. On it, he built the institute now known
as Tuskegee University and historically black university that is renowned
to this day and in eighteen eighty five, Cornelia graduated
with honors in Tuskegee's first graduating class. To my class
that graduated in eighteen eighty five, the first one to graduate,
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we proudly boast three Peabody Medals were awarded for excellence
in scholarship, and I was awarded one of the medals.
Think for a second about how remarkable this is. Here
was a black woman getting a college diploma on the
very same land her own mother had been a slave.
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I don't know exactly what shaped Cornelia's outlook on the world.
Of course, we missed each other by about a hundred years.
But in her records you can see the three main
influences that shaped her politics and how she saw the world.
The first was her education, and the second was her mentor,
Booker T. Washington. Mister Washington himself took charge of our classes,
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and I have always been very proud that I can
say that he was my teacher. If I have been
of any service to my people, I owe it all
to mister Washington, who impressed upon me those lessons which
led me to want to spend myself in the helping
of my people. Here's Booker T. In nineteen o eight,
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reading an excerpt of a speech he gave in eighteen
ninety five. It was his most famous, called the Atlanta Compromise,
and this is the only known audio recording of his voice.
He did not train that in the first years of
All New Life. He began at the top because of
the fun it's hard to hear him, I know, not
great sound quality in the early nineteen hundreds, But what
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he's basically saying is that black people were too focused
on political power and intellectual pursuits and not focused enough
on earning money or learning a trade, or in his words,
that the political convention or stump speaking had more attractions
than starting a dairy farm or truck garden. Note that
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he's literally giving a speech when he says that. It's
a confusing thing to say when he only got his
university because the local state senator needed black votes. But
Booker t always had a shall we say, controversial perspective
on how black people should function in a post slavery
America where racism ran rampant and equality remained a pipe dream.
(13:06):
He was essentially the father of respectability politics. He spent
a lot of time focused on what black people were
doing wrong. He liked to tell black people to work
harder to get a hobby, and this perspective was a
foundation on which Booker T's philosophy of industrial education was built.
Part of the theory behind industrial education was respectability and
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an attempt to make black people indispensable. People like Cornelia
and Booker T encourage black people to focus on trade work,
and basically what that meant was that even though black
folks had been freed from the practice of slavery, they
should still arm themselves with similar skills that they practiced
on the plantation. Cornelia was an early and avid supporter
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of Booker T. Washington's philosophy of industrial education, So in
eighteen eighty eight, when Washington himself requested that Cornelia moved
to wa to teach, she did it. Wa Waugh was
this poor black community about fifteen miles outside of Montgomery.
It was there that Cornelia founded her first school, the
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Colored Institute, almost twenty years before she founded Mount Meg's.
Not one person in the whole community owned a foot
of land, and heavy crop mortgages were the burden of
every farmer. It became evident at once that pioneer work
was very much needed, homes were neglected, and the sacredness
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of family life was unknown to most of the people.
While there, Cornelia began getting more involved with local women's clubs,
the third thing that shaped her worldview. Cornelia never married,
had no kids, which was unusual for the time, but
she had a very, very full social life. She was
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part of seemingly endless organizations and in leadership positions of
many of them. Most notably, she became president of the
alab i am, a federation of Colored women's clubs, an
exclusive organization for black women focused on service. Their slogan
was lifting as we climb, but this idea that as
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you climb a ladder, even if you're at the top
of the ladder, those folks who were at the bottom
are still yours. They're still connected to you. That's doctor
Denise Davis May, Chair and professor of social work at
Alabama State University and an expert on these women's clubs.
The women of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs
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were typically second and third generation middle class women, even
in the eighteen nineties. I think when we talk about
the eighteen nineties and we talk about black women, particularly
in the South, we envision share cropping. We envision women
who are just out of enslavement and have a very
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particular image of what that might be. These women were educated.
They attended some of the established at the time, not
historically black colleges but now historically black colleges and universities.
They were married to professionals in some of their rights.
They were professional educators in theory. The Colored Institute was
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a school, but ultimately it was more than that. At
just twenty three, Cornelia was sent to law to essentially
fix the people there, their homes, their families, their perspectives,
their lives. And she took this role very seriously. She
went from house to house each week to make sure
that they were clean. She inspected children in the morning
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to make sure that they had neat hair and clean fingernails.
She dealt with family disputes. She pushed the men to
work and the women to stay home. I am pleased
with the progress the people have made. Many now own
their own homes, and eight and ten persons are no
longer content to sleep in one room log cabins. I
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know what I'm saying when I state that sacred family
ties are respected and appreciated as never before in this
immediate region. Years later, in a newspaper interview, she stated
proudly that a large part of her success could be
attributed to one particular tactic, shaming people. There were some
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class based issues in terms of how they serve the community.
That is definitely correct. As a black woman in Alabama,
Cornelia was among the most disadvantaged demographic in the country,
the bottom of the barrel. And yet among black women
there were differences. Some had more power than others, and
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at the top of that list was Cornelia. Her work
at the Colored Institute turned her into somewhat of a celebrity.
There are all these articles from the late at hundreds
of her traveling the country, giving speeches and raising money
and hobnobbing with people whose names we know today, Harriet Tubman,
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Frederick Douglas, Ida B. Wells. There she is in eighteen
ninety six, being named president of the National Federation of
Afro American Women. In nineteen oh four at the World's Fair,
traveling the country to speak in Boston and Chicago. In
New York, giving speeches to path rooms, she was the
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subject of a long fawning profile in The Washington Post
in nineteen oh five, framed as the good, classy Negro
woman helping the poor ones. The Montgomery Advertiser described her
as the Booker Washington among colored women. Cornelia was complicated.
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On one hand, she was responsible for so much good
At the Colored Institute and later at Mount Meg's. Cornelia
provided a level of attention, assistance, and opportunity to so
many Black people when they never could have afforded otherwise.
She really did care about the community, and still she
looked down on them. Like her mentor book or t
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Cornelia seemed to believe that true social and legal equality
was an arm's reach of black people. All we had
to do was be a little better, a little more useful,
make a little more money, work a little harder, and
white people might just come around. In one speech, Cornelia
told the audience, we cannot be respected till we learn
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to do something. White men will not respect you. I
would not respect you myself. And unsurprisingly, Cornelia's willingness to
be critical of black people gained the admiration of more
than a few white ones. After all, Cornelia had the
tendency to attribute the black community struggles to their own
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failings rather than persistent, systemic and justice and centuries of
slavery that had ended just a few years prior, a
child of a slave basically preaching about bootstraps. The question
is did Cornelia really believe the stuff that she was
saying publicly. I'm inclined to believe that she did, But
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it's also possible she was playing politics, saying the things
that white people wanted to hear the only way she
could get what she wanted from the people who were
really in power. So these women understood the necessity to
work in community with the women who had the ear
of people who were in charge. Right, that's not very
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different than today. You need to be able to establish
relationships with the folks who are sitting at the dinner
table with the man who signs the probate for your land.
Cornelia has been running the Colored Institute for more than
ten years. When she gets interested in a new project,
she and her club want to help build a juvenile reformatory.
(21:09):
When I was researching Cornelia, there was one thing that
kept nagging at me. Here she was president of her
woman's club, principle of a growing school, adored by the community,
and often outspokenly critical of black youth. So why suddenly
start this school for quote unquote juvenile delinquents. Then I
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stumbled upon a document in old files from the nineteen sixties,
and it began to answer this question. At the turn
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of the twentieth century, four boys are arrested in Birmingham
accused of breaking and entering. One of them is just
eleven years old. Now, had they been white, they would
have gone to the reformatory for white boys, which had
been created after a white women's club champion the project.
But these four boys were black, which meant that there
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was no place for them to go except adult prison.
This is what inspires Cornelia's Club to build a juvenile
reformatory for black children. Then the state of Alabama, black
youngsters as early as aged ten ten years old had
been sentenced to male prisons, and the women concluded that
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if they were going to save an endangered population, which
was the young black males, they needed to open a
reformatory where young black males could be sent. By the
early nineteen hundreds, reform schools were part of a growing
movement across the United States and the world, as progressives
began to talk about the concept of children as a
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class of people in their own right. That's significant because
before the twentieth century, there weren't many formal legal distinctions
between adults and miners, and that persisted for black kids.
Black children in particular, were typically treated just like adults.
They were sentenced just like adults, they were put in
the same prisons with adults, and they were executed just
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like adults. That's Barry Feld, Professor emeritus at the University
of Minnesota Law School. As the United States at the
end of the nineteenth century was switching, shifting from a
primarily agricultural economy to a more industrial economy, and so
the progressive reformers had adopted a new conception of childhood
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as vulnerable and innocent. Well, at least some children were
seen as vulnerable and innocent, but not Black kids, who
study show society has always perceived as older and more
adult than they are. So Cornelia School was meant to
fill a long overlooked void in the care of black
Alabamian children. She gave a statement to the local paper
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saying that she and the members of the women's clubs
were building a school for so called juvenile delinquents, or,
as she put it, the unfortunate and floating young element
of our race, who, from lack of good home training,
find their way to jail penitentiaries and convict minds. It
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is conceded that children thrown among hardened criminals are made
worse in character by unwholesome environments, and in the end
proved themselves criminals rather than useful citizens. Black reformatories weren't
necessarily popular, but they had support across a white spectrum.
In nineteen o seven, my local paper, The Atlanta Constitution,
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supported a reformatory for black kids in the most racist
way possible. Quote. The necessity for such a specific treatment
is even more powerfully applicable to the Negro than to
the white race. The Negro youth is essentially racially of
a roving, irresponsible, impulsive, susceptible temperament. The race itself is
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but half child. Cornelia and the club ladies raised two
thousand dollars on their own to build their own school,
and when they couldn't get anyone to give them land,
Cornelia already had a solution. She owned four hundred acres
outside of Montgomery, a feat for any black person, let
alone a black woman, and she agreed to sell twenty
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acres to the club for less money than she paid
for it. On August eighteenth, nineteen oh seven, the Alabama
Industrial School for Negro Boys opened, but there wasn't much
press about it, at least that I could find, except
in a magazine called The Colored American, in an article
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called child Saving in Alabama. The magazine praised the school,
and this article has a picture of the school. It's
the only one we have from that era. In it,
you can see about twenty black boys standing stoically in
two rows, their faces shadowed by the sun. Behind them
is a white house, the same white building I saw
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when I went to Mount Megs, And in front of
them is a field of cotton. The following year, Cornelia
gave a proud assessment at a conference at Tuskegee. The
school has twenty two boys and no bolts or bars.
The boys work in the garden. Cornelia saw the school
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as a place that gives black children a chance at opportunity,
a much better and even life saving alternative to prison.
But there was a problem money. Despite the good things
about Mount Megs, even at the start, it was struggling financially.
Cornelia had a lot of money for a black woman
at the time, but again it's all relative. She didn't
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have money to keep an entire school afloat, and while
the clubs spent a lot of time raising funds, it
was simply not enough to keep the school going. But
Cornelia was determined to keep Mount Mag's open, So just
three years after the doors opened, Cornelia began lobbying the
state to take over Mount Mag's. I besieged every member
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of the legislature. It was funny. I would send in
from the lobby for a member. Of course he would
not know, but what it was a white woman asking
for him, and he would come out. Then he would
ask what I wanted, and I would say, we have
a bill prepared to make an appropriation for a reformatory
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for Negro children, and I want you to vote for it.
And I wouldn't let him go until I had his
promise to vote for it if it came up. This
was where Cornelia's connections came in handy, especially her connections
to white people. She lobbied judges, legislators, and other prominent
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white men in the community to support the state's takeover,
and not just privately but publicly, and many of them
did it. One headline read juvenile Reformatory at Mount Megs
is endorsed by many prominent white men. In fact, the
fact that Cornelia had connections with powerful white people was
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the only reason she was able to build Mount Megs
at all. And Alabama, even the most successful black people
needed white approval to do almost anything. Even with the
money raised within the black community, they still needed the
support and approval of the institutions beyond the black community.
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In nineteen eleven, the state of Alabama officially took over
Mount Megs. This may have been the biggest mistake of
Cornelia Bowen's life. The institution was able to stay alive,
but at an unimaginable cost, and Mount Meg's was irreparably changed.
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There's this quote from one of those white men who
supported the state takeover, a quote that I think about
a lot now. It foreshadowed the future of the institution.
It says, I've always felt that when you put a
young boy in jail or in the penitentiary for any
length of time, you went a long way toward killing
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a human soul. Oh done back on meds all librate. Cornelia,
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it seems, had only good intentions. The school needed funding
that she and her club in her community couldn't sustainably provide.
But almost immediately after the state took over, there were
early side that the way that they thought about the
black kids in their care was drastically different than Cornelia's outlook.
The first change, renaming the school the Alabama Industrial School
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for Negro Boys, would now be called the Alabama Reform
School for Juvenile Negro Lawbreakers. Cornelia remained intimately involved with
Mount Meg's for years as a trustee until she died
in nineteen thirty four, but the real power always remained
with the white male board members, men with connections wealth
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and land, men who saw Mount Meg's as a way
to generate money, not rehabilitate children. And this is an
important thing to note about Mount Meg's. Sure, the state
agreed to take it over, but that didn't mean they
were going to fund it, not sufficiently anyway, not like
they funded the white schools. We mentioned this last episode.
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When the white schools needed something, they'd asked the state
for money. But when Mount Megs needed something schoolbooks, medicine, teachers,
working toilets, clean water, the state mostly expected them to
pick enough cotton to get it themselves. I wondered if
Cornelian knew what she was doing handing the school over
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to the state of Alabama, if she expected Mount Megs's
fall to be so swift, So to expect that, as
Miss Bowen and other individuals begin to retire out and
transition out, you now have the state system responsible for
the well being of these children, and to expect that
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they would do so respectfully and in love. In Jim Crow,
Alabama is cotta insane given the context of where we're located,
and how might the women who made Mount Meg's possible
have felt about what this school became. They created the
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Mountain Meg's a formatory for colored boys because they didn't
trust anybody else to do it, And I would think
that they would not be surprised. I think they would
be upset that we allowed it to happen. I think
they would be upset that we allowed it to happen.
When I was reading or talking to people about their
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personal experiences at Mount Meg's, I had to keep reminding
myself that it was a school, because by the time Lonnie, Mary, Jenny,
and Johnny were all incarcerated there in the nineteen sixties,
Mount Meg's had become something very different. What more than
one person called a slave camp. But it hadn't always
been like that, not that bad. Even after the school
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was handed over to the state, it maintained some level
of humanity, at least at the beginning. So let's go
back to nineteen eighteen, when, at the age of twelve,
Satchel Page was arrested and sentenced to six years at
Mount Meg's. The charge boys, who at the time were
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exemplary fellow students, were trusted to transport him fifteen miles
in a wagon to Mount Meg's. Here's author Donald Spivey
again he sees the plays. It is clear that this
is not what he thought it would be. He was
looking for some plays, probably with bars and all of
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that sort of right, and there were no bars, no bars,
no cells. Instead, Satchel found a meal, clothes and a
pair of shoes waiting for him, hand me downs that
to him looked brand new. The boys had to adhere
to a strict routine sunrise, wake up, morning, prayer, breakfast,
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and then chores like feeding the livestock or mending the buildings,
or cleaning the schoolroom or harvesting the crops. The rest
of the time, the boys works affected to be in
the schoolroom, learning arithmetic, reading and writing a classic book,
or t industrial education. This model actually worked in the
case of Satchell Page. Perhaps that's because during Satchell's time there,
(34:20):
Cornelia Bowen's influence still permeated the school. She didn't run
the school anymore, but she remained on the board and
was still closely involved, and Satchell became one of Cornelia's
favorite students. Good behavior earned Satchel the privilege of joining
the Mount Meg's baseball team, a group of boys with
a special place in Cornelia's heart. She's the one who
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believes that baseball sports can be a reclamation project, so
this is a reward for the boys, but it's also
a teaching tool to get them to understand sportsmanship, to
understand working together, and it's a process that she uses
quite effectively. Satchel Page, the legendary Picture, learned how to
(35:06):
play baseball at Mount Meg's. Playing baseball open Satchel's world.
The team traveled to play games sometimes, and there were
big picnics where Mount Meg's students and the surrounding community
would come out to cheer them on. And when Satchel
(35:26):
left Mount Meg's five years later, the story is that
he had been transformed for the better. And he came
out with a nice pair of shoes and clothes. And
I forget how much they gave you back, Dan a
couple of dollars. And it knew how to pitch, he said,
If training five years of my life to learn how
to pitch like this, it was well worth it. The
(35:48):
year Satchel arrives, Mount Meg's seems to be a success story.
The reformatory is doing splendid work, said one nineteen eighteen article.
Substantial improvement has been made, said another. Cornelia in the
club are thinking of starting a school just like for girls.
But in the end there were so few Satchel pages,
(36:11):
it seems way likelier that most of the kids were
Lonnies and Jennies and Johnnies and Mary's. By nineteen twenty,
everything at Mount Meg's was being rationed, from the tools
to the food, and even with money from the state,
the Federation of Women still had to fundraise to cover
infrastructure and faculty salaries. Farming, which was once just part
(36:34):
of the industrial education model, quickly became the school's primary
source of income. That made the boy's labor essential to
keeping the school in operation. In nineteen twenty, the governor
of Alabama wrote to the school informing them that he
was prepared to parole some of the boys. The school's
assistant superintendent, JR. Wingfield responded, discouraging the governor from releasing
(36:58):
five of the boys because he needed them to operate
the machinery. He wrote, I would like for the Governor
to withhold his actions until we can train a boy
to take each of these places. I hope that you
will understand my position clearly. I do not object to
parolling the boys. They might wait just a little while
till we can get their places filled, rather than disarrange
(37:21):
and inconvenience everything. This was what Mount Meg's became, a
labor camp for black children and yet another way for
black work to generate white money. The state told students
they were there for their own improvement, but it was
glaringly clear that they were there for the benefit of Alabama.
With the state's dependence on the unpaid labor of its
(37:43):
black child prisoners, Mount Meg's mission shifted from rehabilitating its
words to exploiting them. But the violence at Mount Meg's
was often met with resistance. Starting even in Sachil Pages
Day notices started appearing in the local newspapers, ratcheting up
through the fifties and sixties. They said things like six
(38:05):
armed Negroes escaped Mount Meg's Industrial School, or police seeking
escape artist in Burglary running away was a regular part
of the Mount Meg's experience. On the next episode of Unreformed,
we hear about these escapes and we look at one
in particular and its harrowing consequences. Unreformed, The Story of
(38:31):
the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children is a production
of School of Humans and iHeartMedia. This episode was written
by me Josie Deffie, Rice and Taylor von Leslie. Our
script supervisors Florence Burrow Adams, and our producer is Gabby Watts,
who had additional writing and production support from Sherry Scott.
Executive producers of Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crowley, Brandon Barr, Matt
Arnette and Knee. Sound design and mixes by Jesse Niswanger.
(38:54):
Music is by Ben Soli. Additional recordings our courtesy of
the Alabama Center for Traditional Culture. The song featured in
this episode is Jesus My Only Friend by Mary le Bandolf.
Cornelia Bowen was voiced by ALBI Award Special Things to
the Alabima Department of Archives and History, Michael Harriet, Floyd Hall,
Kevin Nutt, Van Newkirk, and all of the survivors of
Mount Meg's willing to share their stories. If you are
(39:15):
someone you know attendant Mount Megs and would like to
be in contact, please email Mountmegs Podcast at gmail dot com.
That's Mt M e i G S Podcast at gmail
dot com. School of Humans
School of Humans. The nineteen forty eight World Series signaled
a new era for Major League Baseball. The Boston Braves
faced off against the Cleveland Indians and the first Championship
to be nationally televised, and in Game five, Leroy Satchel
Page took the mound, the first ever player from the
(00:30):
Negro Leagues to pitch in a World Series. Here's the
moment he walked onto the field, and here's the announcement
about the appearance of sache past the Hall of Famer
remains one of baseball's most celebrated pitchers. Page's pitching remained bold, versatile,
(00:54):
and unpredictable as he was pitching for the Indians in
that historic game some seventy four years ago. In the
nineteen forty eight game, his fast pitching was on full display.
The pitch swung on and I don't think the fast.
Each man who went up to bat against him dreaded it.
(01:16):
And he had stamina. He was eighteen when he began
playing baseball professionally and didn't hang up his hat until
he was almost sixty. Page started in the Negro National
Leagues in the mid nineteen twenties and eventually became the
first black pitcher to play in the American League. All
the best players of the time said Paige was the greatest.
(01:37):
Joe DiMaggio called him the best I've ever faced and
the fastest. Plus the man had more personality than the
rest of the league combined. Here he is in nineteen
fifty eight talking to a reporter in Miami. While he
was playing. It became a running joke that Sachel would
never disclose his age. The truth I don't think of
but a very few people in the United States, nor
my age, of where I come from me because I've
(01:59):
been playing him since I was a kid. I never
had a job. But still this isn't one hundred years
run everybody on feet. This he did played ball with
miss albums one hundred, some of them eighty five and ninety.
Page died in nineteen eighty two. He's buried in Kansas City, Missouri,
home of his beloved Negro League Monarchs. The Page's roots
were further south. He grew up in a poor family,
(02:21):
the sixth of twelve children, in a segregated neighborhood called
Down the Bay in Mobile, Alabama. Nat You at least
stands a home in Kansas City. He visits down a
mobile as that said one time that I just live
wearing pitcher. Both Satchel Page's birthplace and resting place claim
(02:41):
him mobile in Kansas City have streets, schools, and scholarships
in his name, but most people don't know that there
was a third place that changed Sachel Page's life. In fact,
if it wasn't for one woman, Cornelia Bowen of Tuskegee, Alabama,
the great Sachel Page might never have been because he
(03:01):
was on a trail to He's gonna either get end
up being lands dead. This is Donald Spivey, an American
historian and distinguished professor at University of Miami. He wrote
the book If You Were Only White, The Life of
Leroy Satchel Page was trouble youth in appollance of black people.
He was hardheaded. He was just a difficult, difficult child,
(03:25):
and back then, and particularly in the South, they would
tell you go and fetch me a switch. He heard
that so often that that could have been his other
nickname rather than Satchell. He could have been go and
fetch me a switch. That hardheadedness got young Satchel into
trouble outside of the home too. By twelve, he was
known in his neighborhood for stealing, and it's rumored that
(03:46):
his nickname Satchel came from an incident where he was
caught stealing a bag and he skipped school. Even back then,
though Satchell could throw throw hard, he'd hunt with just
a pile of rocks in mobile train tracks separated down
the bay from the nearby white neighborhood, and sometimes young
(04:07):
white boys and black boys would meet along the tracks
to battle. They had a ongoing rock bottles with the
Oakdale School, which was a white school across the railroad tracks,
and white students threw rocks up and they threw rocks
back at them, and this became the racial rock wars.
(04:30):
One bottle got out of hand, page trying to hold
off this forward coming mob of white started throwing rocks
with bad intentions, and you know, with his ability to throw,
he was hitting people in the head. And he's lucky
he didn't lock somebody's eye out, and the white Yonsters
luckily didn't complain to their parents about it. Community could
(04:53):
have been wiped out down the bay, might have been spared,
but Sachel's prowess with rocks and his reputation for sticky
fingers soon caught the attention of Mobile's police chief Frank Crenshaw,
a man whose peacekeeping philosophy included the belief that all
black boys between seven and sixteen should be sent to
(05:16):
a detention facility for any minor crime. He said as
much in a letter he wrote to the founder of
Tuskegee University, Booker T. Washington, about quote unquote the juvenile delinquents,
Delinquents like Satchel Paige, who, on July twenty fourth, nineteen eighteen,
at the age of twelve, was sent to the Alabama
(05:38):
Reform School for Juvenile Negro lawbreakers in Mount Meg's, Alabama.
He would be there for six years or until his
eighteenth birthday, whichever came first. He thinks it's the worst
day of his life, that he's being sentenced to school,
he's being sentenced to prison, so he doesn't realize that
(05:59):
in fact, this saved his life. What we know now
is that the school, later known as the alabam An
Industrial School for Negro Children, became a place where thousands
of Alabama's black boys and girls were subjected to abuse
and torture in the name of rehabilitation and reform. But
at its inception, the school was something else, entirely a
(06:23):
safe haven for black children who would have otherwise been
thrown into adult prison. I'm Josie Duffie Rice, and this
is Unreformed the story of the Alabama Industrial School for
Negro Children. Episode three, Cornelia's Dream. Cornelia Bowen was the
(07:09):
founder of Mount Megs. And in order to understand what
Mount Meg's became, you have to understand how it started
Cornelia's vision, and really you have to understand this strange,
remarkable life. She lived a life that was only possible
during that one narrow sliver of history as slavery ended
(07:30):
in the reconstruction era began. Of myself and the war
I have done, there is not a great deal to say.
I was born at Tuskegee, Alabama. My mother lived the
greater part of her life at this place as the
slave of Colonel William Bowen. The birthplace of my mother
was Baltimore, Maryland. She was taught to read by her
(07:52):
master's daughter in Baltimore and was never forbidden to read
by those who owned her in Alabama. That's Alabama born
art historian and professor Alvia Wardlaw. You'll hear her reading
Cornelia's words throughout this episode. Cornelia was born on the
Bowen Plantation in Macon County, Alabama, just east of Montgomery.
(08:16):
It's hard to know exactly when. Some say she was
born in eighteen fifty eight, Others think that it was
more like eighteen sixty four, and after going down a
rabbit hole of census records, I'm inclined to agree. This,
of course, is one of the casualties of being black
during slavery and in the years after, records of your
life were sparse and inconsistent. We don't know anything about
(08:39):
Cornelia's father. Some think he must have been a slave owner,
but there is really no way for us to know.
But what we do know is that her mother, Sophia,
was enslaved. Sophia worked as a seamstress in the home
of her white slave owner, and later Cornelia recalled that
her mother wasn't even allowed to talk to the people
(09:00):
working in the fields. Another thing about Sophia she could read,
and later, when her three daughters were young, she taught
them to read too. On Sundays, with my sisters gathered
about her knees, we would sit for hours listening as
mother would read church hymns. These days were days of freedom,
(09:22):
as I do not remember and know nothing of those
of slavery. My mother always refrained from telling her children
frightful stories of the awful sufferings of the slave days.
So Cornelia was the child of an enslaved woman, and
her life turned out drastically different than her mother's. In
(09:43):
eighteen eighty one, the state appropriated two thousand dollars to
start a black college in Macon County. A white state
senator former Confederate, had pushed for the appropriation himself, hoping
it would get him black votes. This was during the
post Reconstruction period where black people had some voting rights
before they were taken away again, and this was more
(10:05):
evidence of what the right to vote meant, at least
some political power, opportunity, and sometimes education. Booker T. Washington
himself was the person tasked with building this new college
in Macon County. He ended up purchasing the Bowen plantation
where Cornelia was born, the same plantation where her mother
(10:26):
was enslaved. On it, he built the institute now known
as Tuskegee University and historically black university that is renowned
to this day and in eighteen eighty five, Cornelia graduated
with honors in Tuskegee's first graduating class. To my class
that graduated in eighteen eighty five, the first one to graduate,
(10:50):
we proudly boast three Peabody Medals were awarded for excellence
in scholarship, and I was awarded one of the medals.
Think for a second about how remarkable this is. Here
was a black woman getting a college diploma on the
very same land her own mother had been a slave.
(11:11):
I don't know exactly what shaped Cornelia's outlook on the world.
Of course, we missed each other by about a hundred years.
But in her records you can see the three main
influences that shaped her politics and how she saw the world.
The first was her education, and the second was her mentor,
Booker T. Washington. Mister Washington himself took charge of our classes,
(11:36):
and I have always been very proud that I can
say that he was my teacher. If I have been
of any service to my people, I owe it all
to mister Washington, who impressed upon me those lessons which
led me to want to spend myself in the helping
of my people. Here's Booker T. In nineteen o eight,
(12:00):
reading an excerpt of a speech he gave in eighteen
ninety five. It was his most famous, called the Atlanta Compromise,
and this is the only known audio recording of his voice.
He did not train that in the first years of
All New Life. He began at the top because of
the fun it's hard to hear him, I know, not
great sound quality in the early nineteen hundreds, But what
(12:22):
he's basically saying is that black people were too focused
on political power and intellectual pursuits and not focused enough
on earning money or learning a trade, or in his words,
that the political convention or stump speaking had more attractions
than starting a dairy farm or truck garden. Note that
(12:42):
he's literally giving a speech when he says that. It's
a confusing thing to say when he only got his
university because the local state senator needed black votes. But
Booker t always had a shall we say, controversial perspective
on how black people should function in a post slavery
America where racism ran rampant and equality remained a pipe dream.
(13:06):
He was essentially the father of respectability politics. He spent
a lot of time focused on what black people were
doing wrong. He liked to tell black people to work
harder to get a hobby, and this perspective was a
foundation on which Booker T's philosophy of industrial education was built.
Part of the theory behind industrial education was respectability and
(13:28):
an attempt to make black people indispensable. People like Cornelia
and Booker T encourage black people to focus on trade work,
and basically what that meant was that even though black
folks had been freed from the practice of slavery, they
should still arm themselves with similar skills that they practiced
on the plantation. Cornelia was an early and avid supporter
(13:50):
of Booker T. Washington's philosophy of industrial education, So in
eighteen eighty eight, when Washington himself requested that Cornelia moved
to wa to teach, she did it. Wa Waugh was
this poor black community about fifteen miles outside of Montgomery.
It was there that Cornelia founded her first school, the
(14:13):
Colored Institute, almost twenty years before she founded Mount Meg's.
Not one person in the whole community owned a foot
of land, and heavy crop mortgages were the burden of
every farmer. It became evident at once that pioneer work
was very much needed, homes were neglected, and the sacredness
(14:36):
of family life was unknown to most of the people.
While there, Cornelia began getting more involved with local women's clubs,
the third thing that shaped her worldview. Cornelia never married,
had no kids, which was unusual for the time, but
she had a very, very full social life. She was
(14:57):
part of seemingly endless organizations and in leadership positions of
many of them. Most notably, she became president of the
alab i am, a federation of Colored women's clubs, an
exclusive organization for black women focused on service. Their slogan
was lifting as we climb, but this idea that as
(15:17):
you climb a ladder, even if you're at the top
of the ladder, those folks who were at the bottom
are still yours. They're still connected to you. That's doctor
Denise Davis May, Chair and professor of social work at
Alabama State University and an expert on these women's clubs.
The women of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs
(15:39):
were typically second and third generation middle class women, even
in the eighteen nineties. I think when we talk about
the eighteen nineties and we talk about black women, particularly
in the South, we envision share cropping. We envision women
who are just out of enslavement and have a very
(15:59):
particular image of what that might be. These women were educated.
They attended some of the established at the time, not
historically black colleges but now historically black colleges and universities.
They were married to professionals in some of their rights.
They were professional educators in theory. The Colored Institute was
(16:22):
a school, but ultimately it was more than that. At
just twenty three, Cornelia was sent to law to essentially
fix the people there, their homes, their families, their perspectives,
their lives. And she took this role very seriously. She
went from house to house each week to make sure
that they were clean. She inspected children in the morning
(16:45):
to make sure that they had neat hair and clean fingernails.
She dealt with family disputes. She pushed the men to
work and the women to stay home. I am pleased
with the progress the people have made. Many now own
their own homes, and eight and ten persons are no
longer content to sleep in one room log cabins. I
(17:08):
know what I'm saying when I state that sacred family
ties are respected and appreciated as never before in this
immediate region. Years later, in a newspaper interview, she stated
proudly that a large part of her success could be
attributed to one particular tactic, shaming people. There were some
(17:29):
class based issues in terms of how they serve the community.
That is definitely correct. As a black woman in Alabama,
Cornelia was among the most disadvantaged demographic in the country,
the bottom of the barrel. And yet among black women
there were differences. Some had more power than others, and
(17:52):
at the top of that list was Cornelia. Her work
at the Colored Institute turned her into somewhat of a celebrity.
There are all these articles from the late at hundreds
of her traveling the country, giving speeches and raising money
and hobnobbing with people whose names we know today, Harriet Tubman,
(18:14):
Frederick Douglas, Ida B. Wells. There she is in eighteen
ninety six, being named president of the National Federation of
Afro American Women. In nineteen oh four at the World's Fair,
traveling the country to speak in Boston and Chicago. In
New York, giving speeches to path rooms, she was the
(18:34):
subject of a long fawning profile in The Washington Post
in nineteen oh five, framed as the good, classy Negro
woman helping the poor ones. The Montgomery Advertiser described her
as the Booker Washington among colored women. Cornelia was complicated.
(18:55):
On one hand, she was responsible for so much good
At the Colored Institute and later at Mount Meg's. Cornelia
provided a level of attention, assistance, and opportunity to so
many Black people when they never could have afforded otherwise.
She really did care about the community, and still she
looked down on them. Like her mentor book or t
(19:18):
Cornelia seemed to believe that true social and legal equality
was an arm's reach of black people. All we had
to do was be a little better, a little more useful,
make a little more money, work a little harder, and
white people might just come around. In one speech, Cornelia
told the audience, we cannot be respected till we learn
(19:41):
to do something. White men will not respect you. I
would not respect you myself. And unsurprisingly, Cornelia's willingness to
be critical of black people gained the admiration of more
than a few white ones. After all, Cornelia had the
tendency to attribute the black community struggles to their own
(20:02):
failings rather than persistent, systemic and justice and centuries of
slavery that had ended just a few years prior, a
child of a slave basically preaching about bootstraps. The question
is did Cornelia really believe the stuff that she was
saying publicly. I'm inclined to believe that she did, But
(20:24):
it's also possible she was playing politics, saying the things
that white people wanted to hear the only way she
could get what she wanted from the people who were
really in power. So these women understood the necessity to
work in community with the women who had the ear
of people who were in charge. Right, that's not very
(20:46):
different than today. You need to be able to establish
relationships with the folks who are sitting at the dinner
table with the man who signs the probate for your land.
Cornelia has been running the Colored Institute for more than
ten years. When she gets interested in a new project,
she and her club want to help build a juvenile reformatory.
(21:09):
When I was researching Cornelia, there was one thing that
kept nagging at me. Here she was president of her
woman's club, principle of a growing school, adored by the community,
and often outspokenly critical of black youth. So why suddenly
start this school for quote unquote juvenile delinquents. Then I
(21:30):
stumbled upon a document in old files from the nineteen sixties,
and it began to answer this question. At the turn
(21:53):
of the twentieth century, four boys are arrested in Birmingham
accused of breaking and entering. One of them is just
eleven years old. Now, had they been white, they would
have gone to the reformatory for white boys, which had
been created after a white women's club champion the project.
But these four boys were black, which meant that there
(22:14):
was no place for them to go except adult prison.
This is what inspires Cornelia's Club to build a juvenile
reformatory for black children. Then the state of Alabama, black
youngsters as early as aged ten ten years old had
been sentenced to male prisons, and the women concluded that
(22:35):
if they were going to save an endangered population, which
was the young black males, they needed to open a
reformatory where young black males could be sent. By the
early nineteen hundreds, reform schools were part of a growing
movement across the United States and the world, as progressives
began to talk about the concept of children as a
(22:57):
class of people in their own right. That's significant because
before the twentieth century, there weren't many formal legal distinctions
between adults and miners, and that persisted for black kids.
Black children in particular, were typically treated just like adults.
They were sentenced just like adults, they were put in
the same prisons with adults, and they were executed just
(23:20):
like adults. That's Barry Feld, Professor emeritus at the University
of Minnesota Law School. As the United States at the
end of the nineteenth century was switching, shifting from a
primarily agricultural economy to a more industrial economy, and so
the progressive reformers had adopted a new conception of childhood
(23:43):
as vulnerable and innocent. Well, at least some children were
seen as vulnerable and innocent, but not Black kids, who
study show society has always perceived as older and more
adult than they are. So Cornelia School was meant to
fill a long overlooked void in the care of black
Alabamian children. She gave a statement to the local paper
(24:07):
saying that she and the members of the women's clubs
were building a school for so called juvenile delinquents, or,
as she put it, the unfortunate and floating young element
of our race, who, from lack of good home training,
find their way to jail penitentiaries and convict minds. It
(24:28):
is conceded that children thrown among hardened criminals are made
worse in character by unwholesome environments, and in the end
proved themselves criminals rather than useful citizens. Black reformatories weren't
necessarily popular, but they had support across a white spectrum.
In nineteen o seven, my local paper, The Atlanta Constitution,
(24:52):
supported a reformatory for black kids in the most racist
way possible. Quote. The necessity for such a specific treatment
is even more powerfully applicable to the Negro than to
the white race. The Negro youth is essentially racially of
a roving, irresponsible, impulsive, susceptible temperament. The race itself is
(25:13):
but half child. Cornelia and the club ladies raised two
thousand dollars on their own to build their own school,
and when they couldn't get anyone to give them land,
Cornelia already had a solution. She owned four hundred acres
outside of Montgomery, a feat for any black person, let
alone a black woman, and she agreed to sell twenty
(25:35):
acres to the club for less money than she paid
for it. On August eighteenth, nineteen oh seven, the Alabama
Industrial School for Negro Boys opened, but there wasn't much
press about it, at least that I could find, except
in a magazine called The Colored American, in an article
(25:58):
called child Saving in Alabama. The magazine praised the school,
and this article has a picture of the school. It's
the only one we have from that era. In it,
you can see about twenty black boys standing stoically in
two rows, their faces shadowed by the sun. Behind them
is a white house, the same white building I saw
(26:21):
when I went to Mount Megs, And in front of
them is a field of cotton. The following year, Cornelia
gave a proud assessment at a conference at Tuskegee. The
school has twenty two boys and no bolts or bars.
The boys work in the garden. Cornelia saw the school
(26:44):
as a place that gives black children a chance at opportunity,
a much better and even life saving alternative to prison.
But there was a problem money. Despite the good things
about Mount Megs, even at the start, it was struggling financially.
Cornelia had a lot of money for a black woman
at the time, but again it's all relative. She didn't
(27:07):
have money to keep an entire school afloat, and while
the clubs spent a lot of time raising funds, it
was simply not enough to keep the school going. But
Cornelia was determined to keep Mount Mag's open, So just
three years after the doors opened, Cornelia began lobbying the
state to take over Mount Mag's. I besieged every member
(27:30):
of the legislature. It was funny. I would send in
from the lobby for a member. Of course he would
not know, but what it was a white woman asking
for him, and he would come out. Then he would
ask what I wanted, and I would say, we have
a bill prepared to make an appropriation for a reformatory
(27:50):
for Negro children, and I want you to vote for it.
And I wouldn't let him go until I had his
promise to vote for it if it came up. This
was where Cornelia's connections came in handy, especially her connections
to white people. She lobbied judges, legislators, and other prominent
(28:11):
white men in the community to support the state's takeover,
and not just privately but publicly, and many of them
did it. One headline read juvenile Reformatory at Mount Megs
is endorsed by many prominent white men. In fact, the
fact that Cornelia had connections with powerful white people was
(28:31):
the only reason she was able to build Mount Megs
at all. And Alabama, even the most successful black people
needed white approval to do almost anything. Even with the
money raised within the black community, they still needed the
support and approval of the institutions beyond the black community.
(28:52):
In nineteen eleven, the state of Alabama officially took over
Mount Megs. This may have been the biggest mistake of
Cornelia Bowen's life. The institution was able to stay alive,
but at an unimaginable cost, and Mount Meg's was irreparably changed.
(29:12):
There's this quote from one of those white men who
supported the state takeover, a quote that I think about
a lot now. It foreshadowed the future of the institution.
It says, I've always felt that when you put a
young boy in jail or in the penitentiary for any
length of time, you went a long way toward killing
(29:33):
a human soul. Oh done back on meds all librate. Cornelia,
(29:54):
it seems, had only good intentions. The school needed funding
that she and her club in her community couldn't sustainably provide.
But almost immediately after the state took over, there were
early side that the way that they thought about the
black kids in their care was drastically different than Cornelia's outlook.
The first change, renaming the school the Alabama Industrial School
(30:17):
for Negro Boys, would now be called the Alabama Reform
School for Juvenile Negro Lawbreakers. Cornelia remained intimately involved with
Mount Meg's for years as a trustee until she died
in nineteen thirty four, but the real power always remained
with the white male board members, men with connections wealth
(30:39):
and land, men who saw Mount Meg's as a way
to generate money, not rehabilitate children. And this is an
important thing to note about Mount Meg's. Sure, the state
agreed to take it over, but that didn't mean they
were going to fund it, not sufficiently anyway, not like
they funded the white schools. We mentioned this last episode.
(31:02):
When the white schools needed something, they'd asked the state
for money. But when Mount Megs needed something schoolbooks, medicine, teachers,
working toilets, clean water, the state mostly expected them to
pick enough cotton to get it themselves. I wondered if
Cornelian knew what she was doing handing the school over
(31:24):
to the state of Alabama, if she expected Mount Megs's
fall to be so swift, So to expect that, as
Miss Bowen and other individuals begin to retire out and
transition out, you now have the state system responsible for
the well being of these children, and to expect that
(31:45):
they would do so respectfully and in love. In Jim Crow,
Alabama is cotta insane given the context of where we're located,
and how might the women who made Mount Meg's possible
have felt about what this school became. They created the
(32:05):
Mountain Meg's a formatory for colored boys because they didn't
trust anybody else to do it, And I would think
that they would not be surprised. I think they would
be upset that we allowed it to happen. I think
they would be upset that we allowed it to happen.
When I was reading or talking to people about their
(32:26):
personal experiences at Mount Meg's, I had to keep reminding
myself that it was a school, because by the time Lonnie, Mary, Jenny,
and Johnny were all incarcerated there in the nineteen sixties,
Mount Meg's had become something very different. What more than
one person called a slave camp. But it hadn't always
been like that, not that bad. Even after the school
(32:48):
was handed over to the state, it maintained some level
of humanity, at least at the beginning. So let's go
back to nineteen eighteen, when, at the age of twelve,
Satchel Page was arrested and sentenced to six years at
Mount Meg's. The charge boys, who at the time were
(33:10):
exemplary fellow students, were trusted to transport him fifteen miles
in a wagon to Mount Meg's. Here's author Donald Spivey
again he sees the plays. It is clear that this
is not what he thought it would be. He was
looking for some plays, probably with bars and all of
(33:32):
that sort of right, and there were no bars, no bars,
no cells. Instead, Satchel found a meal, clothes and a
pair of shoes waiting for him, hand me downs that
to him looked brand new. The boys had to adhere
to a strict routine sunrise, wake up, morning, prayer, breakfast,
(33:56):
and then chores like feeding the livestock or mending the buildings,
or cleaning the schoolroom or harvesting the crops. The rest
of the time, the boys works affected to be in
the schoolroom, learning arithmetic, reading and writing a classic book,
or t industrial education. This model actually worked in the
case of Satchell Page. Perhaps that's because during Satchell's time there,
(34:20):
Cornelia Bowen's influence still permeated the school. She didn't run
the school anymore, but she remained on the board and
was still closely involved, and Satchell became one of Cornelia's
favorite students. Good behavior earned Satchel the privilege of joining
the Mount Meg's baseball team, a group of boys with
a special place in Cornelia's heart. She's the one who
(34:42):
believes that baseball sports can be a reclamation project, so
this is a reward for the boys, but it's also
a teaching tool to get them to understand sportsmanship, to
understand working together, and it's a process that she uses
quite effectively. Satchel Page, the legendary Picture, learned how to
(35:06):
play baseball at Mount Meg's. Playing baseball open Satchel's world.
The team traveled to play games sometimes, and there were
big picnics where Mount Meg's students and the surrounding community
would come out to cheer them on. And when Satchel
(35:26):
left Mount Meg's five years later, the story is that
he had been transformed for the better. And he came
out with a nice pair of shoes and clothes. And
I forget how much they gave you back, Dan a
couple of dollars. And it knew how to pitch, he said,
If training five years of my life to learn how
to pitch like this, it was well worth it. The
(35:48):
year Satchel arrives, Mount Meg's seems to be a success story.
The reformatory is doing splendid work, said one nineteen eighteen article.
Substantial improvement has been made, said another. Cornelia in the
club are thinking of starting a school just like for girls.
But in the end there were so few Satchel pages,
(36:11):
it seems way likelier that most of the kids were
Lonnies and Jennies and Johnnies and Mary's. By nineteen twenty,
everything at Mount Meg's was being rationed, from the tools
to the food, and even with money from the state,
the Federation of Women still had to fundraise to cover
infrastructure and faculty salaries. Farming, which was once just part
(36:34):
of the industrial education model, quickly became the school's primary
source of income. That made the boy's labor essential to
keeping the school in operation. In nineteen twenty, the governor
of Alabama wrote to the school informing them that he
was prepared to parole some of the boys. The school's
assistant superintendent, JR. Wingfield responded, discouraging the governor from releasing
(36:58):
five of the boys because he needed them to operate
the machinery. He wrote, I would like for the Governor
to withhold his actions until we can train a boy
to take each of these places. I hope that you
will understand my position clearly. I do not object to
parolling the boys. They might wait just a little while
till we can get their places filled, rather than disarrange
(37:21):
and inconvenience everything. This was what Mount Meg's became, a
labor camp for black children and yet another way for
black work to generate white money. The state told students
they were there for their own improvement, but it was
glaringly clear that they were there for the benefit of Alabama.
With the state's dependence on the unpaid labor of its
(37:43):
black child prisoners, Mount Meg's mission shifted from rehabilitating its
words to exploiting them. But the violence at Mount Meg's
was often met with resistance. Starting even in Sachil Pages
Day notices started appearing in the local newspapers, ratcheting up
through the fifties and sixties. They said things like six
(38:05):
armed Negroes escaped Mount Meg's Industrial School, or police seeking
escape artist in Burglary running away was a regular part
of the Mount Meg's experience. On the next episode of Unreformed,
we hear about these escapes and we look at one
in particular and its harrowing consequences. Unreformed, The Story of
(38:31):
the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children is a production
of School of Humans and iHeartMedia. This episode was written
by me Josie Deffie, Rice and Taylor von Leslie. Our
script supervisors Florence Burrow Adams, and our producer is Gabby Watts,
who had additional writing and production support from Sherry Scott.
Executive producers of Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crowley, Brandon Barr, Matt
Arnette and Knee. Sound design and mixes by Jesse Niswanger.
(38:54):
Music is by Ben Soli. Additional recordings our courtesy of
the Alabama Center for Traditional Culture. The song featured in
this episode is Jesus My Only Friend by Mary le Bandolf.
Cornelia Bowen was voiced by ALBI Award Special Things to
the Alabima Department of Archives and History, Michael Harriet, Floyd Hall,
Kevin Nutt, Van Newkirk, and all of the survivors of
Mount Meg's willing to share their stories. If you are
(39:15):
someone you know attendant Mount Megs and would like to
be in contact, please email Mountmegs Podcast at gmail dot com.
That's Mt M e i G S Podcast at gmail
dot com. School of Humans
Host
Josie Duffy Rice
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