Introducing: Unreformed: the Story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
In nineteen sixty five, black girls dressed in oversized military
fatigues were picked up by the police in Montgomery, Alabama.
I was tired and scared and just didn't want to
take it anymore. The girls had run away from a
reform school called the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children,

(00:23):
a place known as Mount Meg's, and they were determined
to tell someone about the abuse they'd suffered there. Picture
the worst environment for children that you possibly can I
believe Mount made for pattern after sleep. It was a
penal columny for children. That's exactly what it was. I
didn't understand why I had to go through what I

(00:44):
was going through, and for what he tells us, there
is no escaped in them. One of the most violent
versions that you would it would have and those character
jud feeling in mont major reform jury. Mount Meg's was
founded by the dot or of a slave as a
safe haven for black children, but by the nineteen sixties

(01:05):
it had turned into a nightmare. I'm writer and reporter
Josie Duffie Rice, and for the past year I've been
investigating what was happening at Mount Meg's in the nineteen sixties,
at the height of the civil rights movement in the
Deep South. And this is the story of how this

(01:28):
reform school derailed the lives of thousands of black children
in Alabama and what happened after those five girls found
someone who was willing to blow the whistle. From I
Heeart Media and School of Humans comes a new podcast, Unreformed,
the story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children.

(01:51):
No one have never been a Toby two show room
at me. Listen to Unreformed on the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast us Becoming January,
eight years m