Speaker 1: School of Humans. This episode discusses historical events that include
Speaker 1: physical and sexual abuse against children. Like the rest of
Speaker 1: the South, Alabama is a study in contradictions, a region
Speaker 1: known for both warm hospitality and gross and justice, swelling
Speaker 1: with pride and stricken by conscience. It's a tangle of racial, economic,
Speaker 1: and geographic disparities. Lots of America can be like this, sure,
Speaker 1: but Alabama's complication is legendary. On one hand, the state
Speaker 1: is deeply conservative, teaming with good old boys and Confederate flags.
Speaker 1: While most of the nation is celebrating the Martin Luther
Speaker 1: King Holiday each January, Alabama celebrates King Lee Day instead,
Speaker 1: a joint observation of Martin Luther King and Robert E. Lee.
Speaker 1: So you'd be forgiven for thinking that a state with
Speaker 1: this much of a racist history would be pretty white.
Speaker 1: But Alabama is not a white state. I say this
Speaker 1: as a Black Southerner myself, For me and my family
Speaker 1: and over half of black people in America, the South
Speaker 1: is home Over a quarter of Alabama's residents are black,
Speaker 1: almost twice the national average, and Alabama has the fifth
Speaker 1: highest black population of any state in the country. In
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties, the state's black population was even larger,
Speaker 1: but you wouldn't have known that looking at the crowd
Speaker 1: that surrounded Alabama's capital on January fourteenth, nineteen sixty three,
Speaker 1: to see George Wallace sworn in as governor after an
Speaker 1: unsuccessful run as a moderate in nineteen fifty eight. Wallace
Speaker 1: triumphed four years later, in part by promising never to
Speaker 1: integrate the state. It was during this inauguration speech that
Speaker 1: Wallace made a defining statement of the era. Bag White
Speaker 1: people have maintained power in Alabama, not just back then,
Speaker 1: but today as well, thanks to the law. It's easy
Speaker 1: to think of the law as being an objectively moral force,
Speaker 1: one that is overwhelmingly fair and equal. But the law
Speaker 1: isn't objective, nor is justice blind, and the rule of
Speaker 1: law is not about fairness or consistency. It's about power.
Speaker 1: The law mutates and remolds itself to serve those who
Speaker 1: enforce it, who make it, and who benefit from it.
Speaker 1: Everyone else is at its mercy, and no one knows
Speaker 1: that more than black people in Alabama. I say that
Speaker 1: to remind you that the children were talking about in
Speaker 1: this po podcast were technically legally criminals. The law had
Speaker 1: made that determination and so that's what they were, juvenile delinquents,
Speaker 1: Negro lawbreakers. Never mind that the laws that they were
Speaker 1: breaking were laws designed for them to break, implemented so
Speaker 1: that the state could deem them criminals. These were children,
Speaker 1: often as young as ten or eleven years old, suffering
Speaker 1: trauma from being separated from their loved ones, taken from
Speaker 1: their families and handed over to the state. They were children,
Speaker 1: but to the state of Alabama, they were criminals all
Speaker 1: the same. That is the Alabama that Lonnie Holly, Jenny Knox,
Speaker 1: Johnny Bodley, and Mary Stevens, as well as countless other
Speaker 1: young black children grew up in. We have viewed with
Speaker 1: dismay the tragically slow pace of the Negros progress or
Speaker 1: a full emancipation the state of Alabama, enforced by the
Speaker 1: demogoguery of the racist courses in the machinery of government.
Speaker 1: These incidents in Alabama were caused by outsiders who came
Speaker 1: to this state seeking trouble. I felt that I was
Speaker 1: not being treated right then that I had a right
Speaker 1: to retain the sea that I had taken as a
Speaker 1: passenger on the bus. The federal officers are armed with
Speaker 1: a proclamation from President Kennedy, urging the governor to end
Speaker 1: his efforts to prevent two Negro students from registering at
Speaker 1: the university who are committed to a worldwide struggle to
Speaker 1: promote and protect the rights of all who wish to
Speaker 1: be free. You are ordered to disperse, go home, or
Speaker 1: go to your church. This march will not confett. Montgomery, Alabama,
Speaker 1: in the sixties was the most segregated place on the planet.
Speaker 1: That's Denny Abbott, a former juvenile probation officer. If you
Speaker 1: look up Mount Meg's, one of the first things that
Speaker 1: pops up is a book called They Had No Voice,
Speaker 1: written by Denny. In it, he tells the story of
Speaker 1: the eleven years he spent working for Montgomery County Juvenile
Speaker 1: Justice System as a probation officer. He's a big part
Speaker 1: of our story, as you'll find out later. When telling
Speaker 1: us about his childhood, he told us that his father
Speaker 1: was an out and out racist. I heard the in
Speaker 1: word every day from him. In fact, I think my
Speaker 1: fathers don't remember the clan quite frankly, and growing up,
Speaker 1: Denny lived a very segregated life. Elementary school, middle school,
Speaker 1: high school, in college. I never went to school with
Speaker 1: a black person, not once. Didn't know the name of
Speaker 1: a black person until I started working after I graduated
Speaker 1: from college, so I really had no information about the
Speaker 1: black community. Everything was rab After graduating from Huntingdon College
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty one, didn't he found himself married and broke.
Speaker 1: He was just twenty one and he needed a job,
Speaker 1: any job. I found out about an opening as a
Speaker 1: probation officer with a montgomer Juvenile court. His title was
Speaker 1: actually boys Counselor and interesting and actually what I find
Speaker 1: kind of disturbing euphemism for probation officer. I was one
Speaker 1: of like seven or eight probation officers there, and just
Speaker 1: a few weeks into his job, he had to drive
Speaker 1: a black child to Mount Meg's for the first time.
Speaker 1: What I saw driving up to the institution were black
Speaker 1: kids working in the fields, and they were wearing army
Speaker 1: fatigue so well cast off army surplus pants and shirts
Speaker 1: that were much too large. They had to roll them up.
Speaker 1: Most of the kids were barefooted and that's what they
Speaker 1: did from sun up to sundown, work in the fields.
Speaker 1: And then I got to see a couple of the
Speaker 1: buildings and they were all and increpit. I do remember
Speaker 1: that there was a train for a waste, human waste
Speaker 1: that was just outside the door and window that was open,
Speaker 1: and just the conditions were hardle That was Denny's first
Speaker 1: glimpse of Mount Meg's, a place he eventually drove hundreds
Speaker 1: of kids to a place he would come to call
Speaker 1: a slave camp. I'm Josie Duffie Rice, and this is
Speaker 1: unreformed the Story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children,
Speaker 1: Episode two, The Arrival. If you were a kid in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties Alabama and you were accused of breaking the
Speaker 1: law in some way, one of two things would probably happen.
Speaker 1: If you were white and had the money and resources,
Speaker 1: you'd probably get to go home, no charges, no punishment.
Speaker 1: But if you were one of the unlucky ones, you
Speaker 1: were sent to one of three industrial schools. There were
Speaker 1: two near Birmingham, one for white boys and one for
Speaker 1: white girls, but all the black kids, boys and girls
Speaker 1: were sent to the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children,
Speaker 1: otherwise known as Mount Meg's. And in some cases you
Speaker 1: could be sent to Mount Megs even when it wasn't
Speaker 1: clear that you'd broken any law. If they ran away
Speaker 1: from home, the juvenile court would exercise jurisdiction. If they
Speaker 1: were incorrigible, if they didn't listen to their parents, they
Speaker 1: could be sent to the juvenile court. That's Barry Feld.
Speaker 1: He's a Centennial Professor of Law Emeritus at the University
Speaker 1: of Minnesota Law School. In addition, the children who were
Speaker 1: abused or neglected or dependent through no fault of their
Speaker 1: own but because of their family circumstances would also end
Speaker 1: up in juvenile court. Some of these kids were sentenced
Speaker 1: to time at Mountmegs, but other kids, they didn't even
Speaker 1: see a judge. They just got sent straight there, no
Speaker 1: formal charges, no clear sentence. Once we get into the
Speaker 1: judges chamber, he said, ma'am, I'm sentence in you a
Speaker 1: year and six months to the Mountmegs in Dukeshire school.
Speaker 1: Huh what why? What? I do you know? I didn't
Speaker 1: do anything and I just cried and cried and cried
Speaker 1: and cried because I didn't understand. I don't know. That's
Speaker 1: Jenny Knox. Jenny was born in October in nineteen fifty two.
Speaker 1: She adored her mother, but Leona Montgomery had her challenges.
Speaker 1: She had many children, some of whom Jenny had no
Speaker 1: connection to, mostly Jenny had a relationship with her older sisters,
Speaker 1: Geraldine and Ernestine, who were close in age to her.
Speaker 1: She lived with the two of them, her mother, her
Speaker 1: three younger half siblings, and their father, John Montgomery Senior,
Speaker 1: the only father that Jenny ever knew. Life with John
Speaker 1: as their father was comfortable and the family lived in
Speaker 1: a nice home. But we didn't have to worry too
Speaker 1: much about anything when she was married. But when Jenny
Speaker 1: was a young girl, John Montgomery was shipped off or
Speaker 1: yet another military tour abroad, and she and her siblings
Speaker 1: lived alone with their mother, alcoholic who struggled to parent.
Speaker 1: Something had to give. She started drinking and things stought happening.
Speaker 1: I just say life stowed happening in the process of
Speaker 1: life happening. To her, it was at our experience as children.
Speaker 1: When Jenny was around twelve, she and her younger siblings
Speaker 1: were placed in a foster home, and then a different one,
Speaker 1: and then yet a different one. Eventually, Jenny's aunt, Willie G.
Speaker 1: Robinson became their legal guardian. Being taken in by actual
Speaker 1: family seems like it would have been a relief, but
Speaker 1: Jenny hated living with Aunt Willie. She made them work
Speaker 1: in the fields picking peas and cotton. She isolated them
Speaker 1: from family and friends. She controlled every aspect of their lives.
Speaker 1: I really didn't want to stay with their you know,
Speaker 1: because I didn't. I didn't feel like I was being
Speaker 1: treated right. As a matter of fact, I didn't feel
Speaker 1: like any of us was treated right. So Jenny ran away.
Speaker 1: She left Aunt Willie's house with a single goal in mind.
Speaker 1: I just wanted to be with my mom. Nothing else
Speaker 1: really mattered to me like being with my mom. There
Speaker 1: was nobody greater, you know, a better knew how to
Speaker 1: take care of me and love me like my mom.
Speaker 1: Jenny ended up staying with another aunt, who told Jenny
Speaker 1: she was welcome as long as she did her choices
Speaker 1: and went to school. The arrangement was working out well
Speaker 1: until one day a school staff member came to Jenny's
Speaker 1: class and summoned her to the principal's office. Jenny was
Speaker 1: devastated when she saw who was waiting for her. She
Speaker 1: was there, Oh my god, it was Aunt Willie. Even
Speaker 1: though Jenny was consistently attending school, and even though she
Speaker 1: was much happier staying with her other aunt, the judge
Speaker 1: ruled that Jenny running away from her appointed guardian, Aunt Willie,
Speaker 1: was an offense punishable by time served at Mount Meg's.
Speaker 1: I wasn't out drinking, getting drunk, being loose in the
Speaker 1: streets or whatever. I had class, not even think about
Speaker 1: no boyfriend and all that different kind of stuff. But
Speaker 1: I didn't understand it's still about this meat. So when
Speaker 1: Jenny was around thirteen, she was sentenced to eighteen months
Speaker 1: at Mount Meg's. If you're wondering why these kids didn't
Speaker 1: push back or appeal their sentences, the answer is that
Speaker 1: they couldn't not back then. At least they weren't entitled
Speaker 1: to lawyers. Children didn't really have any legal rights at all.
Speaker 1: Until just fifty five years ago, American kids were being
Speaker 1: carted off to juvenile attention without first being afforded any
Speaker 1: procedural rights. Rights that for kids like Jenny Knox could
Speaker 1: have made a huge difference. And I have a lawyer.
Speaker 1: I don't know anything about the lawyer. I don't know
Speaker 1: I needed one. I was awarded with State Department Children's
Speaker 1: Services had taken us from my mom several times. My
Speaker 1: mom was still having children. Mary Stevens, who met in
Speaker 1: her garden an episode one, has a similar story to Jenny.
Speaker 1: My mom was needing me to work help pick continent
Speaker 1: stuff for her to feed the children. I had to
Speaker 1: do that, so I was missing so many days to
Speaker 1: school and stuff and having to work that it just
Speaker 1: got to wear. I didn't want to go to school
Speaker 1: anymore because I was so far behind and everything. You know,
Speaker 1: I just didn't want to go. Eventually, not going to
Speaker 1: school led to serious consequences. We moved to Scottsboro, Alabama,
Speaker 1: where I had skipped school one day and I got
Speaker 1: caught why shrotzy I went to June. Somehow they decided
Speaker 1: that I was going to go to Montgomery, and I
Speaker 1: didn't know where I was going at the time. In fact,
Speaker 1: Mary thought this moved to Montgomery might be good news.
Speaker 1: She thought she might be getting a family again. I
Speaker 1: thought I was going to be adopted because one of
Speaker 1: my brothers was adopted. In nineteen sixty seven, at age thirteen,
Speaker 1: Mary was sent to Mount Meg's for truancy. This is
Speaker 1: part of the story that haunts me. Like Jenny and Lonnie,
Speaker 1: all Mary really wanted was her mother, and instead she
Speaker 1: was functionally sent to a juvenile prison, a place where
Speaker 1: love and care were absent. I believe, Oh, I believe.
Speaker 1: Across Alabama, Mount Megs was used as a boogeyman, essentially
Speaker 1: to scare kids into good behavior. They say, you keep
Speaker 1: being bad, You're going to Mount Megs. That's Johnny Bodley,
Speaker 1: who you met in episode one. He's the professional musician
Speaker 1: who lives in Selma. Growing up, Johnny heard stories about
Speaker 1: Mount Meg's firsthand from his sister, who also went there,
Speaker 1: but her horror stories about the place weren't enough to
Speaker 1: keep Johnny out of there himself. Back then, when the
Speaker 1: local paper mentioned Mount Meg's, it was always because of
Speaker 1: a kid who was sent there after committing a more
Speaker 1: serious crime. Lots of stories about theft, and even some
Speaker 1: kids accused of attempted rape or assault. The paper only
Speaker 1: ever mentioned those small minority of kids. But like Lonnie,
Speaker 1: Mary and Jenny, there were many more kids who were
Speaker 1: sent to Mount Meg's for tiny in fractions or really
Speaker 1: for being poor and black. But of the four of them,
Speaker 1: Johnny might be the closest to what the system would
Speaker 1: consider a quote unquote delinquent today. He was caught by
Speaker 1: the police in nineteen sixty seven. I ain't sitting in
Speaker 1: the city jail for three months and they shift me
Speaker 1: to Mount Megs. On July twenty second, fifteen birthday, Johnny, Lonnie,
Speaker 1: Mary and Jenny and everyone who came to Mount Megs
Speaker 1: got there the same way, driving down a long road
Speaker 1: that led to the school. Everyone we talked to you
Speaker 1: remembered that drive and how they had no idea what
Speaker 1: awaited them. Mount Mags is about twenty miles east of
Speaker 1: Montgomery and two hours south of Birmingham. In the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: the kids were driven there by a juven no probation officer,
Speaker 1: someone like Denny, and often they were handcuffed in the
Speaker 1: back of the car. Lonnie, who came from Birmingham, probably
Speaker 1: took the newly constructed State Highway sixty five, which follows
Speaker 1: the Coosa River. On the edge of the highway, there
Speaker 1: were farmhouses and fields rolling by. Depending on where they
Speaker 1: were coming from, it could take hours to get there,
Speaker 1: heading away from the life they knew, with no idea
Speaker 1: what awaited them. But eventually they'd reached the road to
Speaker 1: Mount Meg's. It was scary just to go down that roll, Dan,
Speaker 1: You ride slowly down this two lines street, pale trees
Speaker 1: on both sides. You're riding slowly. None of us know
Speaker 1: where where we was going the gate. First of all,
Speaker 1: taking that long ride two mountain mags. You're nervous, you
Speaker 1: don't know what to expect, your mind running crazy or whatever.
Speaker 1: You see this big old white house which is the
Speaker 1: girl's home. This big building, a big long front ports.
Speaker 1: It was a pretty building, but it look kind of
Speaker 1: like a plantation house. And then when you get on
Speaker 1: up to the building, you see young ladies out in
Speaker 1: the field, open field, and they was literally bent over,
Speaker 1: you know, with their hands picking, pulling grass. And then
Speaker 1: let me know that this is a horrible vision. The
Speaker 1: boys side was further on down the road from us.
Speaker 1: We go through this gate where the gatekeeper were vehicle stopped.
Speaker 1: He gives him man and signing man. Then we moved
Speaker 1: slowly on down that road. Then you start seeing all
Speaker 1: of these cottages, rick buildings with bars and things on
Speaker 1: the windows, just awful looking buildings, block up buildings called
Speaker 1: to see Cottie J cottage D. I've seen all these boys.
Speaker 1: It's out on the yard just walking around, just just
Speaker 1: doing nothing. You know. All of them looked deadly, all
Speaker 1: of them looked mean. I remember the rock pile. It's off.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's like in this big, this big yard,
Speaker 1: and all of this dirt and all these big, these
Speaker 1: big square rocks painted white. The pile of white rocks
Speaker 1: looked ominous, a dramatic but kind of curious centerpiece on
Speaker 1: the flat pastoral landscape that Lonnie and Johnny came to
Speaker 1: understand all too well. When Lonnie arrived, the hard pulled
Speaker 1: up to this old big house on the campus, and
Speaker 1: out came the superintendent, Elias Brown Holloway, otherwise known as EB.
Speaker 1: Mister Holloway came out, and he was huge and big,
Speaker 1: and he would stand up and look at all of us,
Speaker 1: and then from that he tells us about the place
Speaker 1: and tells us that we should never try to run away.
Speaker 1: There is no escaped in now. Please, Lonnie still shutters
Speaker 1: at the memory of Holloway. You may remember that just
Speaker 1: days before this, Lonnie and some other boys had tried
Speaker 1: to escape from Birmingham Jail. But the minute he saw Holloway,
Speaker 1: he knew that escaping from this place would be much harder.
Speaker 1: After arriving boys were given standard issue military fatigues. This
Speaker 1: was the only clothing that they had. It's the same
Speaker 1: thing that Denny saw the kids wearing when he showed
Speaker 1: up to Mount Meg's for the first time. You take
Speaker 1: all value surveying cloth, you turn now me in, you
Speaker 1: turn in any properties or ended tying your head in
Speaker 1: your pockets. The campus had several buildings, a chapel, a barn,
Speaker 1: a cannery, a nurse's station that was almost always empty,
Speaker 1: in a schoolroom that a lot of kids never saw
Speaker 1: the inside of. The boys slept in buildings called cottages.
Speaker 1: Johnny was at first assigned a cottage d, a residence
Speaker 1: known for being unlocked down twenty four hours a day.
Speaker 1: The cottages were overseen by counselors, and during Lonnie's time
Speaker 1: at Mount Meg's he remembers one of the councilors supervising
Speaker 1: his cottage had been convicted of serious violent crimes, and
Speaker 1: the cottages were packed full of kids. In some years,
Speaker 1: three kids slept on one cot The barely stuffed mattresses
Speaker 1: reeked of urine. The conditions and facilities were disgusting to
Speaker 1: the point of hazardous. Mount Meg's was virtually unlivable. There
Speaker 1: was an open sewer full of fieces and trash that
Speaker 1: became a cesspool for mosquitos. The outhouse was just a
Speaker 1: long board with multiple holes cut out of it. In
Speaker 1: the buildings, dilapidated and poorly constructed, were extreme fire hazards.
Speaker 1: For at least one stretch of time, there was no
Speaker 1: clean water at the facility at all. The kids never
Speaker 1: had enough to eat, and what they had was barely edible.
Speaker 1: After all, the kitchen was full of roaches and other vermin,
Speaker 1: but they were so hungry they'd eat anything. In one story,
Speaker 1: when a kid vomited all over his food, another boy
Speaker 1: was so hungry that he ate it. One survivor said
Speaker 1: he often saw boys pick corn out of kalmaneure to eat.
Speaker 1: The kids were assigned jobs, manual labor that they had
Speaker 1: to do to maintain them Mount Meg's campus. There were
Speaker 1: chores like working in the kitchen or milking the thirty
Speaker 1: five cows, but all of them were expected to work
Speaker 1: in the fields. Mount Meg's was surrounded by miles of farmland.
Speaker 1: There were fifteen hundred acres. They were filled with fruit trees,
Speaker 1: row upon row of vegetables, but mostly cotton. It looked
Speaker 1: at dislike slavery. Can I mean? They would land us
Speaker 1: up in the morning and all the boys would have
Speaker 1: to hold it holes up in the air, and when
Speaker 1: we get ready to go to something that we would
Speaker 1: sea it would say chopped down. All of these boys
Speaker 1: would madge to a field about fast six seven miles
Speaker 1: away to work. Sometime. They ran to the field every
Speaker 1: day from dawn until dusk. There they were black children
Speaker 1: out in the alle Obama fields picking cotton. These kids
Speaker 1: were being worked to the absolute bone. These were kids,
Speaker 1: usually from cities like Birmingham or Montgomery. They were told
Speaker 1: this was training, but training for what, and even for
Speaker 1: the kids that did have farming experience, was close to
Speaker 1: impossible to pick that much cotton every single day. When
Speaker 1: I first got day, I didn't know nothing about picking cotton.
Speaker 1: I'll just pull the whole stalcon everything. After filling up
Speaker 1: large sacks with cotton, a truck would drive by with
Speaker 1: a way station, making sure that the kids had met
Speaker 1: their quotas. One time, Lonnie and some other boys tried
Speaker 1: to outsmart the scale by adding stones to the bottom
Speaker 1: of the bag. It was stupid for us to do that.
Speaker 1: That led to serious punishment, punishment that the kids at
Speaker 1: Mount Meg's were all too familiar with. If you didn't
Speaker 1: pick a hundred pounds or caught in today, I don't
Speaker 1: care how old you would, they would beat you. They
Speaker 1: would punish you if you didn't pick a certain amount
Speaker 1: of watermelons, if you didn't pick a certain amount of cucumbers.
Speaker 1: In Mount Maigs, they would punish you. If you was
Speaker 1: running to the field and you got sick, they would
Speaker 1: punish you for that, quote unquote. Discipline at Mount Meg's
Speaker 1: was relentless, and you could get punished for almost nothing,
Speaker 1: or for things completely out of your control, like this
Speaker 1: one time that Johnny and some other boys were riding
Speaker 1: in the front seat of a truck after the fields
Speaker 1: when the driver of the car suddenly slammed on the brakes.
Speaker 1: The boys were thrown forward and the windshield was shattered,
Speaker 1: and mister Glover took each boy down out of the
Speaker 1: trunk and beat him right there, as if it was
Speaker 1: our fault. Mister Glover was the man who oversaw the
Speaker 1: boys work, watch their every move in the fields. Mister
Speaker 1: Glove was an older man. Whatever part of the military
Speaker 1: that he was in had lamed him because he mostly
Speaker 1: sit down everywhere he went. Despite his disability, mister Glover
Speaker 1: had a reputation for beating kids with a particular intensity.
Speaker 1: John Henry, but that's the name of his stick, and
Speaker 1: John Henry the oak stick isn't mister Glover's only signature.
Speaker 1: Mister Glover usually sit in his chair and beat you,
Speaker 1: and you dan hire on the ground. He would beat
Speaker 1: you while he's sitting in his chair. For the boys
Speaker 1: who failed to complete all their cotton picking on his watch,
Speaker 1: mister Glover has an especially disturbing punishment. He would take
Speaker 1: his oak stick and drill a hole in the ground.
Speaker 1: He would say, you see that hole in the ground, boy,
Speaker 1: and you would have to say, yes, I'm mister Glover.
Speaker 1: He was here. Put you your private part in it.
Speaker 1: Put your dick in the hole, not literally pull yourself
Speaker 1: out of the clothes. What deathway you laid on top
Speaker 1: for that whole and he began to whoop you. Every
Speaker 1: time he whoop you, he hits you, and then here
Speaker 1: a grunt with the stick. And Danny'll keep on hitting
Speaker 1: you with the stick each time, and he grunt, and
Speaker 1: your fast swell up and pretty soon you walking with
Speaker 1: a limp. That's just how bad Mountmaids were. There were
Speaker 1: a number of other adults who ran the facility in
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties. Mister Reddy was another infamous punisher mister Reddy.
Speaker 1: He was a shell shocked person. Man. He was wow
Speaker 1: we call him wild ch out like God damn it.
Speaker 1: He would cross all the time. If he caught you
Speaker 1: doing something, God damn it, you want to be a
Speaker 1: fucking bullet, don't you here? A run over? And just
Speaker 1: stopped beating on you and beat on you and beat
Speaker 1: on you and beat on you until he felt that
Speaker 1: he was satisfied. But it wasn't just the staff that
Speaker 1: the boys had to look out for. In an essay
Speaker 1: about his experience at Mount Meg's, Johnny wrote that on
Speaker 1: the first night there, he stayed awake until morning for
Speaker 1: fear of being sexually assaulted. And not just by the staff,
Speaker 1: but by the other boys. You know, all of them
Speaker 1: look deadly, all of them trying to put fearing you.
Speaker 1: For Johnny, it's impossible to talk about Mount Meg's without
Speaker 1: touching upon the rampant sexual abuse that openly took place.
Speaker 1: I mean, boys got raped all the time in Mount Megs,
Speaker 1: and if a boy reported to a counselor that they'd
Speaker 1: been assaulted, nothing happened. So for blood of them, did
Speaker 1: they got raped? They would do nothing a bad day.
Speaker 1: Boys would often stick together in groups based on where
Speaker 1: they were from. All the Birmingham Boys together Montgomery Boys.
Speaker 1: When Johnny was there, there were just a couple other
Speaker 1: boys from Selma, and Johnny quickly learned that even among
Speaker 1: those groups there were divisions. There were guys known as
Speaker 1: scrubs and there were guys known as ikes. Ikes were tough.
Speaker 1: Scrubs were sort of like the suckers. Many of the
Speaker 1: Ikes become charge boys, meaning it becomes their job to
Speaker 1: keep their peers in line. But even though they're all
Speaker 1: the same age, the charge boys have a lot of
Speaker 1: power over the others. All they had to say that
Speaker 1: you left from Cotton when your rope, and they would
Speaker 1: take you up to the overseer of mister Glover. The
Speaker 1: other thing about Mount Mags is that it was a
Speaker 1: school without any schooling. None of the boys can recount
Speaker 1: getting a real education there or taking any real classes.
Speaker 1: It was a labor farm basically. The girls they seem
Speaker 1: to have some instruction, but not much. Miss Alexander was
Speaker 1: our weaken night supervisor. I think Harris was fun was
Speaker 1: I was so in teacher Miss Wright for cosmetology. Mister
Speaker 1: Dubos was over the feet. That was Jenny. You can
Speaker 1: hear just how worked up she is. Even when she's
Speaker 1: just talking about who was on staff. It's still difficult
Speaker 1: for her to talk about Mount Meg's. As she recalled
Speaker 1: her experience there, she cried and cried. When Jenny first arrived,
Speaker 1: she was taken to the dining hall, everybody together around
Speaker 1: the wall that you introduced me to the stabs in
Speaker 1: the ladies and and make you undressed in front of everybody.
Speaker 1: The staff forced the new girls to bend over naked
Speaker 1: and spread their legs for inspection. They said it was
Speaker 1: for safety, but the girls suspected the real reason was humiliation,
Speaker 1: to make sure that they knew their place. It affects
Speaker 1: your privacy, it the grady. Nothing like this had ever
Speaker 1: happened to Jenny before, and even now, sixty years later,
Speaker 1: it still haunts her. And that was just day one.
Speaker 1: It was only the beginning. On the girl's side. They
Speaker 1: all supped in one dormitory, that big white building that
Speaker 1: looked like a plantation house. You can't talk about Mount
Speaker 1: Meg's in the nineteen sixties without talking about Fanny B. Matthews,
Speaker 1: the girl's matron. When Mary first arrived at Mount Meg's,
Speaker 1: though she thought she was safe because I was relieved,
Speaker 1: because everybody was my complation, and you know that Patty
Speaker 1: was going to be okay. Everyone who worked or was
Speaker 1: locked up at Mount Meg's was black. When she first arrived.
Speaker 1: This provided a false sense of security to Mary, and
Speaker 1: she thought she'd been brought to Mount Meg's to be adopted.
Speaker 1: And when we got there in the driveway and went in,
Speaker 1: I met my fan to b Matthews, and she greeted
Speaker 1: me and I asked, Gressa, are you gonna adopt me?
Speaker 1: I did, and I was there to be get dapped.
Speaker 1: I didn't know, but Fanny Matthews was no mother to
Speaker 1: those girls. Missus Matthews was a tall, middle aged black
Speaker 1: woman who wore a wavy cropped salt and pepper wig.
Speaker 1: She was the mastermind of the complex system of psychological
Speaker 1: and physical punishments she and her staff dolled out to
Speaker 1: the girls. She had a very strong voice, very strong voice.
Speaker 1: She didn't have to raise this. She was loud her demeanor,
Speaker 1: voice and facial expressions, and her walk was fierce. And
Speaker 1: she always carried a thick, great wooden paddle in her hand,
Speaker 1: and she would carry that paddle in a poton in
Speaker 1: a purse on her shoulder. The paddle was a constant
Speaker 1: threat and reminder that Fanny Mathews would not hesitate to
Speaker 1: beat any student. And I've gotten in hitting in the
Speaker 1: head by miss Matthews several times with these with this baton.
Speaker 1: Been over and give her a real hump in your back,
Speaker 1: touch your toes and she comes down on your back
Speaker 1: as hard as she can, but every ounce of strength
Speaker 1: in her. And when you do, it feels like you
Speaker 1: just went through a shop treatment because it hurts that bad.
Speaker 1: And I feel like you're going through the floor when
Speaker 1: she hits you like that. Danny Matthews was relentless. If
Speaker 1: she heard any girls making noise at night, she'd line
Speaker 1: up everyone in the hallway, going down the line and
Speaker 1: hitting girls in the head with that baton. As a punishment,
Speaker 1: Jenny had to manually dry clothes and sheets, meaning she
Speaker 1: had to stand up all night and shake them dry. Mostly,
Speaker 1: Mount Meg's was a torture sight, a place where children
Speaker 1: just endured unbelievable abuse, but there were some good moments,
Speaker 1: some moments when the kids could feel like they were
Speaker 1: actual children and not inmates. There were a couple of
Speaker 1: extracurricular activities that Jenny got involved in that did become
Speaker 1: a part of the choir out there. I became a cheerleader.
Speaker 1: While I was out there, she even met a boy
Speaker 1: nicknamed Chick. Chick was fifteen years old when he and
Speaker 1: Jenny met at Mount Meg's. He was serving time down
Speaker 1: the road on the boy's side, and on the rare
Speaker 1: occasion that it was his job to drive the tractor
Speaker 1: near the fields where the girls lived, he would get
Speaker 1: a chance to see them. I think Chick used to
Speaker 1: always come to the girls home and you know, drive attractors,
Speaker 1: and you know, I guess he got turned on by
Speaker 1: seeing me and wanted to know who I word. Their
Speaker 1: court ship was sweet, innocent. We just slipped letters to
Speaker 1: one another, and if we was caught slipping letters to
Speaker 1: each other, we would get in trouble. But these few
Speaker 1: opportunities to be normal American teenagers were brief. There were
Speaker 1: some good things that went on. They didn't last long,
Speaker 1: but there were some good things that I was in
Speaker 1: the choir, you know, I was on the football team,
Speaker 1: was a kitchen boy, worked in the kitchen, and all
Speaker 1: of those things were privileged positions. No, but as I said,
Speaker 1: it was David brutal and if you made it out
Speaker 1: of laugh, he was blessed. You may be wondering how
Speaker 1: anyone got out of Mount Meg's alive, and the truth
Speaker 1: is that many didn't, or at least that's the consensus.
Speaker 1: We don't have records that tell us just how many
Speaker 1: kids died because of abuse or starvation or being worked
Speaker 1: to death. But there were kids who disappeared. And there
Speaker 1: are memories of children who were beaten within an inch
Speaker 1: of their life and then never seen again. And they
Speaker 1: have him a couple of times. We know that they
Speaker 1: mout they had to die, they ain't. No amulans came
Speaker 1: down through them. Some even have memories of a makeshift graveyard.
Speaker 1: When you're a rabbit Mount Me, you'll see these graves
Speaker 1: over to the side and you don't know what's up.
Speaker 1: But a lot of boys didn't even make it out
Speaker 1: of Mount Me and they said that was not such
Speaker 1: a graveyard. But I think that was the cover of
Speaker 1: because that mouth they have been. And of course all
Speaker 1: of this, the beatings, the abuse, the sexual assault, the
Speaker 1: cotton quotas, the strip search, the starvation, the deaths, the graveyard,
Speaker 1: the infinite never ending punishments were condoned, if not outright
Speaker 1: encouraged by the school's superintendent, Eb Holloway. You can't talk
Speaker 1: about Mount max in the nineteen sixties without talking about
Speaker 1: Eb Holloway. For eighteen years he ran the institution, and
Speaker 1: of all the adults who were directly responsible for what
Speaker 1: those children endured as a superintendent, Holloway was arguably the
Speaker 1: most to blame. He was staying in the Beith House
Speaker 1: and Mount Meigs, so he was treated like a king.
Speaker 1: You know, I had the Gills come down and do
Speaker 1: all of the housework and stuff like that. It was
Speaker 1: he was almost like the master of the plantation. There's
Speaker 1: one specific and chilling detail that stays with Johnny about
Speaker 1: Holloway even now. You know he larned everybody else, and
Speaker 1: he always smiled. He'll be being you to death if
Speaker 1: he be smad. I keep thinking about the adults who
Speaker 1: are running the school back then, mister Glover, mister Reddy,
Speaker 1: Fannie Matthews, and especially Evie Holloway. Who were they and
Speaker 1: why did they treat these kids, these children who were
Speaker 1: in their care so violently. The truth is we don't
Speaker 1: know too much about what was going on internally at
Speaker 1: Mount Meg's back then. We search state archives and people's
Speaker 1: personal documents. We sent in public records requests, but we
Speaker 1: haven't found or received any personnel records. But what we
Speaker 1: do know is that no one really seemed to be
Speaker 1: penalized for what was going on. The Department of Social
Speaker 1: Welfare and the Department of Pensions in Alabama, they did
Speaker 1: these annual reports every year. They came to the school
Speaker 1: and they examined the grounds and they typed up these
Speaker 1: perfunctory reports that are based basically the same every year,
Speaker 1: and they just don't mention the violence that these kids
Speaker 1: were enduring and the couple of times that it is
Speaker 1: like alluded to. It's framed as fair punishment. It's framed
Speaker 1: as reasonable. And it wasn't just that Holloway faced no backlash.
Speaker 1: It was also that he was celebrated. He was praised
Speaker 1: across the state. In fact, if you judged Holloway based
Speaker 1: on what was written about him in the newspapers, you
Speaker 1: would honestly think this guy was a hero, a champion
Speaker 1: for kids, finding tooth and nail to secure adequate resources
Speaker 1: and funding for them from the state of Alabama. And
Speaker 1: this is an important thing to keep in mind here too,
Speaker 1: because it wasn't just the abuse that was the problem.
Speaker 1: Some of Mount Mex's problems couldn't have been solved even
Speaker 1: if they had had the best staff in the world.
Speaker 1: It was a chronically underfunded school. It won't be surprising
Speaker 1: to know that the white industrial schools in Alabama had
Speaker 1: far higher budgets while housing fewer kids and out Mount Megs.
Speaker 1: You know, there was this double standard. A judge in
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties said that he did not want to
Speaker 1: approve more money for Mount Megs because they could just
Speaker 1: sell the crops they grew to fund themselves. At the
Speaker 1: white schools, no one was telling them to make their
Speaker 1: own money off of crop yield. But at Mount Megs,
Speaker 1: the state just kind of expected the black people to
Speaker 1: make it work. Here's the other thing about Ebe Holloway.
Speaker 1: He was technically never qualified to run Mount Megs. He
Speaker 1: had no real background as an educator, had never worked
Speaker 1: at a school like this, So why did the state
Speaker 1: of Alabama hire him. Holloway was born in nineteen oh
Speaker 1: six in South Carolina. He moved to Alabama to attend
Speaker 1: the Tuskegee Institute founded by Booker T. Washington, an institution
Speaker 1: that becomes an important part of our story. We'll get
Speaker 1: to that next episode. Holloway went into agriculture, not education,
Speaker 1: but he started gunning for the job at Mount Megs
Speaker 1: in nineteen forty four, before the previous superintendent, JR. Wingfield
Speaker 1: had even retired. Wingfield spent twenty seven years on the
Speaker 1: job and was a prominent black figure in the community,
Speaker 1: considered part of the upper echelon of black society. Starting
Speaker 1: before Wingfield even retired, Holloway wrote letters to the governor
Speaker 1: asking for the job, and then the governor quickly received
Speaker 1: a flurry of other letters from Alabamians recommending Holloway for
Speaker 1: the position, including from white men, some of whom Holloway
Speaker 1: barely knew. It became clear that he was asking anyone
Speaker 1: he could to recommend him, despite not being qualified for
Speaker 1: the role. But even with all those recommendations, Holloway didn't
Speaker 1: get the job. The governor appointed as superintendent another black
Speaker 1: man with more experience, named Amos Parker. Holloway instead was
Speaker 1: hired to oversee the agriculture at Mount Meg's, but Holloway
Speaker 1: didn't give up. He still wanted to be superintendent and
Speaker 1: seemed willing to sabotage Parker in order to get the
Speaker 1: job in nineteen fifty one. Five years later, the governor
Speaker 1: got another letter about Mount Megs, this time from a
Speaker 1: white county judge. The judge asked that Amos Parker be
Speaker 1: replaced as superintendent because of the hotbed of Negro political
Speaker 1: activity in Montgomery. The judge insisted in his letter that
Speaker 1: Parker belonged to the radical element that is causing much
Speaker 1: trouble through agitation, unrest, and scheming. The judge recommended Holloway
Speaker 1: as Parker's replacement because, in the judge's own writing, Mount
Speaker 1: Megs is in great need of some white oversight, and
Speaker 1: Holloway seems to be a good Negro. He is educated
Speaker 1: and doesn't dabble in political activities. The governor wrote back
Speaker 1: and said that the judge had bad information that Parker
Speaker 1: didn't have radical tendencies, and it was true that as
Speaker 1: far as we know, Parker wasn't particularly radical, but he
Speaker 1: was more willing to speak out about what Mount Meg's needed.
Speaker 1: In March of nineteen fifty one, he went to the
Speaker 1: state legislature and he told them that the conditions at
Speaker 1: the school were deplorable. He said the kids were using
Speaker 1: fertilizer sacks, for towels, and that many of them didn't
Speaker 1: even have shoes. It's not radical to say that kids
Speaker 1: should have shoes to wear, but it was bold. It
Speaker 1: made the news, and eventually the governor decided that Parker
Speaker 1: was more trouble than he was worth. In nineteen fifty two,
Speaker 1: it became official. The governor fired Parker and made eb
Speaker 1: Holloway the new superintendent of Mount Meg's. Every superintendent up
Speaker 1: until and including Holloway was black. In fact, Mount Megs
Speaker 1: was operated exclusively by black people for a long time.
Speaker 1: That was mandated by law. Black children were not allowed
Speaker 1: to be taught by white teachers, but even after the
Speaker 1: law changed, the pattern continued. Still, state officials were specific
Speaker 1: about what kind of black people they wanted in the job.
Speaker 1: It seemed the State of Alabama preferred staff members who
Speaker 1: were ambivalent to the black quote unquote cause timpt Timpta ride, timpte,
Speaker 1: cities want to check lime light, oh bo, and little
Speaker 1: minds oh bo a little line. By the time Denny
Speaker 1: Abbott started working as a juvenile probation officer in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty one, it was clear that Holloway's allegiance wasn't to
Speaker 1: the kids, but to the white board members. He would
Speaker 1: do whatever the white authorities are, those board of trustees
Speaker 1: told him to do. They raised some pigs and other
Speaker 1: chickens and things like that at Mountain Mason. So when
Speaker 1: they slaughtered them for the meat, guess what happened. The
Speaker 1: white trustees pulled up in their brand new cars and
Speaker 1: all of the meat was put into the trunks of
Speaker 1: their cars and they left and the kids had nothing.
Speaker 1: You had a battle and shake balls put a captain,
Speaker 1: And Denny says that despite Mountain Magsi's charter that saved
Speaker 1: three seats on the board for black people, all the
Speaker 1: trustees in the nineteen sixties were white, safe for one Holloway,
Speaker 1: and many of the board members had land surrounding Mountain Megs.
Speaker 1: So when it came time to get their crops harvested,
Speaker 1: guess who did the work. They would pick up the
Speaker 1: phone and call the superintendent, and the sup the kids
Speaker 1: over there in their truck. Did they get any compensation
Speaker 1: for that? No, all I got was beatings when they
Speaker 1: didn't do enough work or the overseers didn't think they
Speaker 1: picked enough cotton, and they were physically beaten every day
Speaker 1: in the field. So I don't know how much more
Speaker 1: you could describe a slave camp than that tell them
Speaker 1: to read in chemn tay right the cheven two ties
Speaker 1: want to check line right before. In some ways nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: Mount Megs was like an early prototype of the for
Speaker 1: profit prison, but it certainly wasn't designed that way. When
Speaker 1: a black woman and student of Booker T. Washington named
Speaker 1: Cornelia Bowen founded Mount Megs in nineteen oh eight, she
Speaker 1: envisioned a safe haven for black kids who weren't being
Speaker 1: served by the state of Alabama. She believed in reform
Speaker 1: through industrial education, and often she was successful, and without her,
Speaker 1: America might not have had one of its most legendary
Speaker 1: black athletes, baseball player Satchel Page. That's next time, Unreformed.
Speaker 1: Unreformed The Story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro
Speaker 1: Children is a production of School of Humans in iHeartMedia.
Speaker 1: This episode was written by me Josie Duffie, Rice and
Speaker 1: Taylor von Laslie. Script supervisors Florence Burrow Adams, and our
Speaker 1: producer is Gabbie Watts, who had additional writing and production
Speaker 1: support from Sherry Scott. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Elsie
Speaker 1: Crowley Brandon Barr, Matt Arnette and me. Sound design and
Speaker 1: mix is by Jesse Niswanger. Music is by Ben Soli.
Speaker 1: Additional recordings are courtesy of the Alabama Center for Traditional Culture.
Speaker 1: The song's featured in this episode of From Vire Hall,
Speaker 1: Mary lou Bendoff with seb Petway and Richard Amerson. Special
Speaker 1: things to the Alabama Department of Archives and History, Michael Harriet,
Speaker 1: Floyd Hall, Kevin Nutt, Van Newkirk, and all of the
Speaker 1: survivors of Mountmeg's willing to share their stories. If you
Speaker 1: are someone you know attendant Mount Megs and would like
Speaker 1: to be in contact, please email Mountmegs Podcast at gmail
Speaker 1: dot com. That's Mt m e i g S Podcast
Speaker 1: at gmail dot com. School of Humans