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