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