0:08

School of Humans. This

0:11

podcast episode discusses historical

0:13

events that include physical abuse

0:16

against children. Earlier

0:23

this year, I drove from Atlanta, where

0:26

I live, to Montgomery, Alabama.

0:30

It's about a three hour drive, depending on

0:32

traffic. I've

0:34

been to Montgomery plenty, but this

0:37

time was different. In

0:39

fact, I wasn't going to the city of Montgomery,

0:42

but to a little unincorporated part

0:44

of the county called Mount Meg's.

0:48

I was there to set foot on the grounds of an old

0:51

Alabama institution that

0:53

I'd spent the last year investigating.

0:57

It was hot outside, over ninety

0:59

degrees. I drove down

1:01

a long road looking for my destination,

1:05

but other than a few houses, it was mostly empty

1:08

until you pull up to the entrance. You

1:11

know, it's a

1:15

long, huge stretch of land right

1:18

by the highway in

1:20

an area of Montgomery

1:22

where there's really not much, which is sort

1:25

of saying something because Montgomery

1:28

isn't the most happened in town anyway. And

1:31

when you pull in on your right is a

1:33

huge stretch of like

1:36

swampland filled with sticks

1:39

and scum and mud. Outside

1:42

of the entrance to the actual youth center, you

1:45

just see gates

1:47

and barbed wire fence

1:50

and it looks

1:52

like a prison. So

1:57

I drove up the long driveway lined with

1:59

trees. I drove past the visitors

2:01

building, past the swamp, and

2:04

up to this most double gait, the

2:07

kind built to keep everyone out. I

2:11

rolled down my window and I asked the guard

2:13

if he would let me in. I'm

2:22

Josie Duffie Rice. I'm a

2:24

writer and a journalist, and before

2:26

that I went to law school. I've

2:28

spent my career focused on the criminal legal

2:30

system, and I've long been particularly

2:33

interested in how we treat children accused

2:35

of crimes. I'm also

2:37

from the South. I grew up in Georgia,

2:40

and a few years ago my family and I moved back

2:42

there. And on this day, I

2:44

was in Alabama outside

2:47

a juvenile correctional facility, trying

2:49

to get in. Since

2:52

it was founded over a hundred years ago,

2:54

this institution has had many names.

2:58

First, it was called the Alabama

3:00

Industrial School for Negro Boys,

3:03

then in nineteen eleven, became

3:06

the Alabama Reform School for

3:08

Juvenile Negro Lawbreakers. Eventually,

3:12

after it went co ed, it changed its

3:14

name again to the Alabama

3:16

Industrial School for Negro Children.

3:20

As you may have figured from the names for

3:23

most of its history, this facility

3:25

held only black kids. These

3:29

days, it's technically named the Mount Meg's

3:32

Campus of the Alabama Department

3:34

of Youth Services, but

3:36

almost everybody just calls it Mount

3:38

Megs. Technically

3:42

Mount Meg's was a reform school for kids,

3:46

but what I've discovered is

3:48

that it wasn't really a school at

3:51

all. Mount Megs with padded after

3:53

swa the slave camp like

3:55

a plantation. We

3:58

didn't have school, they didn't have anything. It was just

4:00

slave draw just played driving Black

4:03

prison for teams, penal

4:05

column for children. This

4:13

is Unreformed the Story

4:15

of the Alabama Industrial School for

4:17

Negro Children, Episode

4:36

one, the Lucky Ones.

4:44

Before we talk about what happened at Mount Meg's,

4:46

we have to go back to a boy named

4:49

Lonnie in Birmingham, Alabama, in

4:51

the early nineteen sixties. In

4:57

the Alabama summers, you can hear

5:00

the whisper of living things, the

5:03

rustle of tiny creatures and the grass,

5:06

the hum of katie DIDs and crickets,

5:09

the blue jays flitting from

5:11

one tree to another. There's

5:14

a lot to discover if

5:16

you're willing to look. And

5:20

as a kid, Lonnie Holly was

5:22

always looking on

5:24

any given evening in nineteen sixty

5:27

one. Back when Lonnie was eleven,

5:30

you might have seen him in Birmingham,

5:32

a young boy looking for critters or

5:34

some interesting piece of litter on the side of

5:36

the road. It was like an adventure,

5:40

a child on an adventure down

5:42

the ditches on the creeks and

5:46

seeing the broken

5:48

material. The closer you got

5:51

to downtown, you got

5:53

a chance to see more and more

5:55

and more and more waste material

5:58

that had been flushed down the creek and

6:01

the ditches. Lonnie

6:04

was always finding some unusual thing that

6:06

someone else had discarded. He

6:09

loved finding worms and tadpoles. He

6:12

had the mud soaked curiosity of any

6:14

eleven year old boy, and he did

6:17

this often, ran away

6:19

to explore, to search. Lonnie

6:25

had literally dozens of siblings,

6:29

but legend has it that he was his mother's

6:31

scrawniest child. And

6:33

I'm the seventh of her twenty seven children,

6:36

but the last one that had

6:38

to go through the most abuse,

6:42

one of twenty seven. But on this

6:44

night in nineteen sixty one, Lonnie

6:47

is basically an orphan. He

6:49

lost touch with his family when he was a toddler

6:52

after a local dancer who was a friend

6:54

of his mother's, noticed how frail

6:56

he was. This

6:59

lady, she was a burulette dancer

7:03

at the fair ground, and

7:05

that she keep me and

7:08

she could breath feed me, you know. So

7:12

the dancer took Lonnie in so she could feed

7:14

him, but then eventually she

7:16

too was gone. In

7:19

some tellings of the story, the burlesque

7:21

dancer left him with a couple in exchange

7:23

for a bottle of whiskey. That

7:27

couple, the mcilroys, owned a whiskey

7:29

house, and they took Lonnie

7:31

in. Back then, he

7:34

was known as Tonky macilroy.

7:36

Latuki was the one that was always

7:39

being mistreated or whatever, but

7:41

in a sense, little TUCKI

7:44

was always the one that was kept

7:47

sound. Lonnie

7:49

was in that house for years. Missus

7:52

McIlroy was good to him. She became

7:54

a surrogate mother. Even now,

7:56

Lonnie says that she loved him like he

7:59

was her own son. But

8:01

still these weren't happy years.

8:04

He was alone so often, and mister

8:06

McElroy was an alcoholic and abusive.

8:09

And it wasn't just him. There

8:11

were others around Lonnie who would beat

8:14

him, sometimes badly enough to

8:16

land him in the hospital. Lonnie

8:19

remembers one story from when he was around four

8:21

years old, when an old man was

8:23

at the whiskey house drunk. Lonnie

8:26

was eating a plate of food. Was

8:28

gonna be kicking off my plate, and

8:31

I dropped the plate and crawled

8:33

up underneath the couch, and

8:37

he kept reaching under there, and I think I

8:39

beat him on the armor on the hand

8:41

of something. The man was furious

8:45

and he got made and went over

8:47

there and got the pokeone

8:50

that you strew up the hot colds and

8:52

stuff with in the heater,

8:55

and shiwed the pokin in my heat

8:59

and put a hole in my head.

9:02

The field enough and

9:05

they had to rush me to the horspital because

9:08

I was holling and screaming. That

9:11

was the first incident of

9:13

me having to be involved will hospital,

9:17

was to get this pokeraon pulled out of my

9:19

head. A

9:22

few years later, when Lonnie was seven,

9:25

Missus McIlroy died. Mister

9:28

McIlroy was out as usual, running

9:31

around with his other ladies. It

9:34

was unexpected, at least for Lonnie,

9:37

and he didn't really get it. No

9:39

one had taught him anything about death, so

9:42

for days it was just him

9:44

in her dead body in the house

9:47

alone. It

9:51

wasn't until mister McIlroy got home

9:54

that Lonnie learned that she was dead.

9:57

To god, damn it, you don't killed my

9:59

wife. And he was so angry

10:01

with me, and

10:04

he just stopped beating me. Lonnie

10:06

ran out of the house as fast as he could. I

10:09

remembered grabbing my wagon

10:11

Alfham under the house and just

10:13

busting out the fence. And

10:16

then suddenly Lonnie was hit

10:19

by a car and dragged for

10:21

blocks. And I remember

10:25

the car hitting me drugged me up

10:27

a nap underneath it. After

10:30

three and a half months in a coma,

10:33

Lonnie woke up in the hospital. He

10:36

didn't want to go back to live with mister McElroy,

10:39

but it was kind of the only option he

10:42

had nowhere else to go. Lonnie

10:49

got older and every so often

10:52

he'd hear whispers or rumors about

10:54

his birth family. Someone

10:56

told him that his mother was living with his brothers

10:58

and sisters out by the Birmingham Airport.

11:02

Lonnie wanted to find them, but

11:04

it was too vague, too impractical. It's

11:07

not like a young black boy could just knock

11:09

on random doors asking people

11:11

if they'd seen his mother. All

11:14

I could think about every

11:16

day, every hour, or my mama

11:19

and my mama having a bunch of children,

11:22

and they lived at a crosstown well

11:25

where was a crosstown So

11:28

for years Lonnie coped with

11:30

the life that he had. He

11:33

waited until after dark and

11:35

then explored where he could when he

11:37

could. So no, it

11:40

wasn't a happy life. It

11:42

wasn't care free or joyful, but

11:45

he had his small pleasures, like his

11:47

adventures in the dishes, exploring

11:51

moments of freedom,

11:55

until one night when even that was snatched

11:58

away from him. And this particularly

12:01

evening her hey got all the

12:03

way to town. I was out

12:06

doing carefew and that was

12:08

the reason enough for him to teching did jubuna.

12:12

So this was a common thing back then. You

12:15

even see it now sometimes actually, especially

12:17

in the South, there were curfews and

12:19

laws against skipping school and loitering

12:22

and congregating, but almost

12:24

always these laws were only enforced

12:27

against black people and Jim

12:29

Crow Alabama, these tiny infractions

12:32

led to countless black children entangled

12:34

in the criminal legal system, like

12:36

Lonnie. When he was eleven years old,

12:39

the cops arrested him, put him

12:41

in the back of the cruiser, and took

12:43

him to jail for being out past curfew.

12:49

Lonnie wasn't the only black kid in the jail.

12:53

He wasn't even the only one in his cell. The

12:56

others had been arrested for their involvement

12:58

in the civil rights movement that was brewing

13:00

in Alabama, especially

13:02

in Birmingham.

13:06

By the time Lonnie got there, they've been

13:08

planning their escape enjoining

13:12

the jailbreak didn't feel like much of a choice.

13:15

Well, you either broke out,

13:17

I got your ass beat because

13:20

they wasn't gonna leave you behind and tell one.

13:22

They had this ridiculous plan that

13:25

deering lights out, they'd somehow

13:27

trick a janitor into opening their

13:29

cell door, steal his keys,

13:32

and make their great escape. Somehow

13:35

it worked. We took his key

13:38

to his automobile and every time

13:41

and ran out the

13:43

back interest of the juvenile. Juvenile

13:54

the group managed to drive away, their

13:57

tires screeching in the rain, but

13:59

unfortunately their getaway driver wasn't

14:01

as talented as he let on. We

14:04

didn't know how to drive real good, so

14:08

we was ribbing on the road

14:10

and then all of a sudden he went through on

14:12

drake and hit the telegram

14:15

Poe. And once he had

14:17

the Telegram Poe, he had

14:19

a rig. Within

14:29

moments they heard sirens. They took

14:31

us right back to the juvenile put

14:33

his back in the sail, and early

14:35

that morning we was loaded

14:37

up in this truck and

14:40

took to this place called

14:43

Alabama in Duster School for Nigro Cheered.

14:49

By age eleven, Lonnie had already

14:51

been separated from his family, endured

14:54

beatings, lost his surrogate

14:56

mother, received a life threatening

14:58

injury to his head, been dragged

15:01

underneath a truck, spent three

15:03

months in a coma, and suffered

15:05

countless other abuses. But

15:08

now on the road to Mount Meg's, Lonnie

15:10

was about to enter some of the worst years

15:13

of his life. About

15:25

a year ago, I got an email about

15:27

Lonnie Holly. Now

15:29

I had never met Lonnie, but

15:31

I come from a family of art lovers, so

15:33

I had heard about him.

15:36

Lonnie Bradley Holly, formerly

15:38

Tonky the boy playing

15:40

in the Ditches in Birmingham in nineteen sixty

15:42

one, is now a musician,

15:45

an arts educator, and most

15:48

notably, an internationally

15:50

renowned artist. By

15:52

nineteen eighty eighty two, my

15:55

works had been to sixty

15:57

four cities. My works

15:59

had went to the Smithsonian. Lonnie's

16:02

art can be found in many other museums too,

16:05

including the Metropolitan Museum of Art

16:07

and the National Gallery.

16:10

I spent time with him recently in a

16:12

friend's home in Atlanta,

16:14

and his work was everywhere. Hanging

16:17

from the ceiling was this incredible sculpture

16:19

he made from wire, wood,

16:21

paper, and metal, or, as Lonnie

16:23

puts it, all the things that people

16:25

throw away. On the

16:28

countertop was a small, beautiful sculpture

16:30

made from sandstone. Lonnie

16:33

is self taught through and through. His

16:36

art comes from the kind of things he used to find

16:38

in the ditches. Talking

16:41

to him, you sense that in his life,

16:43

art and tragedy are often inseparable.

16:46

In fact, the first time he realized he was making

16:48

art, he was in his twenties. After the death

16:51

of his young niece and nephew, his

16:53

family couldn't afford headstones, so

16:56

Lonnie offered to make them. I

16:58

didn't know anything about art

17:01

or sculpture

17:04

or did depict all

17:07

of those things. I learned after

17:10

my sister two children

17:13

was buried and I

17:15

started working with this material and

17:19

it was a sandstone.

17:22

I was cutting different shapes and making baby

17:24

tombstones. It

17:27

was a Tuskegee arm and came by he

17:29

lived it down the screet for my Grandpels

17:33

say, you know what you're doing. I

17:36

said, no, sir,

17:40

he said, I've been almost all around the world

17:43

and I've seen a lot of things on he

17:47

said, but death what you are doing? He

17:49

said, you're doing art. Fans

17:53

of Liney's art know that his hardships were

17:56

his tours and tribulations

17:58

leave the foundation for all of his work. In

18:01

fact, it was those hardships that

18:04

led to the email in my box asking

18:06

me if I was interested in helping tell the story.

18:09

The email wasn't about Lonnie's work or

18:11

his career. It was about

18:13

the three years he spent at the Alabama

18:16

Industrial School for Negro children. There

18:19

were no educational facilities

18:22

there. You can't stop, you can never

18:24

break the line, you can never slow down.

18:26

If you do, you we was being

18:28

treated with dull man. I

18:30

mean boys got raped all the time. Amount

18:33

me. You'd hit him by the hundred, a hundred

18:35

the water to tie with a palace, and

18:37

she comes down on your back as hard

18:39

as you can. Well. Avery

18:42

also strengthen her day,

18:44

beating me to the print that

18:46

I couldn't even walk. I couldn't do nothing but crowd.

18:49

She had hit me in the head with a bottle

18:52

in my head was swallowing.

18:55

She would make me stay on the stairs so I

18:57

wouldn't be seeing. You'll see these

18:59

graves over to the side.

19:01

They won't heed. There's a lot of boys didn't even make

19:03

it out amount me. Over

19:10

the past few years, we've heard more and

19:12

more disturbing stories about places

19:14

like Mount Meg's, institutions

19:17

for so called delinquent children, where

19:19

miners were brutally abused. These

19:22

institutions have a long history in America.

19:25

For more than a century, children have been shipped

19:27

off to quote unquote reform schools.

19:30

Some of them, like Mount Meg's, are

19:32

state run institutions. Others

19:35

are expensive reform boarding schools

19:37

where the wealthiest and their wayward kids. But

19:40

the thing that they have in common is

19:42

the abuse. Many kids

19:44

ended up dead. Mount

19:47

Meg's was one of these places, and

19:50

yet it has a particularly unique origin

19:52

story. It was started in nineteen

19:55

oh seven by the daughter of an enslaved

19:57

woman. It was an institution

19:59

that was meant to reform, to rehabilitate,

20:02

to get black children out of adult prisons.

20:05

But then the state of Alabama took over the school

20:08

and it did just the opposite. Honestly,

20:11

it's hard to imagine how any kid could

20:13

have emerged from Mount Meg's unharmed. Much

20:16

of Mount Meg's history is unknown, especially

20:19

the early years. Part of that is

20:21

due to poor record keeping, maybe to avoid

20:23

oversight. Some of it can

20:25

also be chopped up to bad luck, since

20:28

what little did exist was burned in a fire

20:30

in the nineteen twenties. But

20:33

mostly it was probably just negligence

20:35

or general disregard for

20:37

the lives of poor black children. Children

20:40

are really vulnerable, very vulnerable.

20:43

They don't vote, they don't like campaign contributions,

20:46

they don't have political friends in high places

20:48

that can make things happen. They were totally

20:50

at the wild of adults. That's

20:52

Denny Abbott. He's eighty

20:55

three years old now, but he was only

20:57

twenty one when he started working in youth

20:59

corrections and visited Mount Meg's

21:01

for the first time. That

21:04

was in nineteen sixty one, the same

21:06

year Lonnie was sent there. Danny

21:09

is a white guy, like most people

21:11

working in corrections in Alabama,

21:14

and back then, he was responsible for taking

21:16

both black and white kids to

21:19

their respective segregated reform

21:21

schools. Immediately,

21:23

he noticed a disparity between the two. The

21:27

white kids had a good educational program

21:29

and both of the boys and girls. In the white

21:31

schools, they had social

21:33

services, they had medical services,

21:36

vocational rehab services, but

21:38

Mount Megs, Mountain

21:40

Megs had none of those. Zero,

21:43

not one. Picture the worst environment

21:45

for children that you

21:47

possibly can and Mountain

21:50

Megs is at the top of that list. Nobody

21:53

got a fair shake at Mountain Megs, not one

21:55

kid, and it was a disgrace.

21:59

Danny took this job when he was fresh out of

22:01

college. It was decent work,

22:04

stable, it came with a pension, but

22:07

still he didn't like what he saw at Mount

22:09

Megs. It bothered him

22:11

so much so that he reported the conditions

22:13

of the reformatory numerous times

22:16

to his superiors. Of course,

22:18

nothing happened, and there's a very

22:20

simple reason why nothing happened. Nobody

22:24

cared. They were black kids. They

22:27

almost didn't exist except to

22:29

do things for white people. So nobody

22:31

cared and nothing ever happened. Mount

22:34

Megs was started in nineteen oh seven and

22:37

it still exists today,

22:40

and honestly, every era of its history

22:42

could be its own series. But there

22:44

is a reason we are focused on Mount Meg's

22:46

in the sixties. The school

22:48

sits right outside of what was not just a battleground

22:51

state, but a battleground city in

22:53

the fight for civil rights. Mount

22:56

Megs is just a few miles away from where

22:58

Rosa Parks refused to get up from her seat

23:00

on the bus, where Martin Luther King

23:03

was arrested, where civil rights

23:05

leaders like John Lewis marched from Selma.

23:08

And while much of America slowly started

23:11

to improve throughout the decade, Alabama

23:14

refused. Mount

23:16

Meg's was at its absolute worst. That

23:20

is until a few brave people tried

23:22

to change things for the kids there, and

23:25

the civil rights movement came to Mount

23:27

Megs's doorstep. Whereas

23:41

with the help of Lonnie and Denny, we

23:43

were able to find other children who were sent

23:45

to Mount Megs in the sixties. Throughout

23:48

this series, you'll hear from many former students

23:50

talking about their time there, including

23:53

archival interviews recorded in the mid

23:56

nineteen nineties, and you'll

23:58

hear from four survivors in particular. Among

24:01

them, they spent almost a whole decade at Mount

24:03

Meg's. Each year that

24:05

one left, a new one joined. Lonnie

24:08

Holly was the first to be sent to Mount Megs.

24:11

There from nineteen sixty one to nineteen

24:13

sixty four, Jenny Knox

24:16

was there from about nineteen sixty four to

24:18

nineteen sixty seven. Then there's

24:20

Mary Stevens who was there from

24:22

nineteen sixty seven to nineteen sixty

24:24

nine. And Johnny Bodley

24:27

who was also sent there in nineteen sixty

24:29

seven and stayed until nineteen

24:31

seventy y.

24:35

I stand but

24:37

been tree right there, that's where I have

24:40

a breakfast. I stand

24:42

any figs. This is Mary

24:44

Stevens. I don't know. She's a soft

24:46

spoken woman, a mother who surrounds

24:48

herself with photos of her children.

24:51

Mary is a gardener, and these days she

24:54

enjoys the fruit trees and plants in her

24:56

garden in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

24:59

I love figs. They're

25:01

just there coming out. This is a plum tree.

25:04

That's a lot of plum have fallen. All

25:07

have strawberries. As

25:10

a matter of fact, my little one, the

25:12

day that he came home may be four,

25:16

the strawberries were blown. And that was

25:19

Mary is talking about one of her younger sons.

25:22

Her biological children are all grown up

25:24

now, and a few years ago she adopted

25:27

two boys. And this is a Georgia plum

25:29

tree.

25:33

Listening to Mary, you can hear in

25:35

her voice, the pride and joy

25:37

in her home. She's carved

25:39

out this quiet life for herself and her children.

25:42

It's hard to imagine her at a place like

25:44

Mount Meg's, but in the late

25:47

nineteen sixties she spent eighteen

25:49

months at the institution. In

25:52

nineteen sixty eight, Mary and four other

25:54

black girls decided to run away from

25:56

Mount Meg's, but they didn't

25:59

manage to get very far before they were caught.

26:02

They were picked up by police and brought

26:04

to the juvenile detention center. But

26:07

it just so happened that this detention

26:10

center in Montgomery was also

26:12

where Denny's office was. Runaways

26:15

from Mount Meg's were not unusual. Desperate

26:18

kids ran away all of the time, but

26:20

this time these girls

26:22

insisted on speaking to someone in charge.

26:26

That someone was Denny

26:29

and that meeting would change everything.

26:36

After connecting with Lonnie and Mary,

26:39

we were able to find other survivors of Mount

26:41

Meg's. Jenny

26:43

Knox lives in Montgomery.

26:45

She's seventy now, and when

26:48

we went to her house, she opened

26:50

the door dressed in her Sunday best. I

26:54

was born in the fifties, and that's

26:56

thou I light. This

26:59

one is a red and white flower dress.

27:02

Amma red Flower, build

27:04

Amma sander shoes

27:07

over there with the glitter and my necklaces

27:09

and stuff, and so I just wanted to dress up

27:11

for you guys. Jenny

27:14

is extremely welcoming a

27:16

great host. Jenny

27:18

is also a devout Christian, and one

27:21

of the first things you notice when you walk into

27:23

her house, other than the countless

27:25

family photos, is her large

27:27

collection of Bibles. Her

27:29

favorite scripture is about mercy,

27:33

something she was searching for when she was serving

27:35

time at Mount Meg's. Not just

27:37

once, but twice.

27:40

My favorite scripture was

27:44

what got me through each day.

27:47

It Psalms fifty one. It

27:49

starts off by saying, have mercy upon

27:52

me, Oh God, according

27:55

to thy loving kindness, according

27:57

to the multitudes of thy timber mercies,

28:01

blot out much transgressions.

28:04

Why should meet, thirdly from my iniquities

28:06

in clears, I mean for my sins. I

28:09

acknowledge my transgressions and sins.

28:12

Goddamn God,

28:19

Damn godam.

28:30

This is Johnny Bodley. He also

28:32

was at Mount Meg's in the nineteen sixties. We

28:35

recently went to his hometown, about

28:37

an hour west from where Jenny lives in Selma,

28:39

Alabama, to a community

28:41

center called by the River Center for Humanity.

28:45

Johnny, who plays the keyboard and the guitar,

28:47

performed several of his songs there. Johnny

28:51

spent a couple of decades in Boston as

28:53

a musician. I was in a major

28:56

popular R and B group band

28:59

up there called the Hypnotics. I

29:01

was in Boston. You know what I was. I

29:04

had become I'm pretty popular,

29:06

you know, because of my green adds. A lot

29:08

of girls have liked it me. You know, if

29:11

you didn't catch that, Johnny says,

29:13

the reason he's so popular with women is because

29:15

of his bright green eyes. After

29:18

Boston, he moved back to Selma. Now

29:21

Johnny busks almost daily in Selma.

29:24

That got Daniel Alabama. I became a church

29:27

musician, you know, play for three

29:30

churches, you know, piano player,

29:32

things that I thought I would never do.

29:36

He plays Marvin Gay and not King

29:38

Cole and Billy Holliday on his Yamaha

29:40

keyboard or strums on his guitar.

29:43

But for the last few years, his main

29:45

focus has been educating local youth.

29:48

I speak throughout the state of Alabama and other places

29:50

to young people. You know about Hiba's

29:53

prevention because of the hfba's prevented

29:56

specialists for a long time. You know, That's

29:58

why. That's how a lot of young people know me. Johnny's

30:01

different than he was when he was younger. He's

30:04

more peaceful now, but trying

30:06

to repair the damage that was done to him

30:08

at Mount Megs was a long road.

30:11

Mount Meegs makes you worse, makes you worse.

30:14

Mount Meegs gave you achilling mentality.

30:17

Mount meeds to a gas into murderers.

30:24

In this mentality that Johnny's describing

30:27

instilled in him at Mount Megs, it

30:29

upended the lives of countless black

30:32

children in Alabama. Last

30:45

year, when I first heard about Mount Megs, there

30:47

was one thing that really caught my attention.

30:51

It was the way that this institution shaped

30:53

the rest of people's lives. Lonnie

30:56

Holly, Jenny Knox, Johnny

30:58

Bodley, and Mary Stevens are still,

31:01

even into their late sixties and seventies,

31:04

dealing with the psychological emotional trauma

31:06

of their time at Mount max. It

31:09

been with me all of my life. I've

31:11

never been able to get the hardest

31:15

part of that out of my life.

31:18

I was told in Mount Megs that you

31:20

know, we will never be anything we will never amount

31:23

to anything. We wasn't going to Mount

31:25

to anything. You know, I've said

31:27

to myself something

31:30

that had to be wrong with them. I

31:33

don't understand what happened.

31:36

And they're also all things considered the

31:39

lucky ones. For countless

31:41

others, the trauma Mount Mags inflicted on

31:43

them irreparably derailed their lives.

31:46

Many are locked up serving life

31:49

sentences or even on death row,

31:51

and others have been executed. Most

31:54

of the gas that I knew it was in my Mags a

31:56

deceased now and Soma

31:59

doing life in prison. Song

32:01

was electecuted, and it's said, how

32:04

are you one of the most violable

32:06

person that you would ever have in

32:09

your life? And those characterisms

32:12

you will be stealing me when

32:14

I was a tweer of thirteen year child

32:16

in Mount May's reformatory. That

32:20

is Johnny mack Young. He's

32:22

serving life in prison without possibility for

32:24

parole for murder. We'll

32:27

spend some time with him later in the series. His

32:30

story echoes the story of so many former

32:32

attendees of Mount Meg's. I've

32:38

been fascinated by, consumed

32:40

by even the story of Mount Meg's

32:42

for about a year now. In some ways

32:45

that's pretty on brand for me, given

32:47

that my professional focus is the criminal legal

32:50

system. But in other ways,

32:52

it's a little different than what I usually do.

32:55

I tend to focus on things that have happened recently

32:58

or are happening right now. But

33:02

this story, the one we're going to

33:04

tell you, it largely takes

33:06

place a few decades ago, in

33:08

the nineteen sixties. But

33:11

the more time we spent on this story, talking

33:14

to people, sorting through archives,

33:16

putting the puzzle pieces together, the

33:19

more we realize that this is in fact a

33:21

story about today. After

33:24

all, at this very moment, Mount

33:26

Meg's is still in operation. This

33:29

is a story about the people who were children

33:32

back then and who they became, but

33:35

it's also a story about the ones that are

33:37

children now in the future

33:39

they face. I

33:42

was surprised and a bit ashamed that

33:44

I'd never even heard of Mount Megs. I've

33:47

spent a fair amount of time in Montgomery. One

33:50

of my best friends from law school lives there.

33:52

Her name is Rachel Judge, and she's

33:55

a federal defender now, meaning she

33:57

represents defendants in federal court.

34:00

But before this, she spent almost a decade

34:02

working in the Alabama state court system.

34:05

As an attorney at the Equal Justice Initiative.

34:09

She spent her whole career representing people

34:11

facing the most severe punishments.

34:15

Some of her clients were kids when they

34:17

were sentenced to life without parole. Many

34:21

of them spent years of their childhoods in adult

34:23

prison. Others

34:26

are on death row. So

34:29

I reached out to her to see what she had

34:31

to say about it. I wanted

34:34

to ask you a

34:36

quick question about a project

34:38

I'm working on because

34:40

I thought you might have some insight. Do you

34:42

have a second to talk? Yeah,

34:45

okay, great. Have you heard

34:47

of a place called

34:49

Mount Meg's. Oh yeah,

34:52

I mean that's just right outside of Montgomery, right, you're

34:54

talking about that one, Yeah, the like institution

34:57

for kids. Honestly, I hadn't

34:59

heard of it for a minute. I always saw the

35:02

signs driving into Montgomery.

35:04

But then I had client, one of my clients

35:07

who was sentenced to light without the role

35:09

as a kid. He spent time there

35:12

in the late eighties. So I think tragically,

35:14

that is a place that ends up feeding

35:17

a lot of kids into the adult system, and then

35:19

a number of them even end up on Alabama's

35:21

death Row. A lot of kids

35:23

who spent time there

35:26

and were likely abused

35:28

there right then ended up, like

35:30

you said, serving life without parole

35:33

sentences or even on death row. So

35:35

it's like crazy to hear you say that. Well,

35:38

I had a client. He spoke about being shackled

35:42

on his hands and feet and his waist

35:44

twenty four hours as day, for days at a

35:46

time, and that's right now,

35:49

that's twenty I'm sure it was like

35:51

twenty fourteen something like that. I

35:53

can't what it was like in the sixties and

35:55

seventies. To imagine it decades

35:58

ago, it's pretty unfathomable.

36:02

We've been trying to figure out how to get into the

36:04

Mountains campus for over a year, but

36:08

we basically got nowhere. Especially

36:10

given COVID, no one was

36:12

willing to let us in. So

36:14

eventually I just decided to go on

36:17

the off chance that I could just manage to talk

36:19

my way in once I got there. But

36:22

unsurprisingly my plan didn't

36:24

work. Kay, I've

36:26

been working on a project about the Mount

36:29

Megs and the sixties, and I was just hoping I could

36:31

see the campus. Is there a way we could

36:33

just drive around it? So

36:38

I pulled over outside the gate and

36:40

walked around a little. I couldn't stop

36:43

thinking about the thousands of children,

36:46

mostly black children, who'd been

36:48

stuck here, especially back in the

36:50

nineteen sixties. How

36:52

did it happen and what did it take

36:54

to make the abuse stop? In

36:58

this season of Unreformed, we look at

37:00

what Mount Meg's intended to be when it was founded

37:02

in nineteen oh seven and the nightmare

37:04

that it had been actually became. This

37:08

is a story of the abuse suffered by the children

37:10

trapped there and what happened

37:12

after five girls escaped and

37:15

found someone who decided to do something

37:17

about it. This

37:21

season Unreformed, they

37:24

was literally bent over with

37:27

their hands pulling grass.

37:30

This the holloway laid him down right in front

37:32

of everybody and almost beat him to death.

37:34

Their slogan was lifting as we climbed,

37:37

this idea that as you climb a

37:39

ladder, those folk who were at the bottom

37:41

are still yours. This model

37:44

actually worked in the case of a Satchel

37:46

page. I backed up, and I kept

37:48

backing up, and I stopped

37:51

running. I was

37:53

not going back without telling somebody,

37:56

well scoring on with me now.

37:58

I think, you know what, I can't be

38:00

the kind of father to

38:02

my own kids if I walk away

38:04

from those girls. I was this liberal

38:07

Jewish kid coming down from the North, and here

38:09

I am in Montgomery, Alabama, doing my thing,

38:11

and I'm going to file civil rights cases the

38:13

absolute denial of basic

38:16

and fundamental human rights to

38:19

Negro children who are incroc

38:21

Writing in a concentration camp

38:24

at Mountain Meg's Alaame

38:26

gave me in a foundation for everything that I am,

38:28

all that I am now as a thought of a mound me,

38:31

all that I would be would always be a pout

38:33

of the mound me unreformed.

38:39

The Story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro

38:41

Children is a production of School of Humans

38:44

and iHeartMedia. This

38:48

episode was written by Taylor Bond, Lastlie and

38:50

me Josie Uffie Race. Our script

38:52

supervisor is Florence Burrow Adams and our

38:55

producer is Gabbie Watts. We

38:57

had additional writing and production support from Sherry

38:59

Scott. Executive producers

39:01

are Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crowley, Brandon

39:04

Barr, Matt Ournette, and sound

39:06

design and mix is by Jesse Niswaller. Music

39:09

is by Ben Soli, with recordings courtesy of

39:11

the Alabama Center for Traditional Culture.

39:14

Special thanks to Alabama Department of Archives

39:16

and History, Michael Harriet, Floyd Hall, Kevin

39:18

Nutt, Van Nuker, and all of the survivors

39:20

of Mount Meg's willing to share their story.

39:23

If you are someone you know attended Mount Megs

39:25

and would like to connect with us, please email

39:27

Mountmegs Podcast at gmail dot com.

39:29

That's mt M e i g S

39:32

Podcast at gmail dot

39:34

com. School

39:52

of Humans