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

Listens: 0

About

In 1968, police arrested five Black girls dressed in oversized military fatigues in Montgomery. The girls were runaways, escaping from a state-run reform school called the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children in Mount Meigs, Alabama. The girls were determined to tell someone about the abuse they’d suffered there: physical and sexual violence, unlivable facilities, and grueling labor in the fields surrounding the school. It was, as several former students called it, a slave camp. UNREFORMED is the story of how this reform school derailed the lives of thousands of Black children in Alabama for decades and what happened after those five girls found someone willing to blow the whistle. Host Josie Duffy Rice investigates the history of the school at the tail end of the Civil Rights movement in Alabama and speaks to former students who are still haunted by their experience but had the will to survive.

Episode 8: Searching for Justice

In the final episode, we look at where Lonnie, Mary, Johnny, Jennie, Johnny Mack, and Denny are fifty years after leaving Mt. Meigs. We also look at h...
Show notes

Episode 7: The Aftermath

Many people who were incarcerated at Mt. Meigs as children ended up spending their entire lives tethered to the criminal legal system. Many were sente...
Show notes

Episode 5: When Mary Met Denny

Mary Stephens and four other girls escape Mt. Meigs and are determined to tell someone about what's happened to them. Probation officer Denny Abbott m...
Show notes

Episode 4: The Runaways

Since the 1920s, notices started appearing in the local newspapers near Mt. Meigs. They said things like "Six armed negroes escaped Mount Meigs Indust...
Show notes

Episode 3: Cornelia's Dream

By the 1960s, the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children was an early prototype of the for-profit prison. But it wasn’t designed that way. In th...
Show notes

Episode 2: The Arrival

Survivors of Mt. Meigs share how they ended up in the juvenile justice system and what happened once they went down the long road to the reformatory. ...
Show notes

Episode 1: The Lucky Ones

Reporter Josie Duffy Rice travels to a small town outside Montgomery, Alabama, and tries to visit a juvenile reform school, once called the Alabama In...
Show notes