Episode 1: The Lucky Ones

little unincorporated part of the county called Mount Meg's. I was there to set foot on the grounds of an old Alabama institution that I'd spent the last year investigating. It was hot outside, over ninety degrees. I drove down a long road looking for my destination, but other than a few houses, it was mostly empty until you pull

up to the entrance. You know, it's a long, huge stretch of land right by the highway in an area of Montgomery where there's really not much, which is sort of saying something because Montgomery isn't the most happened in town anyway. And when you pull in on your right is a huge stretch of like swampland filled with sticks and scum and mud. Outside of the entrance to the actual youth center, you just see gates and barbed wire fence and it looks like a prison. So I drove

up the long driveway lined with trees. I drove past the visitors building, past the swamp, and up to this most double gait, the kind built to keep everyone out. I rolled down my window and I asked the guard if he would let me in. I'm Josie Duffie Rice. I'm a writer and a journalist, and before that I went to law school. I've spent my career focused on the criminal legal system, and I've long been particularly interested in how we treat children accused of crimes. I'm also

from the South. I grew up in Georgia, and a few years ago my family and I moved back there. And on this day, I was in Alabama outside a juvenile correctional facility, trying to get in. Since it was founded over a hundred years ago, this institution has had many names. First, it was called the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Boys, then in nineteen eleven, became the Alabama Reform School for Juvenile Negro Lawbreakers. Eventually, after it went co ed, it changed its name again to the Alabama

Industrial School for Negro Children. As you may have figured from the names for most of its history, this facility held only black kids. These days, it's technically named the Mount Meg's Campus of the Alabama Department of Youth Services, but almost everybody just calls it Mount Megs. Technically Mount Meg's was a reform school for kids, but what I've discovered is that it wasn't really a school at all. Mount Megs with padded after swa the slave camp like

a plantation. We didn't have school, they didn't have anything. It was just slave draw just played driving Black prison for teams, penal column for children. This is Unreformed the Story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, Episode one, the Lucky Ones. Before we talk about what happened at Mount Meg's, we have to go back to a boy named Lonnie in Birmingham, Alabama, in the early nineteen sixties.

In the Alabama summers, you can hear the whisper of living things, the rustle of tiny creatures and the grass, the hum of katie DIDs and crickets, the blue jays flitting from one tree to another. There's a lot to discover if you're willing to look. And as a kid, Lonnie Holly was always looking on any given evening in nineteen sixty one. Back when Lonnie was eleven, you might have seen him in Birmingham, a young boy looking for critters or some interesting piece of litter on the side

of the road. It was like an adventure, a child on an adventure down the ditches on the creeks and seeing the broken material. The closer you got to downtown, you got a chance to see more and more and more and more waste material that had been flushed down the creek and the ditches. Lonnie was always finding some unusual thing that someone else had discarded. He loved finding worms and tadpoles. He had the mud soaked curiosity of any eleven year old boy, and he did this often,

ran away to explore, to search. Lonnie had literally dozens of siblings, but legend has it that he was his mother's scrawniest child. And I'm the seventh of her twenty seven children, but the last one that had to go through the most abuse, one of twenty seven. But on this night in nineteen sixty one, Lonnie is basically an orphan. He lost touch with his family when he was a toddler after a local dancer who was a friend of

his mother's, noticed how frail he was. This lady, she was a burulette dancer at the fair ground, and that she keep me and she could breath feed me, you know. So the dancer took Lonnie in so she could feed him, but then eventually she too was gone. In some tellings of the story, the burlesque dancer left him with a couple in exchange for a bottle of whiskey. That couple, the mcilroys, owned a whiskey house, and they took Lonnie in.

Back then, he was known as Tonky macilroy. Latuki was the one that was always being mistreated or whatever, but in a sense, little TUCKI was always the one that was kept sound. Lonnie was in that house for years. Missus McIlroy was good to him. She became a surrogate mother. Even now, Lonnie says that she loved him like he was her own son. But still these weren't happy years. He was alone so often, and mister McElroy was an

alcoholic and abusive. And it wasn't just him. There were others around Lonnie who would beat him, sometimes badly enough to land him in the hospital. Lonnie remembers one story from when he was around four years old, when an old man was at the whiskey house drunk. Lonnie was eating a plate of food. Was gonna be kicking off my plate, and I dropped the plate and crawled up underneath the couch, and he kept reaching under there, and I think I beat him on the armor on the

hand of something. The man was furious and he got made and went over there and got the pokeone that you strew up the hot colds and stuff with in the heater, and shiwed the pokin in my heat and put a hole in my head. The field enough and they had to rush me to the horspital because I was holling and screaming. That was the first incident of me having to be involved will hospital, was to get this pokeraon pulled out of my head. A few years later,

when Lonnie was seven, Missus McIlroy died. Mister McIlroy was out as usual, running around with his other ladies. It was unexpected, at least for Lonnie, and he didn't really get it. No one had taught him anything about death, so for days it was just him in her dead body in the house alone. It wasn't until mister McIlroy got home that Lonnie learned that she was dead. To god, damn it, you don't killed my wife. And he was so angry with me, and he just stopped beating me.

Lonnie ran out of the house as fast as he could. I remembered grabbing my wagon Alfham under the house and just busting out the fence. And then suddenly Lonnie was hit by a car and dragged for blocks. And I remember the car hitting me drugged me up a nap underneath it. After three and a half months in a coma, Lonnie woke up in the hospital. He didn't want to go back to live with mister McElroy, but it was kind of the only option he had nowhere else to go.

Lonnie got older and every so often he'd hear whispers or rumors about his birth family. Someone told him that his mother was living with his brothers and sisters out by the Birmingham Airport. Lonnie wanted to find them, but it was too vague, too impractical. It's not like a young black boy could just knock on random doors asking

people if they'd seen his mother. All I could think about every day, every hour, or my mama and my mama having a bunch of children, and they lived at a crosstown well where was a crosstown So for years Lonnie coped with the life that he had. He waited until after dark and then explored where he could when

he could. So no, it wasn't a happy life. It wasn't care free or joyful, but he had his small pleasures, like his adventures in the dishes, exploring moments of freedom, until one night when even that was snatched away from him. And this particularly evening her hey got all the way to town. I was out doing carefew and that was the reason enough for him to teching did jubuna. So

this was a common thing back then. You even see it now sometimes actually, especially in the South, there were curfews and laws against skipping school and loitering and congregating, but almost always these laws were only enforced against black people and Jim Crow Alabama, these tiny infractions led to countless black children entangled in the criminal legal system, like Lonnie. When he was eleven years old, the cops arrested him, put him in the back of the cruiser, and took

him to jail for being out past curfew. Lonnie wasn't the only black kid in the jail. He wasn't even the only one in his cell. The others had been arrested for their involvement in the civil rights movement that was brewing in Alabama, especially in Birmingham. By the time Lonnie got there, they've been planning their escape enjoining the jailbreak didn't feel like much of a choice. Well, you either broke out, I got your ass beat because they

wasn't gonna leave you behind and tell one. They had this ridiculous plan that deering lights out, they'd somehow trick a janitor into opening their cell door, steal his keys, and make their great escape. Somehow it worked. We took his key to his automobile and every time and ran out the back interest of the juvenile. Juvenile the group managed to drive away, their tires screeching in the rain, but unfortunately their getaway driver wasn't as talented as he

let on. We didn't know how to drive real good, so we was ribbing on the road and then all of a sudden he went through on drake and hit the telegram Poe. And once he had the Telegram Poe, he had a rig. Within moments they heard sirens. They took us right back to the juvenile put his back in the sail, and early that morning we was loaded up in this truck and took to this place called

Alabama in Duster School for Nigro Cheered. By age eleven, Lonnie had already been separated from his family, endured beatings, lost his surrogate mother, received a life threatening injury to his head, been dragged underneath a truck, spent three months in a coma, and suffered countless other abuses. But now on the road to Mount Meg's, Lonnie was about to enter some of the worst years of his life. About a year ago, I got an email about Lonnie Holly.

Now I had never met Lonnie, but I come from a family of art lovers, so I had heard about him. Lonnie Bradley Holly, formerly Tonky the boy playing in the Ditches in Birmingham in nineteen sixty one, is now a musician, an arts educator, and most notably, an internationally renowned artist. By nineteen eighty eighty two, my works had been to sixty four cities. My works had went to the Smithsonian.

Lonnie's art can be found in many other museums too, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery. I spent time with him recently in a friend's home in Atlanta, and his work was everywhere. Hanging from the ceiling was this incredible sculpture he made from wire, wood, paper, and metal, or, as Lonnie puts it, all the things that people throw away. On the countertop was a small, beautiful sculpture made from sandstone. Lonnie is self taught through

and through. His art comes from the kind of things he used to find in the ditches. Talking to him, you sense that in his life, art and tragedy are often inseparable. In fact, the first time he realized he was making art, he was in his twenties. After the death of his young niece and nephew, his family couldn't afford headstones, so Lonnie offered to make them. I didn't know anything about art or sculpture or did depict all

of those things. I learned after my sister two children was buried and I started working with this material and it was a sandstone. I was cutting different shapes and making baby tombstones. It was a Tuskegee arm and came by he lived it down the screet for my Grandpels say, you know what you're doing. I said, no, sir, he said, I've been almost all around the world and I've seen a lot of things on he said, but death what

you are doing? He said, you're doing art. Fans of Liney's art know that his hardships were his tours and tribulations leave the foundation for all of his work. In fact, it was those hardships that led to the email in my box asking me if I was interested in helping tell the story. The email wasn't about Lonnie's work or his career. It was about the three years he spent at the Alabama Industrial School for Negro children. There were no educational facilities there. You can't stop, you can never

break the line, you can never slow down. If you do, you we was being treated with dull man. I mean boys got raped all the time. Amount me. You'd hit him by the hundred, a hundred the water to tie with a palace, and she comes down on your back as hard as you can. Well. Avery also strengthen her day, beating me to the print that I couldn't even walk. I couldn't do nothing but crowd. She had hit me in the head with a bottle in my head was swallowing. She would make me stay on the stairs so I

wouldn't be seeing. You'll see these graves over to the side. They won't heed. There's a lot of boys didn't even make it out amount me. Over the past few years, we've heard more and more disturbing stories about places like Mount Meg's, institutions for so called delinquent children, where miners were brutally abused. These institutions have a long history in America. For more than a century, children have been shipped off to quote unquote reform schools. Some of them, like Mount Meg's,

are state run institutions. Others are expensive reform boarding schools where the wealthiest and their wayward kids. But the thing that they have in common is the abuse. Many kids ended up dead. Mount Meg's was one of these places, and yet it has a particularly unique origin story. It was started in nineteen oh seven by the daughter of an enslaved woman. It was an institution that was meant to reform, to rehabilitate, to get black children out of

adult prisons. But then the state of Alabama took over the school and it did just the opposite. Honestly, it's hard to imagine how any kid could have emerged from Mount Meg's unharmed. Much of Mount Meg's history is unknown, especially the early years. Part of that is due to poor record keeping, maybe to avoid oversight. Some of it can also be chopped up to bad luck, since what little did exist was burned in a fire in the nineteen twenties. But mostly it was probably just negligence or

general disregard for the lives of poor black children. Children are really vulnerable, very vulnerable. They don't vote, they don't like campaign contributions, they don't have political friends in high places that can make things happen. They were totally at the wild of adults. That's Denny Abbott. He's eighty three years old now, but he was only twenty one when he started working in youth corrections and visited Mount Meg's for the first time. That was in nineteen sixty one,

the same year Lonnie was sent there. Danny is a white guy, like most people working in corrections in Alabama, and back then, he was responsible for taking both black and white kids to their respective segregated reform schools. Immediately, he noticed a disparity between the two. The white kids had a good educational program and both of the boys and girls. In the white schools, they had social services, they had medical services, vocational rehab services, but Mount Megs,

Mountain Megs had none of those. Zero, not one. Picture the worst environment for children that you possibly can and Mountain Megs is at the top of that list. Nobody got a fair shake at Mountain Megs, not one kid, and it was a disgrace. Danny took this job when he was fresh out of college. It was decent work, stable, it came with a pension, but still he didn't like what he saw at Mount Megs. It bothered him so much so that he reported the conditions of the reformatory

numerous times to his superiors. Of course, nothing happened, and there's a very simple reason why nothing happened. Nobody cared. They were black kids. They almost didn't exist except to do things for white people. So nobody cared and nothing ever happened. Mount Megs was started in nineteen oh seven and it still exists today, and honestly, every era of its history could be its own series. But there is a reason we are focused on Mount Meg's in the sixties.

The school sits right outside of what was not just a battleground state, but a battleground city in the fight for civil rights. Mount Megs is just a few miles away from where Rosa Parks refused to get up from her seat on the bus, where Martin Luther King was arrested, where civil rights leaders like John Lewis marched from Selma. And while much of America slowly started to improve throughout the decade, Alabama refused. Mount Meg's was at its absolute worst.

That is until a few brave people tried to change things for the kids there, and the civil rights movement came to Mount Megs's doorstep. Whereas with the help of Lonnie and Denny, we were able to find other children who were sent to Mount Megs in the sixties. Throughout this series, you'll hear from many former students talking about their time there, including archival interviews recorded in the mid nineteen nineties, and you'll hear from four survivors in particular.

Among them, they spent almost a whole decade at Mount Meg's. Each year that one left, a new one joined. Lonnie Holly was the first to be sent to Mount Megs. There from nineteen sixty one to nineteen sixty four, Jenny Knox was there from about nineteen sixty four to nineteen sixty seven. Then there's Mary Stevens who was there from

nineteen sixty seven to nineteen sixty nine. And Johnny Bodley who was also sent there in nineteen sixty seven and stayed until nineteen seventy y. I stand but been tree right there, that's where I have a breakfast. I stand any figs. This is Mary Stevens. I don't know. She's a soft spoken woman, a mother who surrounds herself with photos of her children. Mary is a gardener, and these days she enjoys the fruit trees and plants in her

garden in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I love figs. They're just there coming out. This is a plum tree. That's a lot of plum have fallen. All have strawberries. As a matter of fact, my little one, the day that he came home may be four, the strawberries were blown. And that was Mary is talking about one of her younger sons. Her biological children are all grown up now, and a few years ago she adopted two boys. And this is

a Georgia plum tree. Listening to Mary, you can hear in her voice, the pride and joy in her home. She's carved out this quiet life for herself and her children. It's hard to imagine her at a place like Mount Meg's, but in the late nineteen sixties she spent eighteen months at the institution. In nineteen sixty eight, Mary and four other black girls decided to run away from Mount Meg's, but they didn't manage to get very far before they were caught. They were picked up by police and brought

to the juvenile detention center. But it just so happened that this detention center in Montgomery was also where Denny's office was. Runaways from Mount Meg's were not unusual. Desperate kids ran away all of the time, but this time these girls insisted on speaking to someone in charge. That someone was Denny and that meeting would change everything. After connecting with Lonnie and Mary, we were able to find other survivors of Mount Meg's. Jenny Knox lives in Montgomery.

She's seventy now, and when we went to her house, she opened the door dressed in her Sunday best. I was born in the fifties, and that's thou I light. This one is a red and white flower dress. Amma red Flower, build Amma sander shoes over there with the glitter and my necklaces and stuff, and so I just wanted to dress up for you guys. Jenny is extremely

welcoming a great host. Jenny is also a devout Christian, and one of the first things you notice when you walk into her house, other than the countless family photos, is her large collection of Bibles. Her favorite scripture is about mercy, something she was searching for when she was serving time at Mount Meg's. Not just once, but twice. My favorite scripture was what got me through each day.

It Psalms fifty one. It starts off by saying, have mercy upon me, Oh God, according to thy loving kindness, according to the multitudes of thy timber mercies, blot out much transgressions. Why should meet, thirdly from my iniquities in clears, I mean for my sins. I acknowledge my transgressions and sins. Goddamn God, Damn godam. This is Johnny Bodley. He also

was at Mount Meg's in the nineteen sixties. We recently went to his hometown, about an hour west from where Jenny lives in Selma, Alabama, to a community center called by the River Center for Humanity. Johnny, who plays the keyboard and the guitar, performed several of his songs there. Johnny spent a couple of decades in Boston as a musician. I was in a major popular R and B group band up there called the Hypnotics. I was in Boston. You know what I was. I had become I'm pretty popular,

you know, because of my green adds. A lot of girls have liked it me. You know, if you didn't catch that, Johnny says, the reason he's so popular with women is because of his bright green eyes. After Boston, he moved back to Selma. Now Johnny busks almost daily in Selma. That got Daniel Alabama. I became a church musician, you know, play for three churches, you know, piano player, things that I thought I would never do. He plays Marvin Gay and not King Cole and Billy Holliday on

his Yamaha keyboard or strums on his guitar. But for the last few years, his main focus has been educating local youth. I speak throughout the state of Alabama and other places to young people. You know about Hiba's prevention because of the hfba's prevented specialists for a long time. You know, That's why. That's how a lot of young people know me. Johnny's different than he was when he was younger. He's more peaceful now, but trying to repair the damage that was done to him at Mount Megs

was a long road. Mount Meegs makes you worse, makes you worse. Mount Meegs gave you achilling mentality. Mount meeds to a gas into murderers. In this mentality that Johnny's describing instilled in him at Mount Megs, it upended the lives of countless black children in Alabama. Last year, when I first heard about Mount Megs, there was one thing that really caught my attention. It was the way that

this institution shaped the rest of people's lives. Lonnie Holly, Jenny Knox, Johnny Bodley, and Mary Stevens are still, even into their late sixties and seventies, dealing with the psychological emotional trauma of their time at Mount max. It been with me all of my life. I've never been able to get the hardest part of that out of my life. I was told in Mount Megs that you know, we will never be anything we will never amount to anything.

We wasn't going to Mount to anything. You know, I've said to myself something that had to be wrong with them. I don't understand what happened. And they're also all things considered the lucky ones. For countless others, the trauma Mount Mags inflicted on them irreparably derailed their lives. Many are locked up serving life sentences or even on death row, and others have been executed. Most of the gas that I knew it was in my Mags a deceased now

and Soma doing life in prison. Song was electecuted, and it's said, how are you one of the most violable person that you would ever have in your life? And those characterisms you will be stealing me when I was a tweer of thirteen year child in Mount May's reformatory. That is Johnny mack Young. He's serving life in prison without possibility for parole for murder. We'll spend some time with him later in the series. His story echoes the

story of so many former attendees of Mount Meg's. I've been fascinated by, consumed by even the story of Mount Meg's for about a year now. In some ways that's pretty on brand for me, given that my professional focus is the criminal legal system. But in other ways, it's a little different than what I usually do. I tend to focus on things that have happened recently or are happening right now. But this story, the one we're going to tell you, it largely takes place a few decades ago,

in the nineteen sixties. But the more time we spent on this story, talking to people, sorting through archives, putting the puzzle pieces together, the more we realize that this is in fact a story about today. After all, at this very moment, Mount Meg's is still in operation. This is a story about the people who were children back then and who they became, but it's also a story about the ones that are children now in the future they face. I was surprised and a bit ashamed that

I'd never even heard of Mount Megs. I've spent a fair amount of time in Montgomery. One of my best friends from law school lives there. Her name is Rachel Judge, and she's a federal defender now, meaning she represents defendants in federal court. But before this, she spent almost a decade working in the Alabama state court system. As an attorney at the Equal Justice Initiative. She spent her whole

career representing people facing the most severe punishments. Some of her clients were kids when they were sentenced to life without parole. Many of them spent years of their childhoods in adult prison. Others are on death row. So I reached out to her to see what she had to say about it. I wanted to ask you a quick question about a project I'm working on because I thought you might have some insight. Do you have a second to talk? Yeah, okay, great. Have you heard of a

place called Mount Meg's. Oh yeah, I mean that's just right outside of Montgomery, right, you're talking about that one, Yeah, the like institution for kids. Honestly, I hadn't heard of it for a minute. I always saw the signs driving into Montgomery. But then I had client, one of my clients who was sentenced to light without the role as a kid. He spent time there in the late eighties.

So I think tragically, that is a place that ends up feeding a lot of kids into the adult system, and then a number of them even end up on Alabama's death Row. A lot of kids who spent time there and were likely abused there right then ended up, like you said, serving life without parole sentences or even on death row. So it's like crazy to hear you

say that. Well, I had a client. He spoke about being shackled on his hands and feet and his waist twenty four hours as day, for days at a time, and that's right now, that's twenty I'm sure it was like twenty fourteen something like that. I can't what it was like in the sixties and seventies. To imagine it decades ago, it's pretty unfathomable. We've been trying to figure out how to get into the Mountains campus for over a year, but we basically got nowhere. Especially given COVID,

no one was willing to let us in. So eventually I just decided to go on the off chance that I could just manage to talk my way in once I got there. But unsurprisingly my plan didn't work. Kay, I've been working on a project about the Mount Megs and the sixties, and I was just hoping I could see the campus. Is there a way we could just drive around it? So I pulled over outside the gate

and walked around a little. I couldn't stop thinking about the thousands of children, mostly black children, who'd been stuck here, especially back in the nineteen sixties. How did it happen and what did it take to make the abuse stop? In this season of Unreformed, we look at what Mount Meg's intended to be when it was founded in nineteen oh seven and the nightmare that it had been actually became.

This is a story of the abuse suffered by the children trapped there and what happened after five girls escaped and found someone who decided to do something about it. This season Unreformed, they was literally bent over with their hands pulling grass. This the holloway laid him down right in front of everybody and almost beat him to death. Their slogan was lifting as we climbed, this idea that as you climb a ladder, those folk who were at the bottom are still yours. This model actually worked in

the case of a Satchel page. I backed up, and I kept backing up, and I stopped running. I was not going back without telling somebody, well scoring on with me now. I think, you know what, I can't be the kind of father to my own kids if I

walk away from those girls. I was this liberal Jewish kid coming down from the North, and here I am in Montgomery, Alabama, doing my thing, and I'm going to file civil rights cases the absolute denial of basic and fundamental human rights to Negro children who are incroc Writing in a concentration camp at Mountain Meg's Alaame gave me in a foundation for everything that I am, all that I am now as a thought of a mound me, all that I would be would always be a pout

of the mound me unreformed. The Story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children is a production of School of Humans and iHeartMedia. This episode was written by Taylor Bond, Lastlie and me Josie Uffie Race. Our script supervisor is Florence Burrow Adams and our producer is Gabbie Watts. We had additional writing and production support from Sherry Scott. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crowley, Brandon Barr, Matt Ournette,

and sound design and mix is by Jesse Niswaller. Music is by Ben Soli, with recordings courtesy of the Alabama Center for Traditional Culture. Special thanks to Alabama Department of Archives and History, Michael Harriet, Floyd Hall, Kevin Nutt, Van Nuker, and all of the survivors of Mount Meg's willing to share their story. If you are someone you know attended Mount Megs and would like to connect with us, please email Mountmegs Podcast at gmail dot com. That's mt M

e i g S Podcast at gmail dot com. School of Humans