Episode 3: Cornelia's Dream

remains one of baseball's most celebrated pitchers. Page's pitching remained bold, versatile, and unpredictable as he was pitching for the Indians in that historic game some seventy four years ago. In the nineteen forty eight game, his fast pitching was on full display. The pitch swung on and I don't think the fast. Each man who went up to bat against him dreaded it. And he had stamina. He was eighteen when he began playing baseball professionally and didn't hang up his hat until

he was almost sixty. Page started in the Negro National Leagues in the mid nineteen twenties and eventually became the first black pitcher to play in the American League. All the best players of the time said Paige was the greatest. Joe DiMaggio called him the best I've ever faced and the fastest. Plus the man had more personality than the rest of the league combined. Here he is in nineteen fifty eight talking to a reporter in Miami. While he

was playing. It became a running joke that Sachel would never disclose his age. The truth I don't think of but a very few people in the United States, nor my age, of where I come from me because I've been playing him since I was a kid. I never had a job. But still this isn't one hundred years run everybody on feet. This he did played ball with miss albums one hundred, some of them eighty five and ninety. Page died in nineteen eighty two. He's buried in Kansas City, Missouri,

home of his beloved Negro League Monarchs. The Page's roots were further south. He grew up in a poor family, the sixth of twelve children, in a segregated neighborhood called Down the Bay in Mobile, Alabama. Nat You at least stands a home in Kansas City. He visits down a mobile as that said one time that I just live

wearing pitcher. Both Satchel Page's birthplace and resting place claim him mobile in Kansas City have streets, schools, and scholarships in his name, but most people don't know that there was a third place that changed Sachel Page's life. In fact, if it wasn't for one woman, Cornelia Bowen of Tuskegee, Alabama, the great Sachel Page might never have been because he was on a trail to He's gonna either get end up being lands dead. This is Donald Spivey, an American

historian and distinguished professor at University of Miami. He wrote the book If You Were Only White, The Life of Leroy Satchel Page was trouble youth in appollance of black people. He was hardheaded. He was just a difficult, difficult child, and back then, and particularly in the South, they would tell you go and fetch me a switch. He heard that so often that that could have been his other nickname rather than Satchell. He could have been go and

fetch me a switch. That hardheadedness got young Satchel into trouble outside of the home too. By twelve, he was known in his neighborhood for stealing, and it's rumored that his nickname Satchel came from an incident where he was

caught stealing a bag and he skipped school. Even back then, though Satchell could throw throw hard, he'd hunt with just a pile of rocks in mobile train tracks separated down the bay from the nearby white neighborhood, and sometimes young white boys and black boys would meet along the tracks

to battle. They had a ongoing rock bottles with the Oakdale School, which was a white school across the railroad tracks, and white students threw rocks up and they threw rocks back at them, and this became the racial rock wars. One bottle got out of hand, page trying to hold off this forward coming mob of white started throwing rocks with bad intentions, and you know, with his ability to throw,

he was hitting people in the head. And he's lucky he didn't lock somebody's eye out, and the white Yonsters luckily didn't complain to their parents about it. Community could have been wiped out down the bay, might have been spared, but Sachel's prowess with rocks and his reputation for sticky fingers soon caught the attention of Mobile's police chief Frank Crenshaw, a man whose peacekeeping philosophy included the belief that all black boys between seven and sixteen should be sent to

a detention facility for any minor crime. He said as much in a letter he wrote to the founder of Tuskegee University, Booker T. Washington, about quote unquote the juvenile delinquents, Delinquents like Satchel Paige, who, on July twenty fourth, nineteen eighteen, at the age of twelve, was sent to the Alabama Reform School for Juvenile Negro lawbreakers in Mount Meg's, Alabama. He would be there for six years or until his

eighteenth birthday, whichever came first. He thinks it's the worst day of his life, that he's being sentenced to school, he's being sentenced to prison, so he doesn't realize that in fact, this saved his life. What we know now is that the school, later known as the alabam An Industrial School for Negro Children, became a place where thousands of Alabama's black boys and girls were subjected to abuse

and torture in the name of rehabilitation and reform. But at its inception, the school was something else, entirely a safe haven for black children who would have otherwise been thrown into adult prison. I'm Josie Duffie Rice, and this is Unreformed the story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children. Episode three, Cornelia's Dream. Cornelia Bowen was the

founder of Mount Megs. And in order to understand what Mount Meg's became, you have to understand how it started Cornelia's vision, and really you have to understand this strange, remarkable life. She lived a life that was only possible during that one narrow sliver of history as slavery ended in the reconstruction era began. Of myself and the war I have done, there is not a great deal to say. I was born at Tuskegee, Alabama. My mother lived the greater part of her life at this place as the

slave of Colonel William Bowen. The birthplace of my mother was Baltimore, Maryland. She was taught to read by her master's daughter in Baltimore and was never forbidden to read by those who owned her in Alabama. That's Alabama born art historian and professor Alvia Wardlaw. You'll hear her reading Cornelia's words throughout this episode. Cornelia was born on the Bowen Plantation in Macon County, Alabama, just east of Montgomery.

It's hard to know exactly when. Some say she was born in eighteen fifty eight, Others think that it was more like eighteen sixty four, and after going down a rabbit hole of census records, I'm inclined to agree. This, of course, is one of the casualties of being black during slavery and in the years after, records of your life were sparse and inconsistent. We don't know anything about Cornelia's father. Some think he must have been a slave owner, but there is really no way for us to know.

But what we do know is that her mother, Sophia, was enslaved. Sophia worked as a seamstress in the home of her white slave owner, and later Cornelia recalled that her mother wasn't even allowed to talk to the people working in the fields. Another thing about Sophia she could read, and later, when her three daughters were young, she taught them to read too. On Sundays, with my sisters gathered about her knees, we would sit for hours listening as

mother would read church hymns. These days were days of freedom, as I do not remember and know nothing of those of slavery. My mother always refrained from telling her children frightful stories of the awful sufferings of the slave days. So Cornelia was the child of an enslaved woman, and her life turned out drastically different than her mother's. In eighteen eighty one, the state appropriated two thousand dollars to

start a black college in Macon County. A white state senator former Confederate, had pushed for the appropriation himself, hoping it would get him black votes. This was during the post Reconstruction period where black people had some voting rights before they were taken away again, and this was more evidence of what the right to vote meant, at least some political power, opportunity, and sometimes education. Booker T. Washington himself was the person tasked with building this new college

in Macon County. He ended up purchasing the Bowen plantation where Cornelia was born, the same plantation where her mother was enslaved. On it, he built the institute now known as Tuskegee University and historically black university that is renowned to this day and in eighteen eighty five, Cornelia graduated

with honors in Tuskegee's first graduating class. To my class that graduated in eighteen eighty five, the first one to graduate, we proudly boast three Peabody Medals were awarded for excellence in scholarship, and I was awarded one of the medals. Think for a second about how remarkable this is. Here was a black woman getting a college diploma on the very same land her own mother had been a slave. I don't know exactly what shaped Cornelia's outlook on the world.

Of course, we missed each other by about a hundred years. But in her records you can see the three main influences that shaped her politics and how she saw the world. The first was her education, and the second was her mentor, Booker T. Washington. Mister Washington himself took charge of our classes, and I have always been very proud that I can

say that he was my teacher. If I have been of any service to my people, I owe it all to mister Washington, who impressed upon me those lessons which led me to want to spend myself in the helping of my people. Here's Booker T. In nineteen o eight, reading an excerpt of a speech he gave in eighteen ninety five. It was his most famous, called the Atlanta Compromise, and this is the only known audio recording of his voice. He did not train that in the first years of

All New Life. He began at the top because of the fun it's hard to hear him, I know, not great sound quality in the early nineteen hundreds, But what he's basically saying is that black people were too focused on political power and intellectual pursuits and not focused enough on earning money or learning a trade, or in his words, that the political convention or stump speaking had more attractions than starting a dairy farm or truck garden. Note that

he's literally giving a speech when he says that. It's a confusing thing to say when he only got his university because the local state senator needed black votes. But Booker t always had a shall we say, controversial perspective on how black people should function in a post slavery America where racism ran rampant and equality remained a pipe dream. He was essentially the father of respectability politics. He spent a lot of time focused on what black people were

doing wrong. He liked to tell black people to work harder to get a hobby, and this perspective was a foundation on which Booker T's philosophy of industrial education was built. Part of the theory behind industrial education was respectability and

an attempt to make black people indispensable. People like Cornelia and Booker T encourage black people to focus on trade work, and basically what that meant was that even though black folks had been freed from the practice of slavery, they should still arm themselves with similar skills that they practiced

on the plantation. Cornelia was an early and avid supporter of Booker T. Washington's philosophy of industrial education, So in eighteen eighty eight, when Washington himself requested that Cornelia moved to wa to teach, she did it. Wa Waugh was this poor black community about fifteen miles outside of Montgomery. It was there that Cornelia founded her first school, the Colored Institute, almost twenty years before she founded Mount Meg's.

Not one person in the whole community owned a foot of land, and heavy crop mortgages were the burden of every farmer. It became evident at once that pioneer work was very much needed, homes were neglected, and the sacredness of family life was unknown to most of the people. While there, Cornelia began getting more involved with local women's clubs, the third thing that shaped her worldview. Cornelia never married, had no kids, which was unusual for the time, but

she had a very, very full social life. She was part of seemingly endless organizations and in leadership positions of many of them. Most notably, she became president of the alab i am, a federation of Colored women's clubs, an exclusive organization for black women focused on service. Their slogan was lifting as we climb, but this idea that as you climb a ladder, even if you're at the top of the ladder, those folks who were at the bottom

are still yours. They're still connected to you. That's doctor Denise Davis May, Chair and professor of social work at Alabama State University and an expert on these women's clubs. The women of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs were typically second and third generation middle class women, even in the eighteen nineties. I think when we talk about the eighteen nineties and we talk about black women, particularly

in the South, we envision share cropping. We envision women who are just out of enslavement and have a very particular image of what that might be. These women were educated. They attended some of the established at the time, not historically black colleges but now historically black colleges and universities. They were married to professionals in some of their rights. They were professional educators in theory. The Colored Institute was

a school, but ultimately it was more than that. At just twenty three, Cornelia was sent to law to essentially fix the people there, their homes, their families, their perspectives, their lives. And she took this role very seriously. She went from house to house each week to make sure that they were clean. She inspected children in the morning to make sure that they had neat hair and clean fingernails. She dealt with family disputes. She pushed the men to

work and the women to stay home. I am pleased with the progress the people have made. Many now own their own homes, and eight and ten persons are no longer content to sleep in one room log cabins. I know what I'm saying when I state that sacred family ties are respected and appreciated as never before in this immediate region. Years later, in a newspaper interview, she stated proudly that a large part of her success could be

attributed to one particular tactic, shaming people. There were some class based issues in terms of how they serve the community. That is definitely correct. As a black woman in Alabama, Cornelia was among the most disadvantaged demographic in the country, the bottom of the barrel. And yet among black women there were differences. Some had more power than others, and at the top of that list was Cornelia. Her work at the Colored Institute turned her into somewhat of a celebrity.

There are all these articles from the late at hundreds of her traveling the country, giving speeches and raising money and hobnobbing with people whose names we know today, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglas, Ida B. Wells. There she is in eighteen ninety six, being named president of the National Federation of Afro American Women. In nineteen oh four at the World's Fair,

traveling the country to speak in Boston and Chicago. In New York, giving speeches to path rooms, she was the subject of a long fawning profile in The Washington Post in nineteen oh five, framed as the good, classy Negro woman helping the poor ones. The Montgomery Advertiser described her as the Booker Washington among colored women. Cornelia was complicated. On one hand, she was responsible for so much good

At the Colored Institute and later at Mount Meg's. Cornelia provided a level of attention, assistance, and opportunity to so many Black people when they never could have afforded otherwise. She really did care about the community, and still she looked down on them. Like her mentor book or t Cornelia seemed to believe that true social and legal equality

was an arm's reach of black people. All we had to do was be a little better, a little more useful, make a little more money, work a little harder, and white people might just come around. In one speech, Cornelia told the audience, we cannot be respected till we learn to do something. White men will not respect you. I would not respect you myself. And unsurprisingly, Cornelia's willingness to be critical of black people gained the admiration of more

than a few white ones. After all, Cornelia had the tendency to attribute the black community struggles to their own failings rather than persistent, systemic and justice and centuries of slavery that had ended just a few years prior, a child of a slave basically preaching about bootstraps. The question is did Cornelia really believe the stuff that she was

saying publicly. I'm inclined to believe that she did, But it's also possible she was playing politics, saying the things that white people wanted to hear the only way she could get what she wanted from the people who were really in power. So these women understood the necessity to work in community with the women who had the ear of people who were in charge. Right, that's not very

different than today. You need to be able to establish relationships with the folks who are sitting at the dinner table with the man who signs the probate for your land. Cornelia has been running the Colored Institute for more than ten years. When she gets interested in a new project, she and her club want to help build a juvenile reformatory. When I was researching Cornelia, there was one thing that

kept nagging at me. Here she was president of her woman's club, principle of a growing school, adored by the community, and often outspokenly critical of black youth. So why suddenly start this school for quote unquote juvenile delinquents. Then I stumbled upon a document in old files from the nineteen sixties, and it began to answer this question. At the turn of the twentieth century, four boys are arrested in Birmingham accused of breaking and entering. One of them is just

eleven years old. Now, had they been white, they would have gone to the reformatory for white boys, which had been created after a white women's club champion the project. But these four boys were black, which meant that there was no place for them to go except adult prison. This is what inspires Cornelia's Club to build a juvenile

reformatory for black children. Then the state of Alabama, black youngsters as early as aged ten ten years old had been sentenced to male prisons, and the women concluded that if they were going to save an endangered population, which was the young black males, they needed to open a

reformatory where young black males could be sent. By the early nineteen hundreds, reform schools were part of a growing movement across the United States and the world, as progressives began to talk about the concept of children as a class of people in their own right. That's significant because before the twentieth century, there weren't many formal legal distinctions between adults and miners, and that persisted for black kids.

Black children in particular, were typically treated just like adults. They were sentenced just like adults, they were put in the same prisons with adults, and they were executed just like adults. That's Barry Feld, Professor emeritus at the University

of Minnesota Law School. As the United States at the end of the nineteenth century was switching, shifting from a primarily agricultural economy to a more industrial economy, and so the progressive reformers had adopted a new conception of childhood as vulnerable and innocent. Well, at least some children were seen as vulnerable and innocent, but not Black kids, who study show society has always perceived as older and more

adult than they are. So Cornelia School was meant to fill a long overlooked void in the care of black Alabamian children. She gave a statement to the local paper saying that she and the members of the women's clubs were building a school for so called juvenile delinquents, or, as she put it, the unfortunate and floating young element of our race, who, from lack of good home training,

find their way to jail penitentiaries and convict minds. It is conceded that children thrown among hardened criminals are made worse in character by unwholesome environments, and in the end proved themselves criminals rather than useful citizens. Black reformatories weren't necessarily popular, but they had support across a white spectrum. In nineteen o seven, my local paper, The Atlanta Constitution, supported a reformatory for black kids in the most racist

way possible. Quote. The necessity for such a specific treatment is even more powerfully applicable to the Negro than to the white race. The Negro youth is essentially racially of a roving, irresponsible, impulsive, susceptible temperament. The race itself is but half child. Cornelia and the club ladies raised two thousand dollars on their own to build their own school, and when they couldn't get anyone to give them land,

Cornelia already had a solution. She owned four hundred acres outside of Montgomery, a feat for any black person, let alone a black woman, and she agreed to sell twenty acres to the club for less money than she paid for it. On August eighteenth, nineteen oh seven, the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Boys opened, but there wasn't much press about it, at least that I could find, except in a magazine called The Colored American, in an article

called child Saving in Alabama. The magazine praised the school, and this article has a picture of the school. It's the only one we have from that era. In it, you can see about twenty black boys standing stoically in two rows, their faces shadowed by the sun. Behind them is a white house, the same white building I saw when I went to Mount Megs, And in front of them is a field of cotton. The following year, Cornelia

gave a proud assessment at a conference at Tuskegee. The school has twenty two boys and no bolts or bars. The boys work in the garden. Cornelia saw the school as a place that gives black children a chance at opportunity, a much better and even life saving alternative to prison. But there was a problem money. Despite the good things about Mount Megs, even at the start, it was struggling financially. Cornelia had a lot of money for a black woman

at the time, but again it's all relative. She didn't have money to keep an entire school afloat, and while the clubs spent a lot of time raising funds, it was simply not enough to keep the school going. But Cornelia was determined to keep Mount Mag's open, So just three years after the doors opened, Cornelia began lobbying the state to take over Mount Mag's. I besieged every member of the legislature. It was funny. I would send in

from the lobby for a member. Of course he would not know, but what it was a white woman asking for him, and he would come out. Then he would ask what I wanted, and I would say, we have a bill prepared to make an appropriation for a reformatory for Negro children, and I want you to vote for it. And I wouldn't let him go until I had his promise to vote for it if it came up. This was where Cornelia's connections came in handy, especially her connections

to white people. She lobbied judges, legislators, and other prominent white men in the community to support the state's takeover, and not just privately but publicly, and many of them did it. One headline read juvenile Reformatory at Mount Megs is endorsed by many prominent white men. In fact, the fact that Cornelia had connections with powerful white people was the only reason she was able to build Mount Megs at all. And Alabama, even the most successful black people

needed white approval to do almost anything. Even with the money raised within the black community, they still needed the support and approval of the institutions beyond the black community. In nineteen eleven, the state of Alabama officially took over Mount Megs. This may have been the biggest mistake of Cornelia Bowen's life. The institution was able to stay alive, but at an unimaginable cost, and Mount Meg's was irreparably changed.

There's this quote from one of those white men who supported the state takeover, a quote that I think about a lot now. It foreshadowed the future of the institution. It says, I've always felt that when you put a young boy in jail or in the penitentiary for any length of time, you went a long way toward killing a human soul. Oh done back on meds all librate. Cornelia, it seems, had only good intentions. The school needed funding that she and her club in her community couldn't sustainably provide.

But almost immediately after the state took over, there were early side that the way that they thought about the black kids in their care was drastically different than Cornelia's outlook. The first change, renaming the school the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Boys, would now be called the Alabama Reform

School for Juvenile Negro Lawbreakers. Cornelia remained intimately involved with Mount Meg's for years as a trustee until she died in nineteen thirty four, but the real power always remained with the white male board members, men with connections wealth and land, men who saw Mount Meg's as a way to generate money, not rehabilitate children. And this is an

important thing to note about Mount Meg's. Sure, the state agreed to take it over, but that didn't mean they were going to fund it, not sufficiently anyway, not like they funded the white schools. We mentioned this last episode. When the white schools needed something, they'd asked the state for money. But when Mount Megs needed something schoolbooks, medicine, teachers, working toilets, clean water, the state mostly expected them to

pick enough cotton to get it themselves. I wondered if Cornelian knew what she was doing handing the school over to the state of Alabama, if she expected Mount Megs's fall to be so swift, So to expect that, as Miss Bowen and other individuals begin to retire out and transition out, you now have the state system responsible for the well being of these children, and to expect that

they would do so respectfully and in love. In Jim Crow, Alabama is cotta insane given the context of where we're located, and how might the women who made Mount Meg's possible have felt about what this school became. They created the Mountain Meg's a formatory for colored boys because they didn't trust anybody else to do it, And I would think that they would not be surprised. I think they would be upset that we allowed it to happen. I think they would be upset that we allowed it to happen.

When I was reading or talking to people about their personal experiences at Mount Meg's, I had to keep reminding myself that it was a school, because by the time Lonnie, Mary, Jenny, and Johnny were all incarcerated there in the nineteen sixties, Mount Meg's had become something very different. What more than one person called a slave camp. But it hadn't always been like that, not that bad. Even after the school was handed over to the state, it maintained some level

of humanity, at least at the beginning. So let's go back to nineteen eighteen, when, at the age of twelve, Satchel Page was arrested and sentenced to six years at Mount Meg's. The charge boys, who at the time were exemplary fellow students, were trusted to transport him fifteen miles in a wagon to Mount Meg's. Here's author Donald Spivey again he sees the plays. It is clear that this

is not what he thought it would be. He was looking for some plays, probably with bars and all of that sort of right, and there were no bars, no bars, no cells. Instead, Satchel found a meal, clothes and a pair of shoes waiting for him, hand me downs that to him looked brand new. The boys had to adhere to a strict routine sunrise, wake up, morning, prayer, breakfast, and then chores like feeding the livestock or mending the buildings,

or cleaning the schoolroom or harvesting the crops. The rest of the time, the boys works affected to be in the schoolroom, learning arithmetic, reading and writing a classic book, or t industrial education. This model actually worked in the case of Satchell Page. Perhaps that's because during Satchell's time there,

Cornelia Bowen's influence still permeated the school. She didn't run the school anymore, but she remained on the board and was still closely involved, and Satchell became one of Cornelia's favorite students. Good behavior earned Satchel the privilege of joining the Mount Meg's baseball team, a group of boys with

a special place in Cornelia's heart. She's the one who believes that baseball sports can be a reclamation project, so this is a reward for the boys, but it's also a teaching tool to get them to understand sportsmanship, to understand working together, and it's a process that she uses quite effectively. Satchel Page, the legendary Picture, learned how to play baseball at Mount Meg's. Playing baseball open Satchel's world.

The team traveled to play games sometimes, and there were big picnics where Mount Meg's students and the surrounding community would come out to cheer them on. And when Satchel left Mount Meg's five years later, the story is that he had been transformed for the better. And he came out with a nice pair of shoes and clothes. And I forget how much they gave you back, Dan a couple of dollars. And it knew how to pitch, he said, If training five years of my life to learn how

to pitch like this, it was well worth it. The year Satchel arrives, Mount Meg's seems to be a success story. The reformatory is doing splendid work, said one nineteen eighteen article. Substantial improvement has been made, said another. Cornelia in the club are thinking of starting a school just like for girls. But in the end there were so few Satchel pages, it seems way likelier that most of the kids were

Lonnies and Jennies and Johnnies and Mary's. By nineteen twenty, everything at Mount Meg's was being rationed, from the tools to the food, and even with money from the state, the Federation of Women still had to fundraise to cover infrastructure and faculty salaries. Farming, which was once just part of the industrial education model, quickly became the school's primary source of income. That made the boy's labor essential to

keeping the school in operation. In nineteen twenty, the governor of Alabama wrote to the school informing them that he was prepared to parole some of the boys. The school's assistant superintendent, JR. Wingfield responded, discouraging the governor from releasing five of the boys because he needed them to operate the machinery. He wrote, I would like for the Governor to withhold his actions until we can train a boy to take each of these places. I hope that you

will understand my position clearly. I do not object to parolling the boys. They might wait just a little while till we can get their places filled, rather than disarrange and inconvenience everything. This was what Mount Meg's became, a labor camp for black children and yet another way for black work to generate white money. The state told students they were there for their own improvement, but it was glaringly clear that they were there for the benefit of Alabama.

With the state's dependence on the unpaid labor of its black child prisoners, Mount Meg's mission shifted from rehabilitating its words to exploiting them. But the violence at Mount Meg's was often met with resistance. Starting even in Sachil Pages Day notices started appearing in the local newspapers, ratcheting up

through the fifties and sixties. They said things like six armed Negroes escaped Mount Meg's Industrial School, or police seeking escape artist in Burglary running away was a regular part of the Mount Meg's experience. On the next episode of Unreformed, we hear about these escapes and we look at one in particular and its harrowing consequences. 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 me Josie Deffie, Rice and Taylor von Leslie. Our script supervisors Florence Burrow Adams, and our producer is Gabby Watts, who had additional writing and production support from Sherry Scott. Executive producers of Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crowley, Brandon Barr, Matt Arnette and Knee. Sound design and mixes by Jesse Niswanger. Music is by Ben Soli. Additional recordings our courtesy of

the Alabama Center for Traditional Culture. The song featured in this episode is Jesus My Only Friend by Mary le Bandolf. Cornelia Bowen was voiced by ALBI Award Special Things to the Alabima Department of Archives and History, Michael Harriet, Floyd Hall, Kevin Nutt, Van Newkirk, and all of the survivors of Mount Meg's willing to share their stories. If you are someone you know attendant Mount Megs and would like to be in contact, please email Mountmegs Podcast at gmail dot com.

That's Mt M e i G S Podcast at gmail dot com. School of Humans