Episode 4: The Runaways

the early records about Mount Megs. So it's hard to know just how many kids ran away in the school's infancy, but as far back as the nineteen twenties and thirties, children ran away regularly and sometimes successfully. In nineteen twenty nine, sixteen of the three hundred and fifty students successfully escaped Mount Megs. By the next decade, that number had basically doubled.

In the nineteen fifties and sixties, the Montgomery Advertiser, the local paper, regularly published stories alerting the community to runaways from Mount Megs. In fact, these notices made up a significant chunk of the local papers mentions of Mount Megs at all. Press about Mount Megs was mostly letting people know when the school had years of corn for sale. Her notice is about a lost mule or runaways. Six armed negroes escaped Mount Meg's Industrial School, read the headline

of one such article. Another told of a fourteen year old Mount Meg's runaway believed to be behind the theft of several items cigars, cookies, and other knickknacks from a candy store. Despite the very real and very corporal consequences if caught, kids ran away from the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children all the time in the years after the state took over. In fact, many of them ran away over and over and over again, kept escaping even

if they didn't get too far. In one story, the Alabama Journal mentioned two boys, Willie, who had allegedly tried to escape Mount Meg's five times and Leonard, who had tried to run away ten times. Every former resident we talked to for this podcast has a story about running away from Mount Meg's. And the one thing all of these stories have in common is this the belief that life as a teenage fugitive was better than life as a quote unquote student at Mount Meg's, even knowing what

would happen if they were caught. I'm Josie Duffie Rice, and this is unreformed. The Story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, Episode four the runaways. By all accounts, the punishment for running away could be even more brutal than the day to day violence. Bloodhounds would chase after you, and if they caught you, they'd bite and wouldn't let go.

Chargeboys were once exemplary students, trusted with more responsibility by the superintendent, but by the nineteen sixties the job had been corrupted. They'd become henchmen for the administrators, granted permission to terrorize other students, and they'd also join the hunt for runaways. Johnny Body was both prey and witness to such hunts. This is the worst for automatic. They would

make a charing boy beat you. They'd almost damn near killed you, and they bring you back this like that for every matter to sing and they put your own display, which is what happened to Jenny Knox. Jenny was serving her second sentence at Mount Meg's. After she got out the first time, she was put in the care of her sister, but they had a contentious relationship, and so the sister called up the justic attorney and asked them

to take Jenny back. She called him and told him that she couldn't do anything with me but to come take me back down to Mount Maids, and I was looking for that black car man. I recognized that black car, and I recognized them two faces in up front, and they came to get me out for her porch. When the juvenile probation officers arrived, Jenny was able to evade them in a cat and mouse chase, and she outsmarted them by diving into some tall grass behind the nearby house.

She knew they wouldn't look there, and that's where I stayed. I didn't know of no snakes and none that I wasn't scared. Jenny stayed in that tall grass for hours. It started getting dart and then I came out and it's okay, free alas free Las, thank god online. But Jenny's freedom was short lived. Eventually they caught me the second time. When Jenny was in the back of the probation officer's black car, she knew what type of hell

was awaiting her at Mount Meg's. This time, she wasn't the naive thirteen year old confused right she was being sent away given that, as she saw it, she had done nothing wrong. Jenny was now fifteen years old, and she was returning to the devil she knew, so they considered as being a two timers. So I was a two timers and nothing had gotten no better. Jenny had

no intention of staying at Mount Meg's. That tried to run away from out there, and in I trying to run away, Me and another lady got into some serious trouble when they end up putting us in a straight jacket and we had to stand up and dining room. Why everybody else was sitting out eating and we couldn't eat anything because we were in white. For the way, if they were caught running away or labeled troublemakers, kids

had to wear white clothing. It was a mark of shame so that these kids could be easily identified among the masses of kids and army fatigues. They put you in white, and a lot of times just by you being in white, you would lock away from the other boys. They will give you a white a big white jumpsuit. They never watched it, so the white soup became almost black before you got out of white. White means no privileges.

Mary's responsibilities as head dormitory girl led to more scrutiny and punishment from Fanny, and she had already sustained a terrible injury from one of Fanny's beatings. She had hit me in the hair with a bottle in My head was swollen. Mary had to go to the hospital and Fanny she would make me stay on the stairs. People couldn't see me ahead to stand the stairs in the closet during the day so I wouldn't be seeing. I ran. I ran and ran, and ran, and ran and ran.

When Lonnie ran away, he'd been at Mount Meg's about a year. It was nineteen sixty two and he was twelve years old. He was out in the fields with a group of other boys pulling up cornstocks, and he needed to go to the bathroom. Now, you were lucky if mister Glover let you use the bathroom. Sometimes, even if he did, he'd make a charge boy supervise, and that could lead to physical and sexual abuse. If you were given the permission to go, you were supposed to

make it quick. Run to the woods, do your business, and come right back. But Lonnie looked out that day mister Glover allowed him to take a bathroom break in the woods alone, and while he was gone, the group moved on to another spot, leaving him behind. I had no intention of running away, but they're longer. I stooped down. They kept moving up the field, so I was like a rabbit. I just dumped there and stayed there. And they kept moving up the field so rapidly. They went

over this bluff. You can hardly see their head. And that's when I started backing up. And I backed up, and I kept backing up, raising my body up, graightening up. I didn't see nobody pulling my clothes up, fasten them up, army tight, not turn around, And I started running behind money. It was a barbed wire fence that separated a cornfield from the pecan orchards. He jumped a fence and dashed across the orchards, which turned out to be kind of dangerous.

Train through the bride and a stick of bushes and all the other things that within the perimedy. Around the Alabama Industrial School, they had man made pawn. If you wasn't careful, you'll fall off into one of them and you're drowned and nobody never know you were on them. Still, Lonnie ran ram ram ram ram ram ram ram ran nobody something all body midt now just rain. Lonnie ran with no idea where he was or where he was. Headache back of a muffling around ten a levemo of tide,

and I ran and I didn't know where. I woke as a dog, and I fell into this hole, and that's where I went to sleep. I slepped down in there. Didn't know of no snakes or nothing was in it. Lonnie's luck held. No snakes bothered him while he slept, and he woke up early the next morning at sunrise, took the sound of roosters and birds chirping. He took a look around. I clambed up out of the grave right a roof at at three and then that's when I looked around and I saw a real old tombstone.

He realized the sleeping spot was right next to a cemetery. He kept running and soon found the highway. He ran alongside it to avoid detection. His oversized hand me down military fatigues would have been a red flag to any passer by that he was a mountains escapee, so he ran in the ditches like all those times in Birmingham. Eventually, Lonnie came to what he called a tractor place. He's referring to a farm all show room where they sold tractors. As he was scoping out the place, he looked into

a window in spite a can of sardines. So I took my elbow because I had on long sleeve, and I took my elbow and knocked out one of the window and went into the farmall tractor play and opened the frigerated. It was some cheene cracker, A cold drank, and I sat down and I ate my belletfool, because I was tired. I feel it's leap. Lonnie was exhausted. He didn't know it at the time, but he traveled more than twenty five miles on foot in less than twenty four hours, almost all the way to Tuskegee. But

he didn't get to sleep for long. The next thing I know, the man that owned the track of play. He was a white man, be white man, grabman mccaullo. The man had Lonnie in a bind yelling at him. He got you tightly griped, and then he took his fist and knocked me out. I mean literally knocked me unconscious. Lonnie was knocked out on the floor of the tractor place. When he came to, his bleary eyes made out the image of someone who wasn't there before, someone he didn't

want to see. Next thing I know, somebody flapping me in my place, Holland Dolan. Why did you run away? Why did you run away? It was Superintendent Eb Holloway. He took it fish and showing the white man he could knock me out. And he took and knocked me out again. Two grown men punching a child unconscious. The next time Lonnie woke, he was back at Mount Meg's, on the floor of the cottage for solitary confinement. He was held there for a day, which he spent nursing

his head. Part of the misery of being in that cottage was the apprehension just waiting for the brutal punishment that was to come in the morning. And next thing I knew were a chigboys coming to the sale and taking me out of sale, ultimate by both arms, taking me down to this big cedar tree. Now forget below the cedar tree was a bench also made of cedar. Your arm was cooking, wrapped around the tree and tied around the tree like you hooking the tree, and your

back leg was tied to the bench. And this was going to be a public spectacle. So all of the girls from the girl's home and brought down the boys from the boy's home, all of them. They're brought down every boy, everybody mist the Holloway shout out the dollar, why you want to run away? And then you look around. He said, who you wanted to whoop you? You want me to ready to make you drunk? I'm at the Glover to make you sick. So I had ran away from mister Glover, so I chose at the Glover to

whoop me. Mister Holloway gave orders for the beating to start. The amount of licks that he told him marked the glove of a hit me, and he's like, shoot him a hunting in fifth, I mean hit you a hunting in fifty times. He was hitting Lonnie with a fan belt on his bare legs. So he hit you right in the back of your head and knocked you out cold. So that's the third time I don't be known got knocked out. The beating was so violent that mister Glover he didn't know whether he had killed me or not.

When Lonnie came to next, blood was dripping down his legs, running down into his socks. They dressed him in white. A deep x was shaved into his hair, another mark of a runaway. They took away his shoes and then he was thrown onto the rock. The rock pile was the most infamous torture site on the Mountain's campus. It's a big old circle of nothing but a pile of boone.

And they were whitewashed. All of them were whitewater. The trees all around them there was rock that had been jug when you clear the feed, and they brought brought to the central location powder and whitewashed beautifully white. It's often, I mean, it's like in this big, this big yard, in all of this dirty and all these big, these big square rocks painted white. I'm saying you had to beat undid something real, real bad for you to go on the rock pile. You on the rock pile, You

are an example. Once condemned to the rock pile, you weren't allowed to leave. The only places you could go were to the kitchen to sleep, into the chapel on Sundays if you could muster the strength. Otherwise you were stuck there. You couldn't even leave to use the bathroom. You on the rock pile day and night rang sleep pale of snow. If you went out of the circuit, it would beat it. You know. The rock pod was brutal.

On the rock pile, the boys in white were ostracized from everyone else, and there was even more violence between them because there was nothing else to do except sit there or move some rocks around. It was just them

and the elements and the rocks. You know. I was sitting in the rock pod once on a rock came in and hit me in the face, you know, almost knocked my out, And thought about two fifteen years after that when out here and when I get out of Mount Me, I used to walk around like this, yere, Johnny's holding his hands up in front of his eyes, like expecting a rock to come from anywhere. Lonnie figured he might very well end up dying on the rock pile,

and he thought no one would notice or care. I remember every time that I would touch the back of my thighs and my leg or one day pull the different clothes off of me, they just ripped it off of me and so that exposed it. There's soul that was on me, and they just stopped bleeding all over again. But they beating me to the print that I couldn't even walk. I couldn't do nothing but crowl Even now,

he remembers his blood dripping onto the white rocks. The days turned two weeks, and the weeks turned two months. According to Lonnie, eighteen months later, he was still on the rock pile. I asked him at the Holloway every day for a year and a half, when you're gonna let me off the rock pile. Lonnie created a sculpture called Blood on the Rock Pile in two thousand and three, and when I met him earlier this year, I asked

him about it. So sure, up took clay and red paint and mix it up like my blood in the clay, white washed the rocks, and I took wires. I wanted to buy that situation up so tight. I wanted to rid myself that experience, but I can't. I gave whoopings in my sleep about it. The rock pile still haunts Lonnie to this day. I've often caught myself in that state of being, in my dreams, of asking when are

you going to let me off the rock pile? As Lonnie tells it, Holloway finally led him off the rock pile months later and I asked them and the next thing I know, it was taking me down In one day. It was my time to come off the rock pile. Lonnie didn't try to run away again. Often it wasn't only the kids who wanted to get away from Mount Meg's.

Their parents wanted them home too. We have a document from school administrators that was given to parents and what we think was the late nineteen sixties or so, and it says the purpose of this institution is to train and reclaim delinquent girls and boys of Alabama by giving them spiritual, academic, and vocational experience, and by teaching them to live wholesome lives in their communities. And then in all caps, the document says it is not a prison,

but many parents knew otherwise. We found letters and the state archives written to the governor from parents begging for their children's release. None of them had any idea when their children were coming home. And though they didn't know much about what was happening to their kids at Mount Meg's, they knew enough to be scared. Here's one from nineteen sixty eight to Governor Lorline Wallace, George Wallace's wife. She became governor of Alabama in nineteen sixty seven, right after

her husband's first term. The mother writing to her is talking about her son, Gregory. He has been on Mount Meg's for eighteen months. She says, Gregory is my baby son. I would like for him to come home. I believe he has learned a lesson. He was born with the deformity right side. He is not a bad boy. It was mostly the neighborhood that I was living in at the time. If there is any way possible you can help me get my son home, I will thank you

from the bottom of my heart. You are a mother, and I know you know how a mother feels about her child. I want my son home, please please. Once a month, parents could come visit Mount Meg's, but according to the letters, the visits were closely supervised, making it difficult, if not impossible, for children to tell their parents what was really going on. One letter says when the parents go to visit them, they can't sit down and talk

with them without someone sitting in their presence. They're afraid to talk. In the nineteen forties, one mother, Corinne Hill, filed a habeas petition in court saying her child was being unlawfully detained, and the court agreed, ruling that her son was entitled to be seen by a judge, but that didn't change the process. At Mount Meg's, kids were still detained indefinitely, often without so much as a hearing. And the reason that these parents couldn't get any attention,

any response, any recourse, was obvious. It was because they were black. Here's an excerpt from one letter that we found. I honestly feel that my son's present situation is the result of prejudice on the judge's part and the fact that he was a victim of circumstances. I've exhausted all means of trying to help him there, but it seems that there's a minority here that must accept whatever decisions

are made, whether they represent justice or not. When I was researching Mount Megs, this was one of the hardest parts for me as the black parent of young kids. This idea that your children can be taken by the state and there's nothing you can do but beg it's hard to grapple with. In one nineteen sixty eight letter, a desperate mother tells the governor that she knows the kids are being mistreated. They beat them with a stick. She says they don't have nice clothing to wear, and

she talks about how they're starving. They have corn bread and syrup and peanut butter for breakfast. Mister eb Holloway is stealing their food. She tells the governor that the men who watch over the boys are beating all sides of their heads. She asks, will you please do something about it. Here's another letter from a parent from nineteen fifty nine, written to the governor. The children are having a hard time. It says, these children work in the fields.

He tells the governor he doesn't believe he knows how bad it is, or else he would do something about it. The letter continues, I don't believe the men and women in prison have such a hard time. Please please look into this matter. Mostly these parents were either ignored or given the run around. The governor's office would often refer them back to Mount Meg's. We don't have many records of Mount Megs's response to stuff like this, but we

have one record where eb Holloway himself wrote back. We don't have the original letter from the parent, only Holloway's letter in response. In it, he wrote, we wish to assure you that William is not receiving any inhumane treatment nor injustice, but he is fortunate to be receiving a type of training that he did not receive at home.

Holloway concluded by saying, you may be assured that as soon as the staff feels that William has received the maximum benefit, we shall be happy to recommend him for release. But despite Holloway's insistence that Mount Megs was doing a better job at raising the kids than their parents, the constant stream of runaways indicated otherwise. I was tired and scared and just didn't want to take it anymore. It's November nineteen sixty eight and Mary Stevens has been at

Mount Megs for about a year. She was constantly wearing white. Fannie Matthews had already given her that brutal beating that sent her to the hospital, and she had already attempted to run away once. But then a new girl arrived at Mount Meg's, and there was a girl that came to stay at Mount Megs that really wasn't afraid of them, because she was there for either attempting to kill somebody or killing someone possible murder or not. Mary and the

new girl became friends, Mary admired her bravery. She remembers the new girl wasn't afraid she'd take a beating from Fanny and look her dead in the eyes while it was happening. It was the new girl who had the idea. One day, Mary and four other girls were working together in the fields around Mount Meg's and the new girls said they should run, and this escape would change everything. 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 Laslie. Our scoop supervisors Florence Burrow Adams, and our producer is Gabby Watts, who had additional writing and production support from Sherry Scott. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crowley, Brandon Barr met Urnette, and Me. Sound design and mixes by Jesse Niswanger. Music is by Ben Soli. Additional recordings

our courtesy of the Alabama Center for Traditional Culture. Special things to the Alabama 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 attended 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