Episode 5: When Mary Met Denny

made it to Montgomery. When we got there, you know, ignorant, straight to the bus station, I'll drift a light. I guess who's there. The police. We took us into us, The force took us to juvenile. We knew they were gonna send us back there, and we were not going I was I was now going back without telling somebody what was going on with me. I didn't know that

it was already known. I'm Josie Duffie Rice. And this is unreformed the story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children Episode five, when Mary met Denny fly Away Loy. What Mary said that people already knew is right, and perhaps the most unsettling part that awareness wasn't a problem with Mount Meg's. Enough people across the state knew about the terrible conditions and abuse. It was just no one

was bothered to do anything or wanted to like. From nineteen sixty two to nineteen sixty three, at least three different authorities came to Mount Meg's to investigate the conditions there, and each one basically said the same thing. The school was overcrowded and the facilities were terrible. At the end of these reports, there was always a list of recommendations more staff, a new building, more equipment, but these things

never seemed to happen. The board members of Mount Megs either didn't read the reports closely or didn't do anything about it, and there weren't any trustees like Cornelia trustees willing to fight for the kids. The only time Governor George Wallace, a staunch segregationist, pretended to care about Mount Meg's, was when he was trying to underpay construction workers who

were meant to be working on the campus. I have worried about the housing for these Negro children with winter coming on, he said, and I am concerned for their safety. But he wasn't concerned enough to do anything about it. There was at least a little concern from the public

very little. In the sixties, Governor Wallace got letters from everyone from parents to state representatives, concerned about how the water was unclean, or there was a problem with the sewage, or the kids were forced to work too much, and of course they were concerned about the abuse. One white couple wrote in after their maid's grandson was sent to

the school. They said, our maid has become afraid that instead of helping the boy, the guards at the institution are going to break his health and his spirit by their brutally severe methods. The allegations and these letters were all the same. The kids were being basically tortured, they were under fed, they were dirty. Superintendent Holloway and others were stealing the food that parents sent to their kids. And yet, of course nothing happened, And there was a

very simple reason why nothing happened. Nobody cared they were black kids. Nothing changed until Mary and the other runaways met Denny Abbott. That voice you just heard was Denny. He was a juvenile probation officer. He started working in juvenile corrections in Alabama in nineteen sixty one. He was a young guy back then, in his early twenties, hired to be a boy's counselor. Part of his job was to drive kids from the juvenile jail to Mount Meg's. Well,

I saw what it was like. I granted it because I knew that I was taking a kid to an institution that was gonna, in a negative way, affect him for the rest of his life. After he dropped kids off at Mount Meg's a few times, Denny began reporting what he'd seen to his superiors, including the head of the Montgomery Juvenile Court, judge William F. Thattford. I'm not gonna send white boys to Mount Megs or Negro boys

to the white schools at Birmingham. I have to stand for re election every year, and integration is not popular. That's voice actor Band Gunter, reading a quote that Thattford gave to a Montgomery paper judge. Thatford was many decades older than Denny, and he had a long history in the Alabama legal system. People remember him as a good old boy, respected by the powerful, perfectly comfortable in the

status quo, and according to Denny, openly racist. He was a racist peer and simple, and he made no excuses for that. I remember one time he called all of us into his office for a staff meeting, and he said, if any of you ever refer to a black person as mister or missus in my courtroom, you're a fire. His racism, plus his interest in staying on the bench meant that Judge Thetford was entirely against integration. Billy Thetford was a law enforcement guy. He'd been an FBI agent

and a prosecutor before becoming a judge. He'd been on the wrong side of history more than once. In nineteen fifty six, he prosecuted Martin Luther King Junior himself for violating a law that outlawed Boycott's. The year before that, he'd prosecuted fifteen year old Claudette Colvin after she refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white writer. Nine months before, Rosa Parks did the same. And this is how this is them allowed and even rewarded the cruelty of a place like Mount Meg's and

much of the South. Good old boy attorneys like Judge Thetford were the law. They terrorized black people in the courtroom, often in the same order. Thetford did it first as prosecutor, then if they were lucky as judge, we were taught that judges are impartial, nonpartisan beings who strictly follow the law, whose only interest is getting it legally correct. But what's legally right and what is morally right are often at odds, and many times judges were more like Thetford, interested in

maintaining power rather than ensuring justice. Denny knew Thetford well enough to know it was damn near impossible they did actually do anything to address the conditions at Mount Meg's, but Denny kept filing reports anyway. As a counselor in juvenile court, Denny kept a running log of complaints. He tried to document the physical abuses, the inadequate educational programs, and the myriad other issues at Mount Meg's that he'd witnessed or heard rumored. Sometimes he'd file another report with

his superiors, but the reports he filed went nowhere. I was trying to get changes made, and of course nothing happened. This was the early sixties, smack in the middle of the growing civil rights movement. I saw the freedom bus riders come to Montgomery and get beat up. The march from Selmut to Montgomery, led by Doctor King and John Lewis and some others twenty five thousand marches came from

Selmo to Montgomery. I was standing on the steps of the Captain of Montgomery when those marchers came in, and it was it's kind of all inspiring, actually to see that kind of coalition of people demanding justice and equal rights. But Montgomery was still Montgomery. Montgomery, Alabama, in the sixties was the most segregated place on the planet. One time, Denny invited one of his black co workers over for dinner.

The neighbors saw him walk in my house and didn't like it at all and made some comments to me and my wife about having a black couple in our house. So it was that kind of ridiculous stuff that really painted Montgomery. It was a reflective of the general feeling of white people. We've been talking about Denny and his efforts to draw attention to the conditions at Mount Meg's, but it's worth noting that most of the time Denny just did his job like everyone else. Most days were normal,

no complaints filed, no tension with the judge. As much as he wanted someone to address what was going on at Mount Meg's, he knew it would upset his ability to do his job. So he was constantly weighing what the best approach was. Again, this is Alabama in the nineteen sixties. It's not clear that anyone in the criminal legal system would have been on Denny's side, and relative to the other employees, at least, Denny was powerless. A kid really just twenty one when he started his job,

and for the most part, he liked the job. He also needed the job. Plus, Denny was good at his job. He was a hard worker who really cared about the kids. It was Denny who applied for program grants and started a tutoring program. It was Denny who talked to the press, providing some insight into the intense chaos that some of these children faced. In nineteen sixty three, at the age of twenty three, Denny got a promotion to chief probation Officer.

That was the same year that doctor King reminded white Americans that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. As Chief Juvenile Probation Officer, Denny now had a little bit more power to make some changes. He doesn't go after Mount Meg's right away. While Mount Meg's was the worst of it in Alabama, there wasn't any good place to send kids who'd been accused of a crime, so Denny instead set his sights on the juvenile detention center. My office was like maybe ten steps from the doors

to the detention center, and it was horrible. We were always overcrowded. We had nothing to provide kids. We had four large rooms, one large room for white boys, one large room for white girls on the other side, one large room for black boys, and one large room for black girls. And they were locked up in those rooms about twenty two hours a day. We had no staff

to really supervise them. And we had a room in the middle of those drawing rooms that had a couple of chairs and that could come out and spend two or three hours a day in there. And that was it. Because the juvenile detention center was overcrowded, sometimes kids were sent upstairs to the adult detention center, where physical and

sexual abuse was common. In the mid nineteen sixties, two boys alleged that they'd been left in a cell with several older men who burned them with cigarettes and matches, beat them, and raped them. In nineteen sixty seven, Denny finally got the leverage he needed to advocate for a new juvenile detention center. A local white attorney, I read dement, filed a lawsuit in behalf of a black teenage girl who'd been arrested for running away and was being held

in the county courthouses juvenile jail. I had filed a petition for it of habeas call for some on behalf of a teenage female. This is Irah. She was a runaway, she was not delinquent, and she was placed in a room without any windows, and the electric light bub in the room on Friday afternoon went out and the maintenance people were not available until Monday morning, and so she had spent the weekend in the darkness. The lawsuit was ultimately rejected by Judge Thetford, who refused to even hear

the case. But Denny, without Dufford's knowledge, used the attention brought by the lawsuit to build support for a new detention center. I want every church group, women's group, garden club, civic club that I could find, and I invited them to come down and see the facility. It's something I call impacting the senses. I wanted them to see what we were talking about. I wanted them to smell it.

I wanted them to hear it. I wanted them to touch it, and I said, you know what, here's why I want you to see this, because you want it. This is a tax support facility. Everything you see here and what we're doing to kids, you're a part of it. Ginny's plan started to work. Pressure was put on the Montgomery County Commission to do something about the conditions at

the juvenile detention center. They responded by putting the issue on the ballot, leaving it up to voters to decide whether the county should spend seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars on a new facility. Here we are, in the most conservative place on the planet, asking the voters to build something for link with kids. Yeah. I'm thinking, man,

this is it's probably not going to work. That bond issue passed in Montgomery eight to one, and we've built a really nice new detention center that served kids well as for iver demense client, the runaway teenage girl, a spot opened up for her at Mount Meg's. I share the story about the detention center because it's a really great example of how entrenched the cruelty of juvenile justice really is. This was in the nineteen sixties of course,

but the same dynamics exist even now. There are some real questions about what Denny's role was as a probation officer and what it should have been. Denny was law enforcement, and this is a reflection of one of the most consistent dynamics over time in the criminal legal system, the way we have to rely on law enforcement to fix problems that it created. There are bigger questions about the role of the law and our ability to create fundamental change.

I must admit that as a concept, a really nice new detention center that serves kids, it makes me skeptical. On one hand, given the conditions of the old facility, it's good that something better was created, But on the other hand, the fundamental problem hadn't changed at all. We're still talking about a jail for children. This is a late nineteen sixties during President Lyndon Johnson's War on Crime.

We weren't yet at the levels of incarceration we'd see in the decades to come, but the signs were there, the narratives about humane lockups, for example, the insistence on more facilities instead of fewer arrests. But for Denny, the new detention center was a victory Meanwhile, Denny continued filing complaints about conditions and treatment at Mount Meg's, and his superiors continued to ignore him. Yet another year went by. I guess I don't know. I'm a slow learner. I

held on this notion of administrative help is coming. People are going to do something about it. I mean, I talked to high ranking officials and they all expressed concern. I'm not and I believe that they were going to do something. So I was naive in that regard. So I just kept hearing in these horror stories. And of course the most compelling thing I heard was five girls who had escaped from Mount Meg's came into my office

and wanted to talk to me. The five girls he's talking about were Mary and her four companions, who in nineteen sixty eight had run away and were promptly arrested and sent to the detention center. It was there that Mary insisted on talking to someone, anyone, to tell them about what was happening at Mount Meg's. After being caught

and arrested. After running away from Mount Meg's, Mary and her four companions were taken to the Montgomery juve An Old Attention Center just to Florid, two away from Denny's office. We were wanting to speak with someone, you know, because we knew they were gonna send us back there, and we were not going I was I was not going back without telling somebody what was going on with me. So they told some of the staff that they wanted to see the boss, which was me at the time.

I said sure, so I had them brought up to my office. I really didn't know why they wanted to see me. I had no idea what they were going to be telling me, and I wasn't surprised about what I heard because I knew it was going on. They've started telling me about the physical abuse, the sexual abuse that they endured, almost in a daily basis. One of the girls was hit in the head by a female staff number. She was injured so badly she had to

go to the hospital. They told me about watching her girls beating so badly that she miscarried, and they were being sexually abused too by the male staff cards. I didn't know that it was already known, But after meeting Denny, we talked and told him what was going on there, which she already knew. But we were just crying and telling them how they were beaten us and what they were doing, and that we were not going back. That was the word, we are not going back. We were

afraid to go back. We weren't going back because we knew we were going to be beaten. They had probably never asked a white person for help before. I think I might have been it, and I could see the fear in their eyes, and I knew they were uncomfortable telling me what they were telling me. But they had to do it. They had to tell someone, and they were very courageous. I'll never forget that what Mary and

her friends did is one of the bravest things. I can imagine a black girl having the nerve to speak up about the abuse that she and hundreds of other kids were going through, and not just speak up, but speak up to someone like Denny, a powerful white guy

in law enforcement. When we think back to this era in nineteen sixties the civil rights movement, a lot of weight is given to a couple of moments or events or people, But it took countless moments like these and people like Mary, people who never got recognition or accolades, to shift the winds even slightly in a place like Alabama. Dinny and the girl spoke for about forty five minutes before the five of them were returned to their holding cells.

For years, Denny had been disturbed by the conditions at Mount Meg's, but now he had to decide if he was willing to go further this time. Your mind looks at a situation and it says, well, here's the problem. And then your mind says, okay, what can you do about it? And then you look at that, and then your mind says, if you do that, what's going to be the outcome. Is it going to make a difference. And then your mind says, okay, if you do that, and you think it'll make a difference, what are the

repercussions for you and your family? The answer here might seem obvious. You do whatever you have to do to save the kids. But Denny's predicament is a great example of what I think of as the civil rights fallacy. People are born after the Civil rights movement like to imagine that they would have been on the front lines protesting, boycotting, crossing the bridge, and Salma, But the uncomfortable truth is that when push comes to shove, most people don't do

those things. Because those things have costs. For someone like Denny, fighting the system meant professional and social repercussions, and not just for him, for his family. I went home after

talking to those girls that day. My kids said at the time were six, five and three, and I'm went home and I saw them there in a good home of parents who loved him and cared about him, took care of them, and I said, you know what, I can't be the kind of father, can't be the kind of father to my own kids if I walk away from those girls. And I think the thing that kind of did it is that when your mind told you

all those things, your heart was telling something else. Your heart is who you are, it's your core values, that's your system, it's what you believe, it's who you are. And I my heart said, you got to do something you can't walk away from. I would have regretted my entire life if I hadn't done something. So Denny was done filing complaints. He decided to take a bigger risk, one that would up end his life, and the next episode of Unreformed, Denny, Ira and five brave students begin

the long road to desegregate Mount Meg's 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 Duffie, Rice, and Taylor von Laslie. Our script supervisor is 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 Chloley,

Brandon Barr, Matt Arnette, and Me. Sound design and mix is by Jesse Niswanger. Music is by Ben Soley. Additional recordings are courtesy of the Alabama Center for Traditional Culture. The song featured in this episode is all fly Away by Helen McLoud. William Thetford was voiced by Van Gunter. Special thanks to the Alabama Department of Archives in History, Michael Harriet, Floyd Hall, Kevin Knutt, 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 Igs Podcast at gmail dot com. School of Humans