Episode 8: Searching for Justice

positive a promise that never manifested. For more than a year, we tried over and over to get access to Mount Meg's, not only for reporting purposes, but because Johnny, Mary, Jenny, and Lonnie all expressed interest in seeing what it was like now. We called, emailed, asked anyone who we thought might be able to get us in, but they denied us, giving us various excuses. They were understaffed, there were COVID restrictions, it was too close to the holidays. They even turned

down Denny, a former law enforcement officer. We really don't ever give tours to begin with, a staff person at the Department of Youth Services wrote instead, she just sent us some newsletters and a YouTube link to a video, writing that maybe these would, as she said, provide them some hope that things have changed and continue to change for the better. So instead, I just decided to show

up to see as much of the place as I could. Hi, 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? Since the series started airing, we've finally gotten a more positive response to our request to visit from the administrators at Mount Meg's. In mid February, an official from the Alabama Department of Youth Services responded to

an email sent from a member of Lonnie's team. The officials said they were open to discussing a visit from former residence in the near future, but added that they would like to listen to the entire series before scheduling a specific time. In this episode, the last of the series, we look at where Lonnie, Mary, Johnny, Jenny, and Denny

are fifty years after leaving Mount Megs. We also look at how juvenile justice in America has evolved and how other juvenile reform schools that mistreated their students have atoned for their wrongs. And lastly, we get a glimpse into the current state of Mount Meg's. Has it changed or is it the same place it was more than fifty years ago. The feedback that I get from my clients while at Mount Meg's is, I think exactly what one

would expect it to be. The worst case scenario would be death, and Mount Meg's would be immediately under that. I'm Josie Duffie Rice. This is Unreformed the Story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, Episode eight, Searching for Justice. Over the past year, I've thought more and more about what justice would look like here. What would justice look like for Lonnie, Mary, Jenny and Johnny. What would it look like for all the students of Mount Meg's,

including the ones they today? What would it look like for Jesse, James Andrews or Johnny mac young or the people that they hurt? Is justice even possible? One of the things that blew my mind is the fact that none of the survivors we spoke to even knew about the nineteen sixty nine lawsuit until decades later. They'd been victimized by this institution, but once they were gone, they were gone. There was no follow up, no accounting, no remorse from the state of Alabama. And it goes without

saying that they didn't get any relief. They didn't get settlement money or anything. They didn't even get an apology. They all left Mount Megs and were tossed out to fend for themselves, and they're still paying for it. Half a century later. In twenty twelve, Mary was at her home in Chattanooga, sitting across from an investigator from N's Child Protective Services. Her own children had grown up and

she wanted to become a foster parent. She was nervous because there was something standing in her way, her criminal record, specifically the year and a half she had spent at Mount Meg's. It turned out that it was not going to be an issue. Instead, this meeting connected Mary was someone she hadn't seen since she was a child. The investigator for Department Children's Services did my investigation to be in the foster parenty system, and I told her about

my state at Alabam in Destri School. She said, you know there's a book out about the school. I said, what that book was? They had no voice By whistleblower Denny Abbott and his co author Douglas Collegian. I hadn't forgotten about Danny, you know. At the end of the meeting at Mary's, the investigator gave her Denny's name and phone number. As soon as she lived at called Denny.

That call in twenty twelve was the first time Mary had talked to Denny since she and other runaways for Mount Meg's pleaded for his help at the Montgomery Juvenile Detention Center forty five years prior after I got fired. After we file the suits, it took me almost a year to find meaningful employment, and then at the end of that year we had to borrow money against our

life and chaerance policy to parabills. I got a call from O. J. Keller, who was setting up a division a few services that had already done it in state Florida, and he called me and he said, we have an opening. Would you like to be the regional detention director for South Florida? And I said absolutely, I'll be there tomorrow. They finally saw each other for the first time in decades when Denny gave a talk about his book at the Rosa Parks Library and Montgomery. Their reunion was cut

briefly on video. Great Mary is with a group of women, also survivors of Mount Meg's. Denny hugs each of them, but you can tell he shares a special connection with Mary. Letter tears and I thanked him for helping me and for me getting out of being able to leave, for not being killed. He's more than a friend. I look up to him lis at the Bigger Household because of his care and the way he felt about children and me.

Mary Stevens was always looking for a family. She grew up in an unstable household, and when she first arrived at Mount Meg's, she hoped that Fanny Matthew was going to adopt her, but in some ways, that feeling of family safety always eluded her. After she was released from Mount Meg's, she was plagued by instability once again. Would I left Alabama? Sent me right back to the same foster home birthplaces? I got right. My brothers and sisters were there. I left the foster home, got married, had

a baby at nineteen. But while she tried to build the family she always wanted her brothers and sisters were left behind. I know they will be a beat for the raise of strap and so Mary did something bold, risky. I stole my brothers and sisters from that boster who It was a crazy idea, one that if things went wrong, could have resulted in her child being taken from her, but Mary did it anyway. I told my brother when I was coming for him to be ready, one brother

and two sisters. I was scared. I was so scared. It was scared. Police go to be behind me, had my brother looking out who was speeding. We're probably gotten stopped for speeding. Fast is that we got stopped for stolen children. Mary and her siblings made it across the state line to Tennessee. By that time, Mary had already left her husband, so she was a young single mother trying to take care of her child and her siblings. She struggled to make ends meet. When I got them

to Tennessee, I couldn't take care of them. I was making a dollar sixty see an hour or make the police department as a dispatch. I had a child, and I couldn't get any help for little brothers and sisters. So they hated at boor to TPSS Tennessee Preparatory School. But it was nothing like not for Mary. Her life as an adult wasn't always easy, but it was better than her childhood. She remarried, had more children, divorced again.

She built a career as an insurance agent. But in recent years Mary was called to something else, foster parenting. I think Matt Mags had like to do that. After I divorced and new that I wanted to do something good, so I started to post at home. When they came into my house, they were calling me miss Mary. I told them you can call me what everyone. You don't have to call me miss Mary. And I explained to him how much I loved them and cared for him, and you know, thank you was Nana. Mary showed us

a property behind her house. She used to own three lots but ended up selling them off. Actually I wanted to start a school. That's why I had these three lots. I wanted to school. But I got sick and I got to have back surgery again. So I was diagnosed with room toward authors in nineteen eighty eight. I came home in seventy so I've been dealing with this since nineteen eighty eight and worse. You know, five row miles

the genitive discs deteriorating and stuff. We found that this is true for a lot of survivors of Mount Mags. There are permanent injuries that started young, often in the back. Let's still have the disability in my bag where I can't sit very long or stand very long. Here's any knocks from the outside. Jenny appears to have a sense of serenity with her family photos and the Bible collection at her Montgomery home, but the years following her release

from Mount Mags were rough. I came home and I've been stuck ever since, from the time I left My Mags until my adulthood, just feeling stagnated, mentally stagnated. After Mount Mags, Jenny moved to Atlanta, where she worked as a nanny. She found herself in and out of tumultuous relationships, and eventually she moved back to Montgomery. I think I came out with lots of anger emmy, lots of hurt. I was troubled, I was confused, I didn't know who

to trust. I just hung out by myself a lot of times because I didn't think nobody would really care or would really understand what I had gone through, or maybe I didn't understand you know, life itself, having most of my teenage years taken away from me, and I think it was when I gave my life to Christ in eighty three when I really feel like releasing away. Jenny got saved in nineteen eighty three and ordained in nineteen ninety three, and ever since then she's been intimately

involved with her church. It was her pastor and his wife who were the first people she was able to open up to about Mount Meg's. I sat down and talked to my pastor's wife first, and then that encouraged me to just go forward and talk about it. Both Jenny and Mary said they haven't talked about what they

went throughout Mount Meg's with many people, even family. Miss Matthews had already told us that no matter who we talked today, wasn't going to believe us, and you know from the start, and so I guess it has settled in my mind, you know, what's the use of trying to tell anybody anything about it? And then I didn't think my family would really understand, so I just kept it held me in. Mary such something similar. I've tried to talk to my daughter about it. She thinks just

because I stayed out of school. I just didn't want to go to school. This reason I had to go away, But it wasn't I've tried to explain too of the childhood that we had. And this is something that you don't talk about love because people think you did something you don't want to go No roomy, that's Johnny Body singing.

In the nineteen eighties, Johnny started working with kids at a secure treatment facility for juvenile delinquents in Boston, Gazzy In for rate murder robber teenagers fifteen sixteen years old. And one of the good things about that situation is whenever I started talking, they would listen because I started talking about Mount Meiggs, start talking about what I was locked up in, the things that I did, and they say, and you are counselor. I said, yeah, I said you

could change. But Johnny wasn't exactly on the street and narrow yet. When he moved to Boston in the nineteen seventies, he was part time musician, part time self described hustler, prone to petty theft, robbery. Here and there. He was teaching the kids he worked with to be better, but wasn't necessarily following his own advice. And then I would go back and be with the young guys. So my conscience start bothering me. I mean, how could I be trying to change these gathered I'm still at here, This

is what I'm saying to myself. And I did that for about fifteen years, working with these gays, you know. So eventually I just just he ended up changing. And that's the best thing that ever happened to me in my life, you know. For the other Johnny, Johnny Mack Young, he's serving life without parole as we speak, for years. He had a plan, so I had made a commitment to myself there, but I got to live without parole. When I get tired during the time, I'm just gonna

make you, thought me. He'd commit suicide by cop by doing something that would force the prison guards to kill him. That led to a standoff with guards while at Holman, one of the most infamously brutal prisons in the country. But Johnny Mack survives a standoff, and he started corresponding with a prison advocacy volunteer via mail. He was shocked

that someone would want to help him. I realized, I don't want to be that person I used to speak and the first baby I had to resolve why was the person that I would And it was all because of the treatment and the same that I was taught in my murde. So he started taking college courses offered in prison, first psychology, then writing. He's a poet and an essayist. He has a bachelor's degree in theology. He

and some other incarcerated men produced a radio show. He also works as a jailhouse lawyer, helping other inmates file appeals. But for Johnny mac, the biggest change happened when the Alabama Department of Corrections started offering meditation courses. I've just staying in like about twenty three, and we learned how to you know, concentrate demand and get obsure sensation. Well that's it's change left five and it just learned it. Then got compassion. See like I almost a crying a

little while when I was talking to you. I'm not affected by what happened back then, but just expression and saying, you know, killing somebody around it's enough to bring cheese tom eyes right. Johnny Mack has been in prison for thirty six years. He's seventy three now. He's currently building a case in hopes of being furloughed under Alabama law. He says he meets two of the requirements. He's a

geriatric inmate, and he's permanently incapacitated. He had back pain so debilitating that sometimes it's hard for him to move at all. But because he's in prison, Johnny Max still has not received treatment. He's in his seventies now, though, and prison does at number on a person's life expectancy. Seventy three in prison is very different than seventy three outside. His health and survival is a race against the clock.

Remember how he started this series, Lonnie Holly was out late at night exploring the streets of Birmingham, finding interesting things among the trash. He'd been separated from his parents and his dozens of siblings as a baby, and by the time he got to Mount Meg's he'd been given a different name entirely. But unlike so many other kids who got taken from their family, Lonnie actually found his

by sheer coincidence. During a conversation he was having one day with another student at Mount Max, I was telling him about how I had been trying to get to the airport out to the Hollies and he asked me, what about the Hollies. He said he knowed some hollies is up the heel from what will. Word got back to Lonnie's grandmother that the baby they've been looking for all of this time, the one taken by aber Less Dancer more than a dozen years before, was locked up

just a couple of hours away. My grandmother. When she found out that I was there, she came to visit me on that Sunday. So once she presented the birth certificate and everything that I was Lonnie Bradley Holly, they released me into her custody and I came home with her. It was nineteen sixty four when Lonnie was finally released

from Mount Meg's. He was fourteen years old. Lonnie was glad to be reunited with his family, but the trauma and abuse he experienced at Mount Meg's stayed with him as he reacclimated to life outside, trying to fit back into the social system, it was almost impossible. His grandmother tried to enroll him back in school, but I wasn't with that in America side. At age fifteen, Lonnie followed one of his brothers to Florida and did whatever work

he could pick up. He later became a cook at Disney World when it opened near Orlando in nineteen seventy one. He's had a few scrapes at the law. He spent a couple of nights in jail, but nothing else. Since the late nineteen seventies, Lonnie's life has been dedicated to his art. He's an extremely successful visual artist and even

has a cult following as a musician. But despite his eventful life traveling the world as an artist at a musician, those formative years at Mount Meg's are embedded in his head and in his body. Here's a clip from a sound check in the UK when Lonnie busted out something he learned as a kid that he called the Mount Meg's Stomp, the rhythm track for this podcast theme song. Lonnie is the only one who has been able to get back inside Mount Meg's. He went in twenty thirteen

with a camera crew. During the visit, he clutched onto the arm of a close family friend, terrified, I get the heebie jeebs now you know, Okay, get your camera ready, cutsy dang gonna. This is this is the way they brought us in. Unlike us, Lonnie was allowed to tour the facility. He saw the old building that Eby Holloway used to live in, the white dormitory where the girls lived. The next year, he went back again, and this time just stood outside the gate reflecting on his time there,

especially on the rock pile. It was just so horrible that I couldn't get it out of my memory. It was almost like you having to go through the shale shop, like you're being in the military, and it's just constantly going through your brain, and this is something that you just can't forget about. Lonnie's art is one way of working through the trauma he endured there. I talked to him about his sculpture Blood on the Rock Pile and some of his other pieces that refer directly to Mount Meg's.

In one piece, he padlocked together eight spoons. It's called chain Gang Mount Meg's. Another called Whitewash, features seven broken mops. The mop heads are dirty, like how the kids in White would have looked after spending days or months on the rock pile. That's Meanwhile, I like doing abstract called the abstract can allow me and put my hand back in situation and then I can redo it. Here is something here I don't know what I can peel is away with the camera rolling, Lonnie peeled away a small

piece of paint from the fence surrounding the grounds. So get that little piece or idea is enough to remind me that I I have been here today. So Lonnie, always fascinated by found objects that others would discard, took that small piece of Mount Megs with him, a fragment of a part of his life that he couldn't erase.

We could have told you the simple story, the easy one, that the nineteen sixty nine lawsuit changed everything, that after Judge Frank Johnson ruled against the State of Alabama, Mount Meg's magically transformed into a caring home for children, a true place of rehabilitation. This is a story Mount Megs likes to tell too. In their January newsletter, the department said they welcome some new ideas on how best to

rehabilitate youth. They mentioned that they prioritize communication and collaboration, writing, we share ideas freely and courageously. We embrace the potential of ideas and approaches. But the truth, as far as I can tell, is more complicated. Since the lawsuit, Mount meg seems to have gotten better, but it never got good. Some parts did improve, at least at first. It was less crowded that it had been. Kids had shoes to wear,

but plenty of things stayed the same. In the past fifty years, countless children have run away, just as they used to, sometimes in packs of three or seven or even eleven. The state would once again use dogs to sniff them out, and if and when they were caught, they'd be arrested and sent to adult jail. And over the past fifty years, the overcrowding and poor infrastructure have made the news again every so often, as state authorities

once again claim they're helpless to address the problems. And Mount Meg's tradition of poor record keeping didn't end in nineteen seventy one either. For example, in nineteen ninety seven, a board member noticed that the school had somehow lost ownership of seven hundred acres of land since the early

nineteen eighties, and no one knew how. The school blamed the lack of paper trail on a nineteen seventy six fire that destroyed the institution's administrative records, but the board member noted that the missing land had happened after the fire. He suspected that the land had been traded for political favors. And there have still been credible allegations of abuse perpetrated by staff and other students. Some of those allegations are

in letters from parents or whispered among practitioners. Others can be found in lawsuits or newspaper articles. In twenty eleven, for example, a student filed suit against a school officer alleging he shoved him into the wall and slammed his into a table. The court noted the injuries bleeding bruises, cracked teeth, a swollen head. The feedback that I get from my clients while at Mount Megs is I think

exactly what one would expect it to be. The worst case scenario would be death, and Mount Meg's would be immediately under that. That's Jennifer Schnipper, a lawyer who's practiced family law in Birmingham, Alabama for almost fifteen years. Relatively early in Jennifer's career, she had a young client facing time at Mount Meg's. The judge was very clear in saying, have you ever been to Mount Megs? And I said no,

and he said you should go. So Jennifer arranged to visit the facility and immediately she understood what the judge meant. It's stark, it's cold, depressing, it's intimidating, and these I knew were kids anywhere from twelve to nineteen twenty twenty one years old that could be in there for three months,

six months, three years. It was shocking that visit to Mount Meg's has shaped Jennifer's decisions as someone who represents children in court, by fight to keep my clients out of Mount Meg's because from my perspective, there is very little value in a commitment to Mount Meg's. I don't find that it particularly benefits my clients, and I often feel like it becomes a bigger detriment to my clients. Over the past couple of decades, the consensus around juvenile

justice in America has shifted. In two thousand and five, the Supreme Court ruled that's sentencing juveniles to death was unconstitutional, and twelve the Court also outlawed mandatory life without parole sentences for children. We know more about children now, more about their brain development, their decision making, the impulses that lead them to act out, and in some ways that

knowledge is changing how the juvenile justice system works. Even in places like Alabama, the juvenile justice system tends to have changed perspectives significantly. We look at the child as a whole. In other words, they're more likely to try other ways of addressing the issues that children face, meaning that sending kids to places like Mount Meg's has steadily decreased, and it continues to decrease. I think commitments account for a very low number of outcomes for these delinquency cases.

There are so many resources in place that can help us keep that from happen. There's one more thing about Mount Meg's that hasn't changed, and that's the suffering in silence. There's not much more interest in what's happening there now than there was fifty years ago. Some other institutions have seemed backlash related to their mistreatment of children, but there's been no reckoning at Mount Megs. We mentioned at the beginning of this podcast that Mount Meg's wasn't the only

school that abused children. At the Dojer School in Florida, once known as the Florida State Reform School, children were abused for decades. In twenty twelve, a team of forensic anthropologists did field work on the property and uncovered dozens of unmarked graves. At least one hundred children were thought to have died there. There's a major difference between what the Doser School was like in the nineteen fifties and

sixties and Mount Megs. Both black and white students attended the Doser School, which was internally segregated, but aside from that, there are a lot of similarities between the two institutions, and the stories told by the survivors of the Doser School echo the stories of those who survived Mount Meg's and in Canada, over a hundred and fifty thousand Indigenous children were forcibly separated from their families and sent to what were called residential schools, many of which were run

by the Catholic Church. Thousands of children at over a hundred schools suffered physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. In two twenty one, experts uncovered over six hundred bodies of children who died at just one school. These aren't the only other institutions where abusing children was systemic, normal, encouraged. But I've thought a lot about these two, specifically not because of what happened at the schools, but what happened after

For survivors of both of these institutions. There's been a call for justice, a demand for accountability for the pain those children endured, and in both Florida and Canada, that call was at least sort of answered. In twenty seventeen, the Florida legislature officially apologized to the survivors of the

Dojer School. Cannot say with enough heart felt remorse that it's taken this long for a legislature, with all the evidence that is before us, to come forth and apologize for what has to be one of the blackest moments on our state's history. And in the summer of twenty twenty two, the Pope traveled to Canada to appologized publicly for the abuse that Indigenous children suffered. Bailoue de Santacion

either very conciliation. So I wondered, did that feel like justice for those survivors to hear the abuse acknowledge, to hear some remorse for some. The answer is yes. Here's Peter Ernick, a survivor of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, speaking to CBC Television. The Pope's upology to me will allow its survivors to begin a new chapter but for others it's not enough, and for some it's not anything.

We talked to some other survivors of the Dojer school about what the state's apology in twenty seventeen meant to them. Here's Charlie Fudge, it's time that they make something more right than just an apology. And Captain Bryant Middleton it was an empty gesture without meeting, with no follow up. And Richard Huntley, let me be honest with you, and I think that's whole wash. I mean, I think that's you know what I mean, that's full of shit. After all,

these apologies don't come with anything. Apologies demand no sacrifice from the state, no reparations, no settlements, no monetary damages for the personal damage done to them. The governor basically said they didn't have money to compensate us. Compensate us in the sense of ensuring that those that had been abused we were treated by doctors if need be. Most of us old guys have a very low income, and the majority of boys it was taken there and beaten

actually ended up in prison. There's been bills for reparations. Money wouldn't fix what they went through. Nothing would, but at least it would be something as boys. These men were abused, tortured, their futures crippled by what they endured. What good are words now? And yet words are more than most have gotten. How many stories like this one have gone uncovered? How many children have gone missing or

died without their families knowing what happened to them? How much abuse has been unleashed on kids like the ones at these schools without anyone saying anything. Here's one of the Doger survivors, Captain Bryant Middleton. Again, I can't help but wonder if any of this would surface anywhere else had it not been so prominently covered by the media here in Florida. How many other places are like dojer the Florida School for Boys that have not been found

out or have not been reported. There's no telling. Alabama has never expressed any regret for what the state did to those children. In fact, the terror of Mount Meg's has gotten little attention at all before now, except for Denny's book and Jesse James Andrews appeal in California court. I have some theories of why that might be. At the Dojor school and the residential schools in Canada, survivors connected and organized. We decided we would have some sort

of reunion. We were startled by the amount of turnout that we had. Literally hundreds of men showed up. It just was overwhelming. You can probably imagine how much the connection matters. How the fight for acknowledgment is much easier when hundreds of people speak out versus just one, regardless of the outcome. Being part of a group is some sort of relief catharsis, But survivors of Mount Megs haven't been organized like that quite yet, and so many of

them suffer alone. They don't have anyone to validate their memories, their trauma, what they went through as children. There are other differences between Mount Meg's and some of these other facilities. For example, at the Dojer School, many of the survivors were white, which probably increased the likelihood of accountability. Plus, the other institutions have been shut down. The Dojer School shuttered in two eleven, and the Canadian residential schools have

been closed since the early nineteen nineties. At Mount Megs, though the institution lives on, we don't know what became aim of the makeshift graveyard that Johnny Bodley and Lonnie Holly remember. But since this podcast began airing, we've gotten emails from people formerly affiliated with Mount Meg's, including one from someone who worked there within the last few years. He says, Lonnie and Johnny's memories are correct, that the small graveyard still existed when he worked there. Whoa with

me Law. Other places have brought in forensic anthropologists to on earth these institutions secrets, But as long as Mount Meg's is open, that level of reckoning is impossible. How can Alabama fully apologize or account for the harm of an institution that still exists. Eby Holloway died in nineteen

seventy six. Judge Thetford died in nineteen seventy seven. Most of the adult perpetrators are dead now, and lots of the children who were there in the nineteen sixties are dead too, But some remain, like Lonnie, Mary, Jenny and Johnny. Don't leave me alone, Lord, don't leave me alone? Why I'm all miss Jesus, john Ah, won't Jesus do all with me? So this is the end of our story, But ours is only part of the story of mounta Megs. The entire story of this place, now almost one hundred

and fifteen years old, is limitless. There's no way to account for all the harm caused by Mountain Megs to survivors, and all the harm caused by survivors because of that trauma. I find myself wishing I had a clearer ending to give you, that I could say the survivors are completely at peace now that I could tell you there'd been

some sort of reckoning with those who perpetrated these injustices. Denny, now in his eighties, is still trying to find a way to get reparations for the survivors of Mount Meg's, but that's not a promise that he or we can make. The true story, as always, is a little more unsatisfying than the stories we want to tell. Earlier, I asked what justice for these survivors would look like. But maybe

the truth is that justice here is impossible. There's no way of making whole what was broken on that stretch of land outside of Montgomery. The harm cannot be undone. We asked, if you could talk to the people who abused you, what would you say? And Mary thought about Fanny Matthews and all of these years later, she found herself wondering what Fanny had gone through, what kind of pain she might have experienced herself to do what she did to Mary and so many others, What happened to

her to make her so treacherous. You know, I'm softy too, as bad as it was, and I haven't so I'm not gonna lie to usday. I've forgiven her, Okay, if she told me what happened to her, I probably have a soft spot for her too. If I knew something that happened, listen, I don't know, I don't know, I'd probably end up loving her too. So maybe there's something else, a bit of comfort maybe, or even hope. And the fact that despite it all, many survivors still have the

capacity for forgiveness. Despite it all, so many of them are still trying to make the world a little better, And fifty years later, they're still here, still suffering, still remembering, but still surviving all the same. 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 script 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, Matt Arnette and Me. Sound design and mixes by Jesse Niswanger. Music is by Ben Soli. Additional recordings are courtesy of

the Alabama Center for Traditional Culture. The songs featured in this episode are Scalaway by Spiritual Voices of Whitehall, Alabama, Walk with Me by Helen McLoud, and I'm a Suspect by Lonnie Holly courtesy of Jack Jaguar. Special thanks 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 enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and review wherever

you get your podcasts. 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