Episode 5: When Mary Met Denny

Mary Stephens and four other girls escape Mt. Meigs and are determined to tell someone about what's happened to them. Probation officer Denny Abbott must make a decision. 

If you or someone you know attended Mt. Meigs and would like to connect with us, please email [e-mail]. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
School of Humans. This podcast episode discusses historical events that
include physical and sexual abuse against children. We were in
the woods, had to be around October November somewhere around

(00:30):
in there. It was pretty cold. It's nineteen sixty eight
and Mary and a group of four girls have just
run away from Mount Meg's. But we stayed in the
woods and slept that day, would run, walk whatever. By night.
We will gone probably a couple of days before we

(00:52):
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

(01:15):
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

(01:39):
Negro Children Episode five, when Mary met Denny fly Away Loy.

(02:10):
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

(02:31):
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

(02:54):
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

(03:16):
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

(03:36):
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

(03:59):
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

(04:21):
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.

(04:44):
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,

(05:05):
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

(05:26):
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

(05:50):
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

(06:12):
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

(06:35):
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

(06:58):
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,

(07:22):
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

(07:46):
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

(08:14):
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

(08:34):
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

(08:57):
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

(09:22):
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.

(09:44):
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

(10:07):
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

(10:27):
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,

(10:49):
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

(11:10):
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

(11:30):
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

(11:52):
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

(12:12):
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.

(12:33):
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

(12:57):
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,

(13:23):
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

(13:45):
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

(14:06):
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

(14:28):
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

(14:50):
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

(15:12):
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

(15:34):
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

(15:55):
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.

(16:18):
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

(16:39):
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

(17:00):
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

(17:21):
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

(17:42):
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

(18:03):
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

(18:23):
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.

(18:43):
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

(19:04):
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

(19:26):
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

(19:48):
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

(20:08):
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

(20:34):
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

(20:55):
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

(21:17):
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.

(21:39):
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

(21:59):
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,

(22:23):
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

(22:45):
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

(23:08):
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.

(23:30):
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

(23:58):
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.

(24:18):
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

(24:40):
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

(25:02):
at gmail dot com. School of Humans