February 21, 2023 • 41 mins
Denny Abbott enlists the help of lawyer Ira Dement to sue the state of Alabama. What ensues is a years-long battle, multiple lawsuits, personal turmoil, but also...a glimmer of hope for the kids at Mt. Meigs.
Special thanks to Denny Abbott and Douglas Kalajian for the use of their book, They Had No Voice: My Fight for Alabama's Forgotten Children.
If you or someone you know attended Mt. Meigs and would like to connect with us, please email mtmeigspodcast@gmail.com.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
School of Humans. Howard Mandel, a Northern Jewish boy fresh
out of law school, decided to move down to Montgomery,
Alabama in nineteen sixty nine. I wanted to be in
Montgomery because I wanted to be a civil rights lawyer,
and that was the heart of racism in the South.
(00:32):
Howard arrived in an Alabama still functioning in many ways
as a renegade state, defying the Civil Rights Act, which
had been passed five years prior. In most counties, there
still weren't any black people on voting roles. There were
no black people on juries voters. Oppression has a long
history in Alabama. When the state constitution was rewritten in
(00:55):
nineteen oh one, convention chair John Knox opened the proceedings
saying that their goal was to establish white supremacy in
this state. The state levied poll taxes, literacy tests, and
convoluted property requirements to vote. Then, like now, people convicted
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of certain crimes were not permitted to cast a ballot.
And as for people willing and able to fight voter
suppression in a court of law, there weren't many. When
Howard got to Alabama, there were only about ten civil
rights lawyers in the entire state. The New England native
and Georgetown Law graduate arrived in a whole new world
(01:40):
the Deep South. Most aspects of Alabamian life remained segregated
down the track. Alabama's gone to Booga Boola, jack On
Alabama bog So. The mayor Montgomery at the time was
a gentleman. His name was Emery Fumi. Mayor carried a pistol.
(02:01):
He was just racist through and through it. He was
the usher at this Presbyterian church and one of his
main jobs is to make sure that no African Americans
tried to come to church. Howard moved to Montgomery for
his first job, clerking for Federal District Court Judge Frank Johnson.
I don't consider having quote stuck my neck out. I'll
(02:25):
value the decisions that I've made and the effect of
those decisions, and my oath as a United States judge
decide cases like the law requires that to be decided.
So technically you had no option if you're going to
(02:45):
be a good jazz. That was an interview with Judge
Johnson in nineteen ninety five after he was awarded the
Presidential Medal of Freedom. Strangely enough, infamously racist Governor George
Wallace and Judge Johnson had grown up together in small
town North Alabama and both up being influential leaders in
(03:07):
the state, but ideologically speaking, they were about as far
as they could get from one another. When I finally
met him, Judge Johnson, we went out to dinner at
a restaurant and we were waiting in line for I
don't know, fifteen minutes, and we finally got into the
(03:27):
main restaurant and I saw that there were only about
three people leading. So I said to Judge Johnson, I said,
why are all these empty tables? Why'd they have us
waiting fifteen minutes? He said, that's because nobody'll sit within
three tables of me, who was such a pariah. Judge
Johnson had been an instrumental part of many important civil
(03:48):
rights cases of his time. He had ruled against racis
Alabama lawmaker since the early nineteen fifties. He ordered Montgomery
to integrate swimming pools and buses. He ruled in favor
of the Freedom Writers, but it was when he first
ordered schools to desegregate that Johnson and truly became the
enemy of dedicated white supremacists. Johnson had to have two
(04:10):
full time bodyguards US Marshals sitting in front of his house.
Every single day. He and his family received death threats constantly.
His mother's house was firebombed, and yet despite all that,
Howard knew that this is where he wanted to be,
to become one of those handful of civil rights lawyers
(04:32):
painstakingly working towards desegregation. I'm Josie Duffie Rice, and this
is Unreformed The Story of the Alabama Industrial School for
Negro Children, Episode six, Scallywag and Carpetbaggers. It's the end
(05:09):
of nineteen sixty eight in Montgomery, Alabama, and Marian or
four companions had just told Denny Abbott about the abuse
they endured at the Alabama Industrial School. Danny was the
chief juvenile probation officer in the county. He already knew
about some of it, the horrible conditions, some of the violence,
(05:30):
but he was rattled by their vivid descriptions of their
quote nightmarish routine of hard labor, beatings and sexual abuse.
It was this conversation with the girls that made Denny
realize he had to do whatever he could to help
the black kids at Mount Meg's and I said, you
know what, I can't be the kind of father, can't
(05:54):
be the kind of father to my own kids if
I walk away from those girls. But there was a
lot to figure out. Good intentions wouldn't be enough. There
was no inevitability of justice here, so there was a
real question about strategy. How could Denny change what was
(06:14):
happening at Mount Meg's and also who would help him.
The cruelty at Mount Meg's had flourished for many reasons,
but indifference to the suffering of black children was a
major part of it, and it would take something pretty
significant to shake up that indifference. Not another committee or
task force, not another list of recommendations, a real change.
(06:38):
Denny couldn't make such a seismic shift happen alone. He
badly needed an ally, someone willing to take on the
Alabama criminal legal system on behalf of black children. He
needed someone as horrified by Mount Meg's as he was,
but ideally an insider, a person well connected enough to
get stuff done despite all the blue bloods and red tape.
(07:02):
And that's when Denny remembered Ira dement de met d
capital m e n t. Ira is a lawyer we
mentioned last episode, the one who had filed a lawsuit
on behalf of that runaway teenage girl who had been
locked up in solitary confinement in the dark for days.
(07:23):
Ira was in private practice in Montgomery, so I knew
he cared about kids, and I knew that he was
very powerful and persuasive as a lawyer. Ira was thirty
four when he and Denny met. Like Denny's boss, Judge Thattford,
Ira came from an old white Alabama family, but Denny
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knew that Ira was willing to fight for kids, including
black kids. Ira believed in the Constitution as this document
that protected everyone, and he was willing to represent just
about anyone. He didn't always have good judgment, and he
had made a few very suspect choices in his professional career,
namely a couple years before, when in nineteen sixty five,
(08:07):
Ira had represented the Ku Klex Klan in a federal
case where the clan had been accused of preventing schools
from integrating. He later implied he did it because they
were willing to pay him, and by the way, he
lost that case when Judge Frank Johnson rightfully ruled against
him either way. By nineteen sixty eight, Ira was ready
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to fight on behalf of the black kids at Mount Meg's.
He framed the deprivations at the school as nothing short
of unconstitutional, claiming the absolute denial of basic and fundamental
human rights to Negro children who are incarcerated in a
concentration camp at Mountain Meigs, Alabama. So that's streets and
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I want to see him. So Denny told Ira about
Mary and the other girls who had shown up to
his office. He told them about the abuse that the
children at Mount Meg's were facing. And it turned out
that Ira had his own suspicions about Mount Meg's. As
Denny wrote in his book entitled they Had No Voice
(09:12):
Between Us, we already had a fat catalog of evidence
and plenty of ideas about how to fatten it. More So,
Ira decided that he wanted to be a part of this.
He wanted to help Denny bring attention to what was
happening at Mount Meg's. As he put it, well, it's
the difference between fundamental right fundamental all it's fat basic Iran.
(09:35):
Denny then had to decide how they wanted to handle this.
So I recalled Governor Albert Brewer. Ira thought maybe there
was a chance that the governor just didn't know about
what was happening at Mount Meg's that if he knew,
he'd be outraged enough to handle it, but that was
not the case. He stated that there was a committee.
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He had a point that he would be happy for
me to confer with him. Told him I had never
seen a committee accomplish. He wasn't wrong. We mentioned this
last episode, but there'd been committees convened before and nothing
had changed. Swa off the bat Ira concluded two things. First,
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they would need to file a lawsuit. What was happening
at the Alabama Industrial School for Negro children was not
only wrong, but he believed it was unconstitutional. There was
a problem though. We couldn't go to state corps. That
would never have worked. The judges were all efficient hunting
each other. It was a good old boys club filled
(10:44):
with judges who had fought equality under the law at
every juncture. As Denny wrote, this was a case about
basic civil and human rights, and no state court in
Alabama had anything but the most dismal record on either front.
See Denny was in law enforcement. Ira was a lawyer.
(11:05):
They both knew that what the laws said didn't matter
as much as who was on the bench making the decisions,
Hence IRAS's second conclusion, they would have to go big.
They decided to file a federal class action lawsuit against
the school, the administrators, and the board of trustees. The
(11:26):
law is intentionally opaque, and the procedural elements of it,
what court you file and why are intricate and kind
of boring, But here it's pretty simple. This is the
late nineteen sixties and the federal government was far more
progressive than the state of Alabama. In fact, during this era,
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the Supreme Court was maybe the most progressive it had
ever been before or since. Filing a federal case meant
there was a slightly better chance they'd get a good
faith judge. But it was a big move a class
action like this, especially against mullable defendants. It signaled that
the wrongdoing wasn't a one off, that abuse of children
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was endemic to the institution, and by suing the board,
the lawsuit made it clear that the fault was not
only with the act of perpetrators, but the passive enablers.
For decades. Trustees had just let cruelty flourish, which meant
they were responsible to This suit targeted the whole system.
(12:35):
On January twenty second, nineteen sixty nine, a county clerk
stamped the lawsuit, officially filing Charles Stockton at All versus
Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children in the United States
District Court for the Middle District of Alabama. The lawsuit
listed as plaintiffs five brave black boys, including Charles Stockton,
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ranging from ages thirteen to fifteen, who were suing by
and through Denny. Don't know exactly how these five children
were chosen. We know that they were kids that had
been in Denny's custody as a probation officer, but beyond that,
we just don't know much about them. And honestly, given
the conditions of Mount Megs, they could have probably chosen
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any of the students there, but in order to file
the lawsuit, they would need students willing to affix their
name to the filing, students who were willing to attest
that they had suffered these harms. The suit spent pages
laying out the deficiencies of Mount Megs, like the understaffing,
the lack of education, the child labor, the overcrowding, the
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crumbling infrastructure, the extreme heat, the lack of privacy, the
absence of vocational training, and the lack of funding. It
also accused school administrators of physical abuse, in particular Superintendent
Ebe Holloway and Matron Fannie Matthews abuse kidding kids in
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the skull with broom handles, were beating kids so badly
that it caused a miscarriage. Being a child out Mount
Megs meant quote, being imprisoned in a penal colony, which
is constitutionally, factually and totally unfit for the purpose for
which it is intended. So that was it. The nine
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page lawsuit was filed out there for everyone in the
country to see, and Ira and Denny weren't only asking
the court to address the abuse and the horrible conditions,
they were also demanding that the state in a great
Mount Megs and other juvenile reformatories. The next day, the
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lawsuit was all over the news. The Montgomery Advertiser and
the Psalma Times published stories about the abuse that the
kids had suffered, and with the publicity came the backlash
from the community from Denny's friends, family, and especial his
boss Judge Thatford. It wasn't like Denny had been quiet
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even before filing this lawsuit. He'd expressed disappointment and discussed
both privately and publicly about countless elements of the juvenile system,
but filing a federal lawsuit that was next level. Denny
and his neighbors in Montgomery, they had their differences, sure,
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but he had a lot of friends and people admired him.
He liked to officiate high school games and go to
church on Sundays. He played football in the local police league.
Old copies of his resume show a list of affiliations
a mile long, and even now he's kept placards and
schedules from a ton of conferences he attended in groups
he was a part of. He'd been vice president of
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the Montgomery Social Service Club, president of his It's PTA.
He taught part time at the local university. This was
his home, his community. Plus, Denny was in law enforcement.
He was a member of the Police Union and the
Alabama Council and Crime and Delinquency. The local paper mentioned
him often. He was powerful, he was respected, and he
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wasn't even thirty years old. Yet after we file the suits,
people that I had known my whole life, that I
had grown up with, some stopped talking to me. Neighbors
stopped interacting with me, store owners turned their backs on me.
My kids were called names going to school unless you
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were there. It's surely kind of hardly explained what that
was like. You can imagine that this must have been
a lonely time. Denny was a whistleblower, but no one
was exactly impressed by his bravery, the ripple effects to
what it did to his wife, his kids, and then
of course there was his job. Over the past few years,
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Judge Thattford had at least publicly supported Denny's push for
a new juvenile detention center. So when Judge Thetford found
out that his subordinate went over his own head after
he stuck his neck out for him, he was furious.
The day after the lawsuit was filed, Judge Thattford sent
Denny a letter, and in it he claimed that Denny
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never told him how bad things were at Mount Meg's,
but he wasn't embarrassed or regretful, And for someone who
supposedly just found out about the abuse that these kids suffered,
he didn't mention them once. Instead, he made it clear
that whatever connection the two of them had was gone.
In that letter, Betford said, as you know, over the
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years since I have been judge of this court, I've
depended upon your integrity, trust and ability. Filing a suit
in federal court without my knowledge is a distinct betrayal
of that trust and of the court for whom you work.
He calmed into his office, I think the next day
of when he found out about it, and he was
(18:14):
irate that I had done that, and he said, you know,
you've betrayed my trust. And I said, well, I might
have betrayed your trust. I don't think I've betrayed the
trust of the kids I'm supposed to be trying to help.
But he suspended me for my job for fifteen days,
a fifteen days suspension without pay for in subordination. It
(18:39):
was eventually reduced to ten. Now you may be wondering
why Thoughtford didn't just fire Denny, and the answer is
that legally he couldn't. Denny did not serve at the
pleasure of any judge, and so Thutford didn't have the power,
but he was trying to get it. Later, when the
county granted their annual merit raises, Denny was the only
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person not to get one. Look, it could have been worse.
We know what happened to people, particularly black people, who
were willing to fight for equality under the law. Denny's
house wasn't bombed, he wasn't shot or killed, and in fact,
the five juveniles who were listed in the lawsuit were
probably at much greater risk than he was. But still,
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things in Denny's personal and professional lives weren't exactly great.
But the case, on the other hand, the case was
going about as well as it possibly could, thanks to
two strokes of luck. The first was that the case
ended up in the docket of none other than Judge
Frank Johnson. There was no Alabama courtroom more willing to
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consider the plight of black children than his, and as
we mentioned before, Judge Johnson knew something about being a pariah. Still,
there was a long way to go between just filing
the case and actually winning it. Then, thankfully, the second
lucky thing happened. Our later became the US Attorney for
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the Middle District of Alabama. This meant that Ira Dement
became the head of the Federal prosecutor's office in the
heart of Alabama. It's hard to explain just how important
this was. Ira goes from just being one of the
only progressive lawyers in Alabama to being one of the
most powerful law enforcement officials in the state. He went
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from being one guy fighting the state of Alabama to
being a prosecutor with the weight of the entire federal
government behind him fighting the state of Alabama. Plus simply
getting a job like this put Ira in his work
in the national spotlight, and that became its own accelerant.
It greatly increased the chance that the kids at Mount
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Meg's would get some genuine attention. The facts of the
case hadn't changed at all, but the calculus shifted significantly,
and his new job made way for another remarkable shift
in the case. Suddenly, federal authorities set their sights on
this lawsuit against Mount Megs. So after I became United
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States Attorney, I interflated the United States and requested that
the Civil Rights Division in the FBI would come involved.
When the FBI came down to the school to observe,
they saw evidence of the cruelty that Denny and Ira
had reported. Here's what one instructor of Mount Meg's told
the FBI during an interview. I have observed numerous beatings
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to inmates with both fan belts and broomsticks on almost
a daily occasion. Inmates would receive these beatings for such
things as being late to dinner, being noisy in the
mess hall, attempts to escape. Meanwhile, Holloway is not happy
about these FBI agents sniffing around looking into how he
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runs the school. In May of nineteen sixty nine, he
wrote an indignant letter to the governor complaining. In it,
he said, one of the agents told me that I
was not to question the students about what they had
talked about, or punish or intimidate the students in any
way because they had talked to the FBI. He lamented
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that after the FBI left, he had more pushback from
the students. In August of nineteen sixty nine, a seventeen
year old girl at Mount Meg's named Diane allegedly went
to Fanny's room and told her, I came up here
to kill you. I'm tired of messing with you. And
in the courtroom, Diane's story was completely different from Fanny's.
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Court officials determined that Diane had definitely been beaten before.
She had bruises on the backs of her legs and
around her shoulders and other scars from previous injury. Fanny
said all of those might have happened in the tussle,
but child services officials determined that the injury were too
old for that. Despite clear evidence that Diane had been abused,
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the court punished her instead of Fanny. The juvenile court judge,
none other than William Thetford, ordered Diane to be tried
as an adult. She got sentenced to six months an
adult jail for battery, knocked down from a charge of
attempted murder. Meanwhile, Superintendent Holloway was starting to get a
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little nervous. He wrote a letter that really stuck with
me to one state official in November of nineteen sixty nine.
It seems as if everyone is out to get me,
and as using every means possible to do so, he wrote,
After twenty three years of hard, honest work here, I
would like to remain until I have reached age sixty five,
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but due to the pressure and strain of this year's work,
I find it impossible to go on much longer. He said,
I am confident that I have done my best. A
month later, a number of people, including Superintendent Holloway, Fanny Matthews,
and Tom Glover, were subpoena, but after searching all the
material we had and visiting several archives, we were only
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able to find Holloway's deposition. It was December nineteen sixty nine,
almost a year after the lawsuit had been filed. Holloway
was careful about what he would share on the record,
but even the little he said made it clear that
the kids were being worked half to death. He said
he had them working fifteen hundred acres milking thirty five
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cows a day. And then the lawyer doing the deposition,
a lawyer for the Department of Justice, He started questioning
Holloway about the abuse. The lawyer asked if mister Glover
had a paddle, and Holloway said, I'm sure he has one.
He told the lawyer that six months prior, he'd started
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a discipline committee to cut down on corporal punishment. He
said it was only then that they stopped just letting
anybody just punish a boy for just any little thing. Now,
he said, boys will be brought in for fighting. We
give them five licks, that's all. The lawyers never brought
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up fan belts. Nobody asked Holloway why he and his
co workers beat kids until they poured blood or passed out.
There were no questions about the sexual abuse, and nobody
mentioned the rock pile. The case was national news now,
which was bad news for the state of Alabama. According
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to Denny, state officials were doing all that they could
to avoid this case going to trial, which would surely
be both embarrassing and expensive. As the case carried on,
Superintendent EB Holloway fulfilled his promise. He retired in May
of nineteen seventy for quote unquote health reasons, and he
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wasn't the first one to leave. Within days of her deposition,
Matron Fanny Matthews resigned in left Mount Megs. After Superintendent
Holloway left Mount Megs, the State of Alabama asked J. B.
Hill to come on board. J B was the former
superintendent of the other industrial school, the one for white boys.
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He believed the situation at Mount Meg's was so dire
that he came out of his retirement to take the job.
He was the first white superintendent at Mount Meg's. Right
off the bat, Superintendent Hill asked to look over the
school's financial records, and he learned that there weren't any
no budgets, no ledger book, nothing. He looked everywhere, and
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all he found was thirty five thousand dollars and unpaid bills,
but no cash to pay them. He had to write
the governor and ask for money to pay off the debts. J. B.
Hill opped all the abuse and stopped the farming program
and the higher staff that will compliment and could deliver
programs because the federal court had said these are things
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you're going to do. There were more changes too. The
most dilapidated living quarters were torn down, all the girls
were transferred to other schools, and most importantly, new guidelines
for corporal punishment were introduced. For a year, Judge Johnson
monitored Mount Megs, holding the possibility of a trial over
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the heads of the board, the administrators, and the state
if they didn't address the problems at the school, But
by nineteen seventy one he'd seen enough improvement to issue
a final ruling that July, more than two years after
Denny filed suit, Judge Johnson ruled for the children of
Mount Megs. His final judgment stated explicitly that the school
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had to stop overcrowding, employ a social worker, and provide
real medical care. He also said that the farming program
had to be limited and that most forms of corporal
punishment were no longer permitted at Mount Meg's. And seventeen
years after Brown v. Board, he ordered the desegregation of
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the Alabama Industrial School for Negro children. Now it was
just the Alabama Industrial School. We had integrated training schools
that made things better for everybody. I got a lot
of letters of support from people who started look at
things a little differently. And yet you can see how
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even this ruling left the door open for some of
the same harm that had always existed at Mount Meg's.
The worst parts of Mount Megs were given permission to continue,
just in a limited capacity. Boys could still be forced
to farm as long as it was consistent with the
school's vocational and training prom Corporal punishment was still allowed,
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but the order stated only with a prescribed paddle. The
order was limited and the law was too. Once the
federal case ended, so did the constant oversight, and that
meant there was still room for kids to fall through
the cracks despite its limitations. Judge Johnson's ruling was a
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watershed moment for Mount Meg's, but even after the ruling,
Denny was still hearing new stories of children who had
been mistreated and abused at Mount Meg's. And then in
nineteen seventy two, Denny stumbled across the name of a
boy named Emmett Player. Five years before, back in nineteen
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sixty seven, Emmett Player had been a ten year old
kid who didn't seem to have anywhere to go. His
mom had recently died, his dad was in prison. So
without a sentencing, without a social worker, without any judicial
oversight whatsoever, they put ten year old Emmett in a
car and they drove him to Mount Meg's. Law does
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not permit that. The law said kids had to be
at least twelve, but many who were sent to Mount
Megs were Emmett's age or younger. Even Lonnie went there
when he was just eleven. Plus, Emmett had been placed
at Mount Megs without being charged or seeing a judge.
Emmett had done nothing except be a black dependent child,
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and he stayed there five years. So Denny decided to
try to help Emmett. But he realized that Mount Meg's
wasn't the only culprit here. I quickly learned that the
homes for dependent children were run primarily by church groups.
I applied to each and every one of them for Emmett,
and each and every one of them him refuses because
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of his black Denny and Irish suit may have integrated
all the juvenile detention facilities in Alabama, but Judge Johnson's
ruling in that case didn't say anything about the integration
of church homes. So that's why I ran into Howard Mandel.
That's Howard Mandel, the young lawyer from the beginning of
this episode. By nineteen seventy two, he'd finished his clerkship
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with Judge Johnson and was one of those handful of
civil rights lawyers in Alabama. So there's a term used
after the Civil War, still used by Southern whites. You
were either a scalawag or carpet bagger. I was a carpetbagger,
you know. I was this liberal Jewish kid coming down
from the North and here I am in Montgomery, Alabama,
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doing my thing, and I'm going to file civil rights cases.
Denny was worse in the eyes because he's a scalawag.
He is a local boy, a local boy who was
defying the old guard, the scalo wag and the harpetbagger,
and they had a plan. So I saw this as
more than just Emmett player. This was a class action
that we would be filed. I said, you know, here,
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we go down this road again, but we have to
do it. So we filed a second federal court class
action lawsuit in nineteen seventy two, and we suited all
the Methodists, and all the Baptists, and all the Presbyterians,
and all the sheriffs at the State of Alabama all
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be half of and I think Kid's life. During the
first suit almost four years prior, Denny was mostly focused
on just one institution, Mount Megs. But this time he's
going after churches. There's no question it's going to make
a lot of people upset. On Friday, November seventeenth, nineteen
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seventy two, Denny and Howard filed their suit, and on
Monday that word summoned Denny to come to his office.
Denny entered while Thetford was dictating a letter to his secretary,
Dear mister Abbott, that bird saught out loud, ignoring Denny,
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but clearly intending him to hear. Within the past month,
I instructed you that there were to be no suits
filed by any personnel of the Montgomery County youth facilities
without my prior knowledge and approval. This discharge is effective immediately, yours,
very truly William f Thetford and the next morning I
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get up and get the Montgomery Advertised, which is a
local paper, headlines front page. Denny appot fire not something
you want to start your day with. He could not
tolerate Denny's and ursuing the State of Alabama and all
these children's homes. He was not going to buckcause he
had to face his friends at the country club. Now,
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technically Betford still didn't have the power to fire Denny,
so once he did, Denny sued him. So Jenny was
entangled in two lawsuits at the same time. As for
the suit against both church and state. The good news
was Judge Johnson got randomly assigned to this new case
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as well, but that didn't make it easy. Pretty quickly
the case devolved into a standoff. I did have a
conversation with the head of the one of the heads
of the welfare department, and she said to me, Howard,
you know they're not going to settle the head people.
They got their marching orders, and that marching orders is segregation.
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Now in segregation forever about a year after the case
was filed, Howard was reading through the minutes of one
Methodist church's board meeting in Bradley, Alabama. They'd had a
board meeting and the topic was should we settle this
case or not? What would God want us to do?
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Kind of thing. So they decided to take a vote.
Method is Children's Home in Selma. So the vote was
should we continue to segregate or should we agree to integrate?
And the vote was thirteen to thirteen. The vote was tied.
That means the chairperson of the board had to vote
(35:22):
as a tiebreaker, and he said, I'm not ready to
vote yet, and they said, what do you mean. He says,
I need to pray about this. He stepped outside and
went to the chapel alone. He came back fifteen minutes later.
Everyone's waiting and he says, I prayed about this, and
(35:43):
what I feel is that I'm voting to integrade. I
think that's the lesson you learned is that people aren't bad,
necessarily bad. They grow up in a certain culture and
that's all they know and they but then he was
called upon just like Denny was. I think that's the
thing is when you're called upon, how are you going
(36:04):
to respond? Everyone doesn't have to be a civil rights
lawyer kind of you live your life, and Denny led
his life and he had his family. But when he
was called upon, he stepped forward. That's I think as
a real lesson. I was always impressed by that he
did something he didn't have to do. Howard maybe right
that a few people did the right thing. But what
(36:27):
sticks with me when I hear this story is how
much luck was involved from start to finish, not just
with this case, but with the first case too. A
judge like Judge Johnson had to exist in Alabama and
had to have both cases randomly assigned to him. Ira
and Howard had to be willing to help. The federal
(36:47):
government had to get involved, Denny had to take a chance,
and the chairperson had to vote yes. Howard sees this
as a story about humans willing to do the right thing,
but I mostly see it as a story of luck
and the end result. Like the first suit, this case
(37:09):
doesn't go to trial, but it was a long haul.
Howard pushing bit by bit, following up every loose end,
meeting every piece of resistance. Eventually, Johnson ruled that the
state of Alabama had to provide black children access to
the same state run care as white ones. We were
(37:30):
thrilled because again, not only had we reformed the juvenile
justice system, in my opinion, now we had reformed the
child welfare system for dependent children as well. I mean
they were being abused too. We felt like we had
made major accomplishments in Alabama to get justice for black kids.
(37:54):
Denny was right that it was a step forward, but
the ruling applied only to state run homes, not private ones,
and that meant that church homes were exempt from Johnson's ruling.
Eventually they did desegregate, but not right away. I think
they were embarrassed. But these are children, that's what always,
(38:15):
you know. And to take a ten year old like
Emmett Player and say to him, you have to go
to Mountain Meggs, even though you've never done anything wrong.
With all the problems Mountain Eggs had. The Welfare department
found Emmett's father in prison, and when they talked with him,
they found out that Emma had an aunt in a
little community called Silicaga and she was willing to take
(38:37):
him in. And Howard, well, he had plenty of other
cases to get to it's like trying to cut a
field of kudzu with a hand sickle that's fifty acres square.
The problems was so overwhelming that I think you do
what you do not because you hope to make significant change,
(39:00):
but because that's just who you are, and that's what
your expectations off of how you live your life. And
then there was Denny. He lost that wrongful termination lawsuit
against Thattford, and he couldn't find a job anywhere in
the state of Alabama. So he started applying to jobs
across the country. He even scored a recommendation from Senator
(39:22):
Ted Kennedy. But nobody wanted to hire a guy who
was such a squeaky wheel, a robble rouser, a guy
who had sued his own job twice. They said, here's
a crazy person. He sued his own state in federal
court twice. We don't want him here in Virginia or
Texas or wherever I was. So I went for almost
(39:45):
a year without meaningful employment. I had a friend who
had a bumper recrowmbing shop, and he let me come
into his store, deliver some bumpers from him, put up
stock in his shelves, clean his bathrooms, sweep the hallways,
which I did, and most importantly, after the lawsuits were settled,
(40:09):
what happened to the thousands of kids who had been
sent to Mount Meg's. I'm looka what happened half towards
I don't you know? There's suchompdis in male marriage. There's
nothing compared to to after Man the Maumee. On our
next episode, we look at some of the children who
(40:29):
were sent to Mount Meg's and later as adults, cycled
in and out of prison. Some were even sentenced to
life in prison or worse, sentenced to death Unreformed. The
Story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children is
a production of School of Humans and iHeartMedia. This episode
(40:49):
was written by Me, Josie Duffie, Rice and Taylor von Leslie.
Our script supervisors Florence Burrow Adams, and our producer is
Gabbi Watts, who had additional writing and production support from
Sherry Scott. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crowley, Brandon
barrmt Arnett, and Me. Sound design and is by Jesse Niswanger.
Music is by Ben Soli. Additional recordings are courtesy of
(41:10):
the Alabama Center for traditional culture. This song featured in
this episode is Alabama Boogie by Johnny Lee, adapting with
drums and percussion by Jordan Ellis. William Thattford was voiced
by Van Gutter. Special thanks to the Alabama Department of
Archives in history, Michael Harriet, Cloyd Hall, Kevin Nutt, Van Newkirk,
and all of the survivors of Mount Meg's willing to
share their stories. Additional thanks to Danny Abbott and Douglas
(41:31):
Collegian for the use of their book They Had No Voice,
My Fight for Alabama's Forgotten Children. 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
School of Humans. Howard Mandel, a Northern Jewish boy fresh
out of law school, decided to move down to Montgomery,
Alabama in nineteen sixty nine. I wanted to be in
Montgomery because I wanted to be a civil rights lawyer,
and that was the heart of racism in the South.
(00:32):
Howard arrived in an Alabama still functioning in many ways
as a renegade state, defying the Civil Rights Act, which
had been passed five years prior. In most counties, there
still weren't any black people on voting roles. There were
no black people on juries voters. Oppression has a long
history in Alabama. When the state constitution was rewritten in
(00:55):
nineteen oh one, convention chair John Knox opened the proceedings
saying that their goal was to establish white supremacy in
this state. The state levied poll taxes, literacy tests, and
convoluted property requirements to vote. Then, like now, people convicted
(01:17):
of certain crimes were not permitted to cast a ballot.
And as for people willing and able to fight voter
suppression in a court of law, there weren't many. When
Howard got to Alabama, there were only about ten civil
rights lawyers in the entire state. The New England native
and Georgetown Law graduate arrived in a whole new world
(01:40):
the Deep South. Most aspects of Alabamian life remained segregated
down the track. Alabama's gone to Booga Boola, jack On
Alabama bog So. The mayor Montgomery at the time was
a gentleman. His name was Emery Fumi. Mayor carried a pistol.
(02:01):
He was just racist through and through it. He was
the usher at this Presbyterian church and one of his
main jobs is to make sure that no African Americans
tried to come to church. Howard moved to Montgomery for
his first job, clerking for Federal District Court Judge Frank Johnson.
I don't consider having quote stuck my neck out. I'll
(02:25):
value the decisions that I've made and the effect of
those decisions, and my oath as a United States judge
decide cases like the law requires that to be decided.
So technically you had no option if you're going to
(02:45):
be a good jazz. That was an interview with Judge
Johnson in nineteen ninety five after he was awarded the
Presidential Medal of Freedom. Strangely enough, infamously racist Governor George
Wallace and Judge Johnson had grown up together in small
town North Alabama and both up being influential leaders in
(03:07):
the state, but ideologically speaking, they were about as far
as they could get from one another. When I finally
met him, Judge Johnson, we went out to dinner at
a restaurant and we were waiting in line for I
don't know, fifteen minutes, and we finally got into the
(03:27):
main restaurant and I saw that there were only about
three people leading. So I said to Judge Johnson, I said,
why are all these empty tables? Why'd they have us
waiting fifteen minutes? He said, that's because nobody'll sit within
three tables of me, who was such a pariah. Judge
Johnson had been an instrumental part of many important civil
(03:48):
rights cases of his time. He had ruled against racis
Alabama lawmaker since the early nineteen fifties. He ordered Montgomery
to integrate swimming pools and buses. He ruled in favor
of the Freedom Writers, but it was when he first
ordered schools to desegregate that Johnson and truly became the
enemy of dedicated white supremacists. Johnson had to have two
(04:10):
full time bodyguards US Marshals sitting in front of his house.
Every single day. He and his family received death threats constantly.
His mother's house was firebombed, and yet despite all that,
Howard knew that this is where he wanted to be,
to become one of those handful of civil rights lawyers
(04:32):
painstakingly working towards desegregation. I'm Josie Duffie Rice, and this
is Unreformed The Story of the Alabama Industrial School for
Negro Children, Episode six, Scallywag and Carpetbaggers. It's the end
(05:09):
of nineteen sixty eight in Montgomery, Alabama, and Marian or
four companions had just told Denny Abbott about the abuse
they endured at the Alabama Industrial School. Danny was the
chief juvenile probation officer in the county. He already knew
about some of it, the horrible conditions, some of the violence,
(05:30):
but he was rattled by their vivid descriptions of their
quote nightmarish routine of hard labor, beatings and sexual abuse.
It was this conversation with the girls that made Denny
realize he had to do whatever he could to help
the black kids at Mount Meg's and I said, you
know what, I can't be the kind of father, can't
(05:54):
be the kind of father to my own kids if
I walk away from those girls. But there was a
lot to figure out. Good intentions wouldn't be enough. There
was no inevitability of justice here, so there was a
real question about strategy. How could Denny change what was
(06:14):
happening at Mount Meg's and also who would help him.
The cruelty at Mount Meg's had flourished for many reasons,
but indifference to the suffering of black children was a
major part of it, and it would take something pretty
significant to shake up that indifference. Not another committee or
task force, not another list of recommendations, a real change.
(06:38):
Denny couldn't make such a seismic shift happen alone. He
badly needed an ally, someone willing to take on the
Alabama criminal legal system on behalf of black children. He
needed someone as horrified by Mount Meg's as he was,
but ideally an insider, a person well connected enough to
get stuff done despite all the blue bloods and red tape.
(07:02):
And that's when Denny remembered Ira dement de met d
capital m e n t. Ira is a lawyer we
mentioned last episode, the one who had filed a lawsuit
on behalf of that runaway teenage girl who had been
locked up in solitary confinement in the dark for days.
(07:23):
Ira was in private practice in Montgomery, so I knew
he cared about kids, and I knew that he was
very powerful and persuasive as a lawyer. Ira was thirty
four when he and Denny met. Like Denny's boss, Judge Thattford,
Ira came from an old white Alabama family, but Denny
(07:45):
knew that Ira was willing to fight for kids, including
black kids. Ira believed in the Constitution as this document
that protected everyone, and he was willing to represent just
about anyone. He didn't always have good judgment, and he
had made a few very suspect choices in his professional career,
namely a couple years before, when in nineteen sixty five,
(08:07):
Ira had represented the Ku Klex Klan in a federal
case where the clan had been accused of preventing schools
from integrating. He later implied he did it because they
were willing to pay him, and by the way, he
lost that case when Judge Frank Johnson rightfully ruled against
him either way. By nineteen sixty eight, Ira was ready
(08:28):
to fight on behalf of the black kids at Mount Meg's.
He framed the deprivations at the school as nothing short
of unconstitutional, claiming the absolute denial of basic and fundamental
human rights to Negro children who are incarcerated in a
concentration camp at Mountain Meigs, Alabama. So that's streets and
(08:51):
I want to see him. So Denny told Ira about
Mary and the other girls who had shown up to
his office. He told them about the abuse that the
children at Mount Meg's were facing. And it turned out
that Ira had his own suspicions about Mount Meg's. As
Denny wrote in his book entitled they Had No Voice
(09:12):
Between Us, we already had a fat catalog of evidence
and plenty of ideas about how to fatten it. More So,
Ira decided that he wanted to be a part of this.
He wanted to help Denny bring attention to what was
happening at Mount Meg's. As he put it, well, it's
the difference between fundamental right fundamental all it's fat basic Iran.
(09:35):
Denny then had to decide how they wanted to handle this.
So I recalled Governor Albert Brewer. Ira thought maybe there
was a chance that the governor just didn't know about
what was happening at Mount Meg's that if he knew,
he'd be outraged enough to handle it, but that was
not the case. He stated that there was a committee.
(09:58):
He had a point that he would be happy for
me to confer with him. Told him I had never
seen a committee accomplish. He wasn't wrong. We mentioned this
last episode, but there'd been committees convened before and nothing
had changed. Swa off the bat Ira concluded two things. First,
(10:21):
they would need to file a lawsuit. What was happening
at the Alabama Industrial School for Negro children was not
only wrong, but he believed it was unconstitutional. There was
a problem though. We couldn't go to state corps. That
would never have worked. The judges were all efficient hunting
each other. It was a good old boys club filled
(10:44):
with judges who had fought equality under the law at
every juncture. As Denny wrote, this was a case about
basic civil and human rights, and no state court in
Alabama had anything but the most dismal record on either front.
See Denny was in law enforcement. Ira was a lawyer.
(11:05):
They both knew that what the laws said didn't matter
as much as who was on the bench making the decisions,
Hence IRAS's second conclusion, they would have to go big.
They decided to file a federal class action lawsuit against
the school, the administrators, and the board of trustees. The
(11:26):
law is intentionally opaque, and the procedural elements of it,
what court you file and why are intricate and kind
of boring, But here it's pretty simple. This is the
late nineteen sixties and the federal government was far more
progressive than the state of Alabama. In fact, during this era,
(11:48):
the Supreme Court was maybe the most progressive it had
ever been before or since. Filing a federal case meant
there was a slightly better chance they'd get a good
faith judge. But it was a big move a class
action like this, especially against mullable defendants. It signaled that
the wrongdoing wasn't a one off, that abuse of children
(12:11):
was endemic to the institution, and by suing the board,
the lawsuit made it clear that the fault was not
only with the act of perpetrators, but the passive enablers.
For decades. Trustees had just let cruelty flourish, which meant
they were responsible to This suit targeted the whole system.
(12:35):
On January twenty second, nineteen sixty nine, a county clerk
stamped the lawsuit, officially filing Charles Stockton at All versus
Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children in the United States
District Court for the Middle District of Alabama. The lawsuit
listed as plaintiffs five brave black boys, including Charles Stockton,
(12:59):
ranging from ages thirteen to fifteen, who were suing by
and through Denny. Don't know exactly how these five children
were chosen. We know that they were kids that had
been in Denny's custody as a probation officer, but beyond that,
we just don't know much about them. And honestly, given
the conditions of Mount Megs, they could have probably chosen
(13:21):
any of the students there, but in order to file
the lawsuit, they would need students willing to affix their
name to the filing, students who were willing to attest
that they had suffered these harms. The suit spent pages
laying out the deficiencies of Mount Megs, like the understaffing,
the lack of education, the child labor, the overcrowding, the
(13:46):
crumbling infrastructure, the extreme heat, the lack of privacy, the
absence of vocational training, and the lack of funding. It
also accused school administrators of physical abuse, in particular Superintendent
Ebe Holloway and Matron Fannie Matthews abuse kidding kids in
(14:06):
the skull with broom handles, were beating kids so badly
that it caused a miscarriage. Being a child out Mount
Megs meant quote, being imprisoned in a penal colony, which
is constitutionally, factually and totally unfit for the purpose for
which it is intended. So that was it. The nine
(14:28):
page lawsuit was filed out there for everyone in the
country to see, and Ira and Denny weren't only asking
the court to address the abuse and the horrible conditions,
they were also demanding that the state in a great
Mount Megs and other juvenile reformatories. The next day, the
(14:49):
lawsuit was all over the news. The Montgomery Advertiser and
the Psalma Times published stories about the abuse that the
kids had suffered, and with the publicity came the backlash
from the community from Denny's friends, family, and especial his
boss Judge Thatford. It wasn't like Denny had been quiet
(15:20):
even before filing this lawsuit. He'd expressed disappointment and discussed
both privately and publicly about countless elements of the juvenile system,
but filing a federal lawsuit that was next level. Denny
and his neighbors in Montgomery, they had their differences, sure,
(15:40):
but he had a lot of friends and people admired him.
He liked to officiate high school games and go to
church on Sundays. He played football in the local police league.
Old copies of his resume show a list of affiliations
a mile long, and even now he's kept placards and
schedules from a ton of conferences he attended in groups
he was a part of. He'd been vice president of
(16:02):
the Montgomery Social Service Club, president of his It's PTA.
He taught part time at the local university. This was
his home, his community. Plus, Denny was in law enforcement.
He was a member of the Police Union and the
Alabama Council and Crime and Delinquency. The local paper mentioned
him often. He was powerful, he was respected, and he
(16:25):
wasn't even thirty years old. Yet after we file the suits,
people that I had known my whole life, that I
had grown up with, some stopped talking to me. Neighbors
stopped interacting with me, store owners turned their backs on me.
My kids were called names going to school unless you
(16:45):
were there. It's surely kind of hardly explained what that
was like. You can imagine that this must have been
a lonely time. Denny was a whistleblower, but no one
was exactly impressed by his bravery, the ripple effects to
what it did to his wife, his kids, and then
of course there was his job. Over the past few years,
(17:07):
Judge Thattford had at least publicly supported Denny's push for
a new juvenile detention center. So when Judge Thetford found
out that his subordinate went over his own head after
he stuck his neck out for him, he was furious.
The day after the lawsuit was filed, Judge Thattford sent
Denny a letter, and in it he claimed that Denny
(17:29):
never told him how bad things were at Mount Meg's,
but he wasn't embarrassed or regretful, And for someone who
supposedly just found out about the abuse that these kids suffered,
he didn't mention them once. Instead, he made it clear
that whatever connection the two of them had was gone.
In that letter, Betford said, as you know, over the
(17:52):
years since I have been judge of this court, I've
depended upon your integrity, trust and ability. Filing a suit
in federal court without my knowledge is a distinct betrayal
of that trust and of the court for whom you work.
He calmed into his office, I think the next day
of when he found out about it, and he was
(18:14):
irate that I had done that, and he said, you know,
you've betrayed my trust. And I said, well, I might
have betrayed your trust. I don't think I've betrayed the
trust of the kids I'm supposed to be trying to help.
But he suspended me for my job for fifteen days,
a fifteen days suspension without pay for in subordination. It
(18:39):
was eventually reduced to ten. Now you may be wondering
why Thoughtford didn't just fire Denny, and the answer is
that legally he couldn't. Denny did not serve at the
pleasure of any judge, and so Thutford didn't have the power,
but he was trying to get it. Later, when the
county granted their annual merit raises, Denny was the only
(19:02):
person not to get one. Look, it could have been worse.
We know what happened to people, particularly black people, who
were willing to fight for equality under the law. Denny's
house wasn't bombed, he wasn't shot or killed, and in fact,
the five juveniles who were listed in the lawsuit were
probably at much greater risk than he was. But still,
(19:28):
things in Denny's personal and professional lives weren't exactly great.
But the case, on the other hand, the case was
going about as well as it possibly could, thanks to
two strokes of luck. The first was that the case
ended up in the docket of none other than Judge
Frank Johnson. There was no Alabama courtroom more willing to
(19:50):
consider the plight of black children than his, and as
we mentioned before, Judge Johnson knew something about being a pariah. Still,
there was a long way to go between just filing
the case and actually winning it. Then, thankfully, the second
lucky thing happened. Our later became the US Attorney for
(20:13):
the Middle District of Alabama. This meant that Ira Dement
became the head of the Federal prosecutor's office in the
heart of Alabama. It's hard to explain just how important
this was. Ira goes from just being one of the
only progressive lawyers in Alabama to being one of the
most powerful law enforcement officials in the state. He went
(20:35):
from being one guy fighting the state of Alabama to
being a prosecutor with the weight of the entire federal
government behind him fighting the state of Alabama. Plus simply
getting a job like this put Ira in his work
in the national spotlight, and that became its own accelerant.
It greatly increased the chance that the kids at Mount
(20:56):
Meg's would get some genuine attention. The facts of the
case hadn't changed at all, but the calculus shifted significantly,
and his new job made way for another remarkable shift
in the case. Suddenly, federal authorities set their sights on
this lawsuit against Mount Megs. So after I became United
(21:16):
States Attorney, I interflated the United States and requested that
the Civil Rights Division in the FBI would come involved.
When the FBI came down to the school to observe,
they saw evidence of the cruelty that Denny and Ira
had reported. Here's what one instructor of Mount Meg's told
the FBI during an interview. I have observed numerous beatings
(21:39):
to inmates with both fan belts and broomsticks on almost
a daily occasion. Inmates would receive these beatings for such
things as being late to dinner, being noisy in the
mess hall, attempts to escape. Meanwhile, Holloway is not happy
about these FBI agents sniffing around looking into how he
(22:02):
runs the school. In May of nineteen sixty nine, he
wrote an indignant letter to the governor complaining. In it,
he said, one of the agents told me that I
was not to question the students about what they had
talked about, or punish or intimidate the students in any
way because they had talked to the FBI. He lamented
(22:23):
that after the FBI left, he had more pushback from
the students. In August of nineteen sixty nine, a seventeen
year old girl at Mount Meg's named Diane allegedly went
to Fanny's room and told her, I came up here
to kill you. I'm tired of messing with you. And
in the courtroom, Diane's story was completely different from Fanny's.
(22:47):
Court officials determined that Diane had definitely been beaten before.
She had bruises on the backs of her legs and
around her shoulders and other scars from previous injury. Fanny
said all of those might have happened in the tussle,
but child services officials determined that the injury were too
old for that. Despite clear evidence that Diane had been abused,
(23:10):
the court punished her instead of Fanny. The juvenile court judge,
none other than William Thetford, ordered Diane to be tried
as an adult. She got sentenced to six months an
adult jail for battery, knocked down from a charge of
attempted murder. Meanwhile, Superintendent Holloway was starting to get a
(23:34):
little nervous. He wrote a letter that really stuck with
me to one state official in November of nineteen sixty nine.
It seems as if everyone is out to get me,
and as using every means possible to do so, he wrote,
After twenty three years of hard, honest work here, I
would like to remain until I have reached age sixty five,
(23:55):
but due to the pressure and strain of this year's work,
I find it impossible to go on much longer. He said,
I am confident that I have done my best. A
month later, a number of people, including Superintendent Holloway, Fanny Matthews,
and Tom Glover, were subpoena, but after searching all the
material we had and visiting several archives, we were only
(24:18):
able to find Holloway's deposition. It was December nineteen sixty nine,
almost a year after the lawsuit had been filed. Holloway
was careful about what he would share on the record,
but even the little he said made it clear that
the kids were being worked half to death. He said
he had them working fifteen hundred acres milking thirty five
(24:40):
cows a day. And then the lawyer doing the deposition,
a lawyer for the Department of Justice, He started questioning
Holloway about the abuse. The lawyer asked if mister Glover
had a paddle, and Holloway said, I'm sure he has one.
He told the lawyer that six months prior, he'd started
(25:01):
a discipline committee to cut down on corporal punishment. He
said it was only then that they stopped just letting
anybody just punish a boy for just any little thing. Now,
he said, boys will be brought in for fighting. We
give them five licks, that's all. The lawyers never brought
(25:22):
up fan belts. Nobody asked Holloway why he and his
co workers beat kids until they poured blood or passed out.
There were no questions about the sexual abuse, and nobody
mentioned the rock pile. The case was national news now,
which was bad news for the state of Alabama. According
(25:45):
to Denny, state officials were doing all that they could
to avoid this case going to trial, which would surely
be both embarrassing and expensive. As the case carried on,
Superintendent EB Holloway fulfilled his promise. He retired in May
of nineteen seventy for quote unquote health reasons, and he
(26:06):
wasn't the first one to leave. Within days of her deposition,
Matron Fanny Matthews resigned in left Mount Megs. After Superintendent
Holloway left Mount Megs, the State of Alabama asked J. B.
Hill to come on board. J B was the former
superintendent of the other industrial school, the one for white boys.
(26:28):
He believed the situation at Mount Meg's was so dire
that he came out of his retirement to take the job.
He was the first white superintendent at Mount Meg's. Right
off the bat, Superintendent Hill asked to look over the
school's financial records, and he learned that there weren't any
no budgets, no ledger book, nothing. He looked everywhere, and
(26:53):
all he found was thirty five thousand dollars and unpaid bills,
but no cash to pay them. He had to write
the governor and ask for money to pay off the debts. J. B.
Hill opped all the abuse and stopped the farming program
and the higher staff that will compliment and could deliver
programs because the federal court had said these are things
(27:16):
you're going to do. There were more changes too. The
most dilapidated living quarters were torn down, all the girls
were transferred to other schools, and most importantly, new guidelines
for corporal punishment were introduced. For a year, Judge Johnson
monitored Mount Megs, holding the possibility of a trial over
(27:40):
the heads of the board, the administrators, and the state
if they didn't address the problems at the school, But
by nineteen seventy one he'd seen enough improvement to issue
a final ruling that July, more than two years after
Denny filed suit, Judge Johnson ruled for the children of
Mount Megs. His final judgment stated explicitly that the school
(28:04):
had to stop overcrowding, employ a social worker, and provide
real medical care. He also said that the farming program
had to be limited and that most forms of corporal
punishment were no longer permitted at Mount Meg's. And seventeen
years after Brown v. Board, he ordered the desegregation of
(28:25):
the Alabama Industrial School for Negro children. Now it was
just the Alabama Industrial School. We had integrated training schools
that made things better for everybody. I got a lot
of letters of support from people who started look at
things a little differently. And yet you can see how
(28:46):
even this ruling left the door open for some of
the same harm that had always existed at Mount Meg's.
The worst parts of Mount Megs were given permission to continue,
just in a limited capacity. Boys could still be forced
to farm as long as it was consistent with the
school's vocational and training prom Corporal punishment was still allowed,
(29:09):
but the order stated only with a prescribed paddle. The
order was limited and the law was too. Once the
federal case ended, so did the constant oversight, and that
meant there was still room for kids to fall through
the cracks despite its limitations. Judge Johnson's ruling was a
(29:38):
watershed moment for Mount Meg's, but even after the ruling,
Denny was still hearing new stories of children who had
been mistreated and abused at Mount Meg's. And then in
nineteen seventy two, Denny stumbled across the name of a
boy named Emmett Player. Five years before, back in nineteen
(29:59):
sixty seven, Emmett Player had been a ten year old
kid who didn't seem to have anywhere to go. His
mom had recently died, his dad was in prison. So
without a sentencing, without a social worker, without any judicial
oversight whatsoever, they put ten year old Emmett in a
car and they drove him to Mount Meg's. Law does
(30:22):
not permit that. The law said kids had to be
at least twelve, but many who were sent to Mount
Megs were Emmett's age or younger. Even Lonnie went there
when he was just eleven. Plus, Emmett had been placed
at Mount Megs without being charged or seeing a judge.
Emmett had done nothing except be a black dependent child,
(30:44):
and he stayed there five years. So Denny decided to
try to help Emmett. But he realized that Mount Meg's
wasn't the only culprit here. I quickly learned that the
homes for dependent children were run primarily by church groups.
I applied to each and every one of them for Emmett,
and each and every one of them him refuses because
(31:06):
of his black Denny and Irish suit may have integrated
all the juvenile detention facilities in Alabama, but Judge Johnson's
ruling in that case didn't say anything about the integration
of church homes. So that's why I ran into Howard Mandel.
That's Howard Mandel, the young lawyer from the beginning of
this episode. By nineteen seventy two, he'd finished his clerkship
(31:30):
with Judge Johnson and was one of those handful of
civil rights lawyers in Alabama. So there's a term used
after the Civil War, still used by Southern whites. You
were either a scalawag or carpet bagger. I was a carpetbagger,
you know. I was this liberal Jewish kid coming down
from the North and here I am in Montgomery, Alabama,
(31:52):
doing my thing, and I'm going to file civil rights cases.
Denny was worse in the eyes because he's a scalawag.
He is a local boy, a local boy who was
defying the old guard, the scalo wag and the harpetbagger,
and they had a plan. So I saw this as
more than just Emmett player. This was a class action
that we would be filed. I said, you know, here,
(32:15):
we go down this road again, but we have to
do it. So we filed a second federal court class
action lawsuit in nineteen seventy two, and we suited all
the Methodists, and all the Baptists, and all the Presbyterians,
and all the sheriffs at the State of Alabama all
(32:36):
be half of and I think Kid's life. During the
first suit almost four years prior, Denny was mostly focused
on just one institution, Mount Megs. But this time he's
going after churches. There's no question it's going to make
a lot of people upset. On Friday, November seventeenth, nineteen
(32:56):
seventy two, Denny and Howard filed their suit, and on
Monday that word summoned Denny to come to his office.
Denny entered while Thetford was dictating a letter to his secretary,
Dear mister Abbott, that bird saught out loud, ignoring Denny,
(33:17):
but clearly intending him to hear. Within the past month,
I instructed you that there were to be no suits
filed by any personnel of the Montgomery County youth facilities
without my prior knowledge and approval. This discharge is effective immediately, yours,
very truly William f Thetford and the next morning I
(33:38):
get up and get the Montgomery Advertised, which is a
local paper, headlines front page. Denny appot fire not something
you want to start your day with. He could not
tolerate Denny's and ursuing the State of Alabama and all
these children's homes. He was not going to buckcause he
had to face his friends at the country club. Now,
(33:59):
technically Betford still didn't have the power to fire Denny,
so once he did, Denny sued him. So Jenny was
entangled in two lawsuits at the same time. As for
the suit against both church and state. The good news
was Judge Johnson got randomly assigned to this new case
(34:19):
as well, but that didn't make it easy. Pretty quickly
the case devolved into a standoff. I did have a
conversation with the head of the one of the heads
of the welfare department, and she said to me, Howard,
you know they're not going to settle the head people.
They got their marching orders, and that marching orders is segregation.
(34:41):
Now in segregation forever about a year after the case
was filed, Howard was reading through the minutes of one
Methodist church's board meeting in Bradley, Alabama. They'd had a
board meeting and the topic was should we settle this
case or not? What would God want us to do?
(35:01):
Kind of thing. So they decided to take a vote.
Method is Children's Home in Selma. So the vote was
should we continue to segregate or should we agree to integrate?
And the vote was thirteen to thirteen. The vote was tied.
That means the chairperson of the board had to vote
(35:22):
as a tiebreaker, and he said, I'm not ready to
vote yet, and they said, what do you mean. He says,
I need to pray about this. He stepped outside and
went to the chapel alone. He came back fifteen minutes later.
Everyone's waiting and he says, I prayed about this, and
(35:43):
what I feel is that I'm voting to integrade. I
think that's the lesson you learned is that people aren't bad,
necessarily bad. They grow up in a certain culture and
that's all they know and they but then he was
called upon just like Denny was. I think that's the
thing is when you're called upon, how are you going
(36:04):
to respond? Everyone doesn't have to be a civil rights
lawyer kind of you live your life, and Denny led
his life and he had his family. But when he
was called upon, he stepped forward. That's I think as
a real lesson. I was always impressed by that he
did something he didn't have to do. Howard maybe right
that a few people did the right thing. But what
(36:27):
sticks with me when I hear this story is how
much luck was involved from start to finish, not just
with this case, but with the first case too. A
judge like Judge Johnson had to exist in Alabama and
had to have both cases randomly assigned to him. Ira
and Howard had to be willing to help. The federal
(36:47):
government had to get involved, Denny had to take a chance,
and the chairperson had to vote yes. Howard sees this
as a story about humans willing to do the right thing,
but I mostly see it as a story of luck
and the end result. Like the first suit, this case
(37:09):
doesn't go to trial, but it was a long haul.
Howard pushing bit by bit, following up every loose end,
meeting every piece of resistance. Eventually, Johnson ruled that the
state of Alabama had to provide black children access to
the same state run care as white ones. We were
(37:30):
thrilled because again, not only had we reformed the juvenile
justice system, in my opinion, now we had reformed the
child welfare system for dependent children as well. I mean
they were being abused too. We felt like we had
made major accomplishments in Alabama to get justice for black kids.
(37:54):
Denny was right that it was a step forward, but
the ruling applied only to state run homes, not private ones,
and that meant that church homes were exempt from Johnson's ruling.
Eventually they did desegregate, but not right away. I think
they were embarrassed. But these are children, that's what always,
(38:15):
you know. And to take a ten year old like
Emmett Player and say to him, you have to go
to Mountain Meggs, even though you've never done anything wrong.
With all the problems Mountain Eggs had. The Welfare department
found Emmett's father in prison, and when they talked with him,
they found out that Emma had an aunt in a
little community called Silicaga and she was willing to take
(38:37):
him in. And Howard, well, he had plenty of other
cases to get to it's like trying to cut a
field of kudzu with a hand sickle that's fifty acres square.
The problems was so overwhelming that I think you do
what you do not because you hope to make significant change,
(39:00):
but because that's just who you are, and that's what
your expectations off of how you live your life. And
then there was Denny. He lost that wrongful termination lawsuit
against Thattford, and he couldn't find a job anywhere in
the state of Alabama. So he started applying to jobs
across the country. He even scored a recommendation from Senator
(39:22):
Ted Kennedy. But nobody wanted to hire a guy who
was such a squeaky wheel, a robble rouser, a guy
who had sued his own job twice. They said, here's
a crazy person. He sued his own state in federal
court twice. We don't want him here in Virginia or
Texas or wherever I was. So I went for almost
(39:45):
a year without meaningful employment. I had a friend who
had a bumper recrowmbing shop, and he let me come
into his store, deliver some bumpers from him, put up
stock in his shelves, clean his bathrooms, sweep the hallways,
which I did, and most importantly, after the lawsuits were settled,
(40:09):
what happened to the thousands of kids who had been
sent to Mount Meg's. I'm looka what happened half towards
I don't you know? There's suchompdis in male marriage. There's
nothing compared to to after Man the Maumee. On our
next episode, we look at some of the children who
(40:29):
were sent to Mount Meg's and later as adults, cycled
in and out of prison. Some were even sentenced to
life in prison or worse, sentenced to death Unreformed. The
Story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children is
a production of School of Humans and iHeartMedia. This episode
(40:49):
was written by Me, Josie Duffie, Rice and Taylor von Leslie.
Our script supervisors Florence Burrow Adams, and our producer is
Gabbi Watts, who had additional writing and production support from
Sherry Scott. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crowley, Brandon
barrmt Arnett, and Me. Sound design and is by Jesse Niswanger.
Music is by Ben Soli. Additional recordings are courtesy of
(41:10):
the Alabama Center for traditional culture. This song featured in
this episode is Alabama Boogie by Johnny Lee, adapting with
drums and percussion by Jordan Ellis. William Thattford was voiced
by Van Gutter. Special thanks to the Alabama Department of
Archives in history, Michael Harriet, Cloyd Hall, Kevin Nutt, Van Newkirk,
and all of the survivors of Mount Meg's willing to
share their stories. Additional thanks to Danny Abbott and Douglas
(41:31):
Collegian for the use of their book They Had No Voice,
My Fight for Alabama's Forgotten Children. 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
Host
Josie Duffy Rice
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