Episode 8: Searching for Justice

In the final episode, we look at where Lonnie, Mary, Johnny, Jennie, Johnny Mack, and Denny are fifty years after leaving Mt. Meigs. We also look at how juvenile justice in America has evolved and how other juvenile reform schools that mistreated their students have atoned for their wrongs. And lastly, we get a glimpse into the current state of Mt. Meigs. Has it changed? Or is it the same place it was more than fifty years ago?

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

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
School of Humans. So remember back in episode one, at
the beginning of this series, I talked about driving to
Mount Meg's last July, about trying to get in the
front gate, more than fifty years after Jenny, Johnny, Lonnie, Mary,

(00:29):
Johnny Mack, and Jesse James Andrews had left. This was
always a project about Mount Meg's back then rather than now.
But the more I looked into the institution's history, the
more I wanted to know what it was like today,
had it improved or had the lawsuit been a false
positive a promise that never manifested. For more than a year,

(00:52):
we tried over and over to get access to Mount Meg's,
not only for reporting purposes, but because Johnny, Mary, Jenny,
and Lonnie all expressed interest in seeing what it was
like now. We called, emailed, asked anyone who we thought
might be able to get us in, but they denied us,

(01:13):
giving us various excuses. They were understaffed, there were COVID restrictions,
it was too close to the holidays. They even turned
down Denny, a former law enforcement officer. We really don't
ever give tours to begin with, a staff person at
the Department of Youth Services wrote instead, she just sent
us some newsletters and a YouTube link to a video,

(01:35):
writing that maybe these would, as she said, provide them
some hope that things have changed and continue to change
for the better. So instead, I just decided to show
up to see as much of the place as I could. Hi,
I've been working on a project about the Mount Megs
and the sixties, and I was just hoping I could
see the campus. Is there a way we could just

(01:57):
drive around it? Since the series started airing, we've finally
gotten a more positive response to our request to visit
from the administrators at Mount Meg's. In mid February, an
official from the Alabama Department of Youth Services responded to
an email sent from a member of Lonnie's team. The
officials said they were open to discussing a visit from

(02:20):
former residence in the near future, but added that they
would like to listen to the entire series before scheduling
a specific time. In this episode, the last of the series,
we look at where Lonnie, Mary, Johnny, Jenny, and Denny
are fifty years after leaving Mount Megs. We also look

(02:42):
at how juvenile justice in America has evolved and how
other juvenile reform schools that mistreated their students have atoned
for their wrongs. And lastly, we get a glimpse into
the current state of Mount Meg's. Has it changed or
is it the same place it was more than fifty
years ago. The feedback that I get from my clients

(03:04):
while at Mount Meg's is, I think exactly what one
would expect it to be. The worst case scenario would
be death, and Mount Meg's would be immediately under that.
I'm Josie Duffie Rice. This is Unreformed the Story of

(03:24):
the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, Episode eight, Searching

(03:45):
for Justice. Over the past year, I've thought more and
more about what justice would look like here. What would
justice look like for Lonnie, Mary, Jenny and Johnny. What
would it look like for all the students of Mount Meg's,
including the ones they today? What would it look like

(04:07):
for Jesse, James Andrews or Johnny mac young or the
people that they hurt? Is justice even possible? One of
the things that blew my mind is the fact that
none of the survivors we spoke to even knew about
the nineteen sixty nine lawsuit until decades later. They'd been

(04:28):
victimized by this institution, but once they were gone, they
were gone. There was no follow up, no accounting, no
remorse from the state of Alabama. And it goes without
saying that they didn't get any relief. They didn't get
settlement money or anything. They didn't even get an apology.

(04:49):
They all left Mount Megs and were tossed out to
fend for themselves, and they're still paying for it. Half
a century later. In twenty twelve, Mary was at her
home in Chattanooga, sitting across from an investigator from N's
Child Protective Services. Her own children had grown up and

(05:10):
she wanted to become a foster parent. She was nervous
because there was something standing in her way, her criminal record,
specifically the year and a half she had spent at
Mount Meg's. It turned out that it was not going
to be an issue. Instead, this meeting connected Mary was
someone she hadn't seen since she was a child. The

(05:30):
investigator for Department Children's Services did my investigation to be
in the foster parenty system, and I told her about
my state at Alabam in Destri School. She said, you
know there's a book out about the school. I said,
what that book was? They had no voice By whistleblower

(05:51):
Denny Abbott and his co author Douglas Collegian. I hadn't
forgotten about Danny, you know. At the end of the
meeting at Mary's, the investigator gave her Denny's name and
phone number. As soon as she lived at called Denny.
That call in twenty twelve was the first time Mary
had talked to Denny since she and other runaways for

(06:12):
Mount Meg's pleaded for his help at the Montgomery Juvenile
Detention Center forty five years prior after I got fired.
After we file the suits, it took me almost a
year to find meaningful employment, and then at the end
of that year we had to borrow money against our
life and chaerance policy to parabills. I got a call
from O. J. Keller, who was setting up a division

(06:33):
a few services that had already done it in state Florida,
and he called me and he said, we have an opening.
Would you like to be the regional detention director for
South Florida? And I said absolutely, I'll be there tomorrow.
They finally saw each other for the first time in
decades when Denny gave a talk about his book at

(06:56):
the Rosa Parks Library and Montgomery. Their reunion was cut
briefly on video. Great Mary is with a group of women,
also survivors of Mount Meg's. Denny hugs each of them,
but you can tell he shares a special connection with Mary.

(07:19):
Letter tears and I thanked him for helping me and
for me getting out of being able to leave, for
not being killed. He's more than a friend. I look

(07:40):
up to him lis at the Bigger Household because of
his care and the way he felt about children and me.
Mary Stevens was always looking for a family. She grew
up in an unstable household, and when she first arrived

(08:02):
at Mount Meg's, she hoped that Fanny Matthew was going
to adopt her, but in some ways, that feeling of
family safety always eluded her. After she was released from
Mount Meg's, she was plagued by instability once again. Would
I left Alabama? Sent me right back to the same

(08:24):
foster home birthplaces? I got right. My brothers and sisters
were there. I left the foster home, got married, had
a baby at nineteen. But while she tried to build
the family she always wanted her brothers and sisters were

(08:45):
left behind. I know they will be a beat for
the raise of strap and so Mary did something bold, risky.
I stole my brothers and sisters from that boster who
It was a crazy idea, one that if things went wrong,
could have resulted in her child being taken from her,

(09:06):
but Mary did it anyway. I told my brother when
I was coming for him to be ready, one brother
and two sisters. I was scared. I was so scared.
It was scared. Police go to be behind me, had

(09:27):
my brother looking out who was speeding. We're probably gotten
stopped for speeding. Fast is that we got stopped for
stolen children. Mary and her siblings made it across the
state line to Tennessee. By that time, Mary had already
left her husband, so she was a young single mother

(09:48):
trying to take care of her child and her siblings.
She struggled to make ends meet. When I got them
to Tennessee, I couldn't take care of them. I was
making a dollar sixty see an hour or make the
police department as a dispatch. I had a child, and
I couldn't get any help for little brothers and sisters.

(10:09):
So they hated at boor to TPSS Tennessee Preparatory School.
But it was nothing like not for Mary. Her life
as an adult wasn't always easy, but it was better
than her childhood. She remarried, had more children, divorced again.

(10:31):
She built a career as an insurance agent. But in
recent years Mary was called to something else, foster parenting.
I think Matt Mags had like to do that. After
I divorced and new that I wanted to do something good,
so I started to post at home. When they came
into my house, they were calling me miss Mary. I

(10:54):
told them you can call me what everyone. You don't
have to call me miss Mary. And I explained to
him how much I loved them and cared for him,
and you know, thank you was Nana. Mary showed us
a property behind her house. She used to own three
lots but ended up selling them off. Actually I wanted

(11:16):
to start a school. That's why I had these three lots.
I wanted to school. But I got sick and I
got to have back surgery again. So I was diagnosed
with room toward authors in nineteen eighty eight. I came
home in seventy so I've been dealing with this since
nineteen eighty eight and worse. You know, five row miles

(11:43):
the genitive discs deteriorating and stuff. We found that this
is true for a lot of survivors of Mount Mags.
There are permanent injuries that started young, often in the back.
Let's still have the disability in my bag where I
can't sit very long or stand very long. Here's any

(12:05):
knocks from the outside. Jenny appears to have a sense
of serenity with her family photos and the Bible collection
at her Montgomery home, but the years following her release
from Mount Mags were rough. I came home and I've
been stuck ever since, from the time I left My

(12:25):
Mags until my adulthood, just feeling stagnated, mentally stagnated. After
Mount Mags, Jenny moved to Atlanta, where she worked as
a nanny. She found herself in and out of tumultuous relationships,
and eventually she moved back to Montgomery. I think I
came out with lots of anger emmy, lots of hurt.

(12:50):
I was troubled, I was confused, I didn't know who
to trust. I just hung out by myself a lot
of times because I didn't think nobody would really care
or would really understand what I had gone through, or
maybe I didn't understand you know, life itself, having most

(13:11):
of my teenage years taken away from me, and I
think it was when I gave my life to Christ
in eighty three when I really feel like releasing away.

(13:34):
Jenny got saved in nineteen eighty three and ordained in
nineteen ninety three, and ever since then she's been intimately
involved with her church. It was her pastor and his
wife who were the first people she was able to
open up to about Mount Meg's. I sat down and
talked to my pastor's wife first, and then that encouraged

(13:58):
me to just go forward and talk about it. Both
Jenny and Mary said they haven't talked about what they
went throughout Mount Meg's with many people, even family. Miss
Matthews had already told us that no matter who we
talked today, wasn't going to believe us, and you know
from the start, and so I guess it has settled
in my mind, you know, what's the use of trying

(14:19):
to tell anybody anything about it? And then I didn't
think my family would really understand, so I just kept
it held me in. Mary such something similar. I've tried
to talk to my daughter about it. She thinks just
because I stayed out of school. I just didn't want

(14:40):
to go to school. This reason I had to go away,
But it wasn't I've tried to explain too of the
childhood that we had. And this is something that you
don't talk about love because people think you did something
you don't want to go No roomy, that's Johnny Body singing.

(15:15):
In the nineteen eighties, Johnny started working with kids at
a secure treatment facility for juvenile delinquents in Boston, Gazzy
In for rate murder robber teenagers fifteen sixteen years old.
And one of the good things about that situation is
whenever I started talking, they would listen because I started

(15:36):
talking about Mount Meiggs, start talking about what I was
locked up in, the things that I did, and they say,
and you are counselor. I said, yeah, I said you
could change. But Johnny wasn't exactly on the street and
narrow yet. When he moved to Boston in the nineteen seventies,
he was part time musician, part time self described hustler,

(15:58):
prone to petty theft, robbery. Here and there. He was
teaching the kids he worked with to be better, but
wasn't necessarily following his own advice. And then I would
go back and be with the young guys. So my
conscience start bothering me. I mean, how could I be
trying to change these gathered I'm still at here, This
is what I'm saying to myself. And I did that

(16:20):
for about fifteen years, working with these gays, you know.
So eventually I just just he ended up changing. And
that's the best thing that ever happened to me in
my life, you know. For the other Johnny, Johnny Mack Young,
he's serving life without parole as we speak, for years.

(16:42):
He had a plan, so I had made a commitment
to myself there, but I got to live without parole.
When I get tired during the time, I'm just gonna
make you, thought me. He'd commit suicide by cop by
doing something that would force the prison guards to kill him.

(17:03):
That led to a standoff with guards while at Holman,
one of the most infamously brutal prisons in the country.
But Johnny Mack survives a standoff, and he started corresponding
with a prison advocacy volunteer via mail. He was shocked
that someone would want to help him. I realized, I

(17:23):
don't want to be that person I used to speak
and the first baby I had to resolve why was
the person that I would And it was all because
of the treatment and the same that I was taught
in my murde. So he started taking college courses offered

(17:44):
in prison, first psychology, then writing. He's a poet and
an essayist. He has a bachelor's degree in theology. He
and some other incarcerated men produced a radio show. He
also works as a jailhouse lawyer, helping other inmates file appeals.
But for Johnny mac, the biggest change happened when the

(18:06):
Alabama Department of Corrections started offering meditation courses. I've just
staying in like about twenty three, and we learned how
to you know, concentrate demand and get obsure sensation. Well
that's it's change left five and it just learned it.

(18:28):
Then got compassion. See like I almost a crying a
little while when I was talking to you. I'm not
affected by what happened back then, but just expression and saying,
you know, killing somebody around it's enough to bring cheese
tom eyes right. Johnny Mack has been in prison for

(18:48):
thirty six years. He's seventy three now. He's currently building
a case in hopes of being furloughed under Alabama law.
He says he meets two of the requirements. He's a
geriatric inmate, and he's permanently incapacitated. He had back pain
so debilitating that sometimes it's hard for him to move

(19:09):
at all. But because he's in prison, Johnny Max still
has not received treatment. He's in his seventies now, though,
and prison does at number on a person's life expectancy.
Seventy three in prison is very different than seventy three outside.
His health and survival is a race against the clock.

(19:40):
Remember how he started this series, Lonnie Holly was out
late at night exploring the streets of Birmingham, finding interesting
things among the trash. He'd been separated from his parents
and his dozens of siblings as a baby, and by
the time he got to Mount Meg's he'd been given
a different name entirely. But unlike so many other kids

(20:04):
who got taken from their family, Lonnie actually found his
by sheer coincidence. During a conversation he was having one
day with another student at Mount Max, I was telling
him about how I had been trying to get to
the airport out to the Hollies and he asked me,

(20:26):
what about the Hollies. He said he knowed some hollies
is up the heel from what will. Word got back
to Lonnie's grandmother that the baby they've been looking for
all of this time, the one taken by aber Less
Dancer more than a dozen years before, was locked up
just a couple of hours away. My grandmother. When she

(20:48):
found out that I was there, she came to visit
me on that Sunday. So once she presented the birth
certificate and everything that I was Lonnie Bradley Holly, they
released me into her custody and I came home with her.
It was nineteen sixty four when Lonnie was finally released

(21:11):
from Mount Meg's. He was fourteen years old. Lonnie was
glad to be reunited with his family, but the trauma
and abuse he experienced at Mount Meg's stayed with him
as he reacclimated to life outside, trying to fit back
into the social system, it was almost impossible. His grandmother

(21:35):
tried to enroll him back in school, but I wasn't
with that in America side. At age fifteen, Lonnie followed
one of his brothers to Florida and did whatever work

(21:58):
he could pick up. He later became a cook at
Disney World when it opened near Orlando in nineteen seventy one.
He's had a few scrapes at the law. He spent
a couple of nights in jail, but nothing else. Since
the late nineteen seventies, Lonnie's life has been dedicated to
his art. He's an extremely successful visual artist and even

(22:21):
has a cult following as a musician. But despite his
eventful life traveling the world as an artist at a musician,
those formative years at Mount Meg's are embedded in his
head and in his body. Here's a clip from a
sound check in the UK when Lonnie busted out something
he learned as a kid that he called the Mount

(22:42):
Meg's Stomp, the rhythm track for this podcast theme song.
Lonnie is the only one who has been able to

(23:03):
get back inside Mount Meg's. He went in twenty thirteen
with a camera crew. During the visit, he clutched onto
the arm of a close family friend, terrified, I get
the heebie jeebs now you know, Okay, get your camera ready,
cutsy dang gonna. This is this is the way they
brought us in. Unlike us, Lonnie was allowed to tour

(23:27):
the facility. He saw the old building that Eby Holloway
used to live in, the white dormitory where the girls lived.
The next year, he went back again, and this time
just stood outside the gate reflecting on his time there,
especially on the rock pile. It was just so horrible

(23:48):
that I couldn't get it out of my memory. It
was almost like you having to go through the shale shop,
like you're being in the military, and it's just constantly
going through your brain, and this is something that you
just can't forget about. Lonnie's art is one way of
working through the trauma he endured there. I talked to

(24:11):
him about his sculpture Blood on the Rock Pile and
some of his other pieces that refer directly to Mount Meg's.
In one piece, he padlocked together eight spoons. It's called
chain Gang Mount Meg's. Another called Whitewash, features seven broken mops.
The mop heads are dirty, like how the kids in

(24:33):
White would have looked after spending days or months on
the rock pile. That's Meanwhile, I like doing abstract called
the abstract can allow me and put my hand back
in situation and then I can redo it. Here is
something here I don't know what I can peel is
away with the camera rolling, Lonnie peeled away a small

(24:56):
piece of paint from the fence surrounding the grounds. So
get that little piece or idea is enough to remind
me that I I have been here today. So Lonnie,
always fascinated by found objects that others would discard, took
that small piece of Mount Megs with him, a fragment

(25:17):
of a part of his life that he couldn't erase.
We could have told you the simple story, the easy one,
that the nineteen sixty nine lawsuit changed everything, that after
Judge Frank Johnson ruled against the State of Alabama, Mount
Meg's magically transformed into a caring home for children, a

(25:40):
true place of rehabilitation. This is a story Mount Megs
likes to tell too. In their January newsletter, the department
said they welcome some new ideas on how best to
rehabilitate youth. They mentioned that they prioritize communication and collaboration, writing,
we share ideas freely and courageously. We embrace the potential

(26:05):
of ideas and approaches. But the truth, as far as
I can tell, is more complicated. Since the lawsuit, Mount
meg seems to have gotten better, but it never got good.
Some parts did improve, at least at first. It was
less crowded that it had been. Kids had shoes to wear,

(26:26):
but plenty of things stayed the same. In the past
fifty years, countless children have run away, just as they
used to, sometimes in packs of three or seven or
even eleven. The state would once again use dogs to
sniff them out, and if and when they were caught,
they'd be arrested and sent to adult jail. And over

(26:50):
the past fifty years, the overcrowding and poor infrastructure have
made the news again every so often, as state authorities
once again claim they're helpless to address the problems. And
Mount Meg's tradition of poor record keeping didn't end in
nineteen seventy one either. For example, in nineteen ninety seven,

(27:11):
a board member noticed that the school had somehow lost
ownership of seven hundred acres of land since the early
nineteen eighties, and no one knew how. The school blamed
the lack of paper trail on a nineteen seventy six
fire that destroyed the institution's administrative records, but the board
member noted that the missing land had happened after the fire.

(27:35):
He suspected that the land had been traded for political favors.
And there have still been credible allegations of abuse perpetrated
by staff and other students. Some of those allegations are
in letters from parents or whispered among practitioners. Others can
be found in lawsuits or newspaper articles. In twenty eleven,

(27:58):
for example, a student filed suit against a school officer
alleging he shoved him into the wall and slammed his
into a table. The court noted the injuries bleeding bruises,
cracked teeth, a swollen head. The feedback that I get
from my clients while at Mount Megs is I think

(28:21):
exactly what one would expect it to be. The worst
case scenario would be death, and Mount Meg's would be
immediately under that. That's Jennifer Schnipper, a lawyer who's practiced
family law in Birmingham, Alabama for almost fifteen years. Relatively
early in Jennifer's career, she had a young client facing

(28:43):
time at Mount Meg's. The judge was very clear in saying,
have you ever been to Mount Megs? And I said no,
and he said you should go. So Jennifer arranged to
visit the facility and immediately she understood what the judge meant.
It's stark, it's cold, depressing, it's intimidating, and these I

(29:10):
knew were kids anywhere from twelve to nineteen twenty twenty
one years old that could be in there for three months,
six months, three years. It was shocking that visit to
Mount Meg's has shaped Jennifer's decisions as someone who represents

(29:30):
children in court, by fight to keep my clients out
of Mount Meg's because from my perspective, there is very
little value in a commitment to Mount Meg's. I don't
find that it particularly benefits my clients, and I often
feel like it becomes a bigger detriment to my clients.

(29:51):
Over the past couple of decades, the consensus around juvenile
justice in America has shifted. In two thousand and five,
the Supreme Court ruled that's sentencing juveniles to death was unconstitutional,
and twelve the Court also outlawed mandatory life without parole
sentences for children. We know more about children now, more

(30:15):
about their brain development, their decision making, the impulses that
lead them to act out, and in some ways that
knowledge is changing how the juvenile justice system works. Even
in places like Alabama, the juvenile justice system tends to
have changed perspectives significantly. We look at the child as

(30:37):
a whole. In other words, they're more likely to try
other ways of addressing the issues that children face, meaning
that sending kids to places like Mount Meg's has steadily decreased,
and it continues to decrease. I think commitments account for
a very low number of outcomes for these delinquency cases.

(30:59):
There are so many resources in place that can help
us keep that from happen. There's one more thing about
Mount Meg's that hasn't changed, and that's the suffering in silence.
There's not much more interest in what's happening there now
than there was fifty years ago. Some other institutions have

(31:20):
seemed backlash related to their mistreatment of children, but there's
been no reckoning at Mount Megs. We mentioned at the

(31:40):
beginning of this podcast that Mount Meg's wasn't the only
school that abused children. At the Dojer School in Florida,
once known as the Florida State Reform School, children were
abused for decades. In twenty twelve, a team of forensic
anthropologists did field work on the property and uncovered dozens

(32:02):
of unmarked graves. At least one hundred children were thought
to have died there. There's a major difference between what
the Doser School was like in the nineteen fifties and
sixties and Mount Megs. Both black and white students attended
the Doser School, which was internally segregated, but aside from that,

(32:23):
there are a lot of similarities between the two institutions,
and the stories told by the survivors of the Doser
School echo the stories of those who survived Mount Meg's
and in Canada, over a hundred and fifty thousand Indigenous
children were forcibly separated from their families and sent to
what were called residential schools, many of which were run

(32:46):
by the Catholic Church. Thousands of children at over a
hundred schools suffered physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. In two
twenty one, experts uncovered over six hundred bodies of children
who died at just one school. These aren't the only
other institutions where abusing children was systemic, normal, encouraged. But

(33:13):
I've thought a lot about these two, specifically not because
of what happened at the schools, but what happened after
For survivors of both of these institutions. There's been a
call for justice, a demand for accountability for the pain
those children endured, and in both Florida and Canada, that

(33:33):
call was at least sort of answered. In twenty seventeen,
the Florida legislature officially apologized to the survivors of the
Dojer School. Cannot say with enough heart felt remorse that
it's taken this long for a legislature, with all the
evidence that is before us, to come forth and apologize

(33:56):
for what has to be one of the blackest moments
on our state's history. And in the summer of twenty
twenty two, the Pope traveled to Canada to appologized publicly
for the abuse that Indigenous children suffered. Bailoue de Santacion

(34:17):
either very conciliation. So I wondered, did that feel like
justice for those survivors to hear the abuse acknowledge, to
hear some remorse for some. The answer is yes. Here's
Peter Ernick, a survivor of the Kamloops Indian Residential School,

(34:38):
speaking to CBC Television. The Pope's upology to me will
allow its survivors to begin a new chapter but for
others it's not enough, and for some it's not anything.
We talked to some other survivors of the Dojer school
about what the state's apology in twenty seventeen meant to them.

(35:03):
Here's Charlie Fudge, it's time that they make something more
right than just an apology. And Captain Bryant Middleton it
was an empty gesture without meeting, with no follow up.
And Richard Huntley, let me be honest with you, and
I think that's whole wash. I mean, I think that's

(35:25):
you know what I mean, that's full of shit. After all,
these apologies don't come with anything. Apologies demand no sacrifice
from the state, no reparations, no settlements, no monetary damages
for the personal damage done to them. The governor basically

(35:45):
said they didn't have money to compensate us. Compensate us
in the sense of ensuring that those that had been
abused we were treated by doctors if need be. Most
of us old guys have a very low income, and
the majority of boys it was taken there and beaten

(36:07):
actually ended up in prison. There's been bills for reparations.
Money wouldn't fix what they went through. Nothing would, but
at least it would be something as boys. These men
were abused, tortured, their futures crippled by what they endured.

(36:28):
What good are words now? And yet words are more
than most have gotten. How many stories like this one
have gone uncovered? How many children have gone missing or
died without their families knowing what happened to them? How
much abuse has been unleashed on kids like the ones

(36:48):
at these schools without anyone saying anything. Here's one of
the Doger survivors, Captain Bryant Middleton. Again, I can't help
but wonder if any of this would surface anywhere else
had it not been so prominently covered by the media
here in Florida. How many other places are like dojer

(37:13):
the Florida School for Boys that have not been found
out or have not been reported. There's no telling. Alabama
has never expressed any regret for what the state did
to those children. In fact, the terror of Mount Meg's
has gotten little attention at all before now, except for
Denny's book and Jesse James Andrews appeal in California court.

(37:38):
I have some theories of why that might be. At
the Dojor school and the residential schools in Canada, survivors
connected and organized. We decided we would have some sort
of reunion. We were startled by the amount of turnout
that we had. Literally hundreds of men showed up. It

(37:58):
just was overwhelming. You can probably imagine how much the
connection matters. How the fight for acknowledgment is much easier
when hundreds of people speak out versus just one, regardless
of the outcome. Being part of a group is some
sort of relief catharsis, But survivors of Mount Megs haven't

(38:20):
been organized like that quite yet, and so many of
them suffer alone. They don't have anyone to validate their memories,
their trauma, what they went through as children. There are
other differences between Mount Meg's and some of these other facilities.
For example, at the Dojer School, many of the survivors

(38:41):
were white, which probably increased the likelihood of accountability. Plus,
the other institutions have been shut down. The Dojer School
shuttered in two eleven, and the Canadian residential schools have
been closed since the early nineteen nineties. At Mount Megs,
though the institution lives on, we don't know what became

(39:05):
aim of the makeshift graveyard that Johnny Bodley and Lonnie
Holly remember. But since this podcast began airing, we've gotten
emails from people formerly affiliated with Mount Meg's, including one
from someone who worked there within the last few years.
He says, Lonnie and Johnny's memories are correct, that the

(39:25):
small graveyard still existed when he worked there. Whoa with
me Law. Other places have brought in forensic anthropologists to
on earth these institutions secrets, But as long as Mount
Meg's is open, that level of reckoning is impossible. How
can Alabama fully apologize or account for the harm of

(39:47):
an institution that still exists. Eby Holloway died in nineteen
seventy six. Judge Thetford died in nineteen seventy seven. Most
of the adult perpetrators are dead now, and lots of
the children who were there in the nineteen sixties are
dead too, But some remain, like Lonnie, Mary, Jenny and Johnny.

(40:11):
Don't leave me alone, Lord, don't leave me alone? Why
I'm all miss Jesus, john Ah, won't Jesus do all

(40:34):
with me? So this is the end of our story,
But ours is only part of the story of mounta Megs.
The entire story of this place, now almost one hundred
and fifteen years old, is limitless. There's no way to

(40:55):
account for all the harm caused by Mountain Megs to survivors,
and all the harm caused by survivors because of that trauma.
I find myself wishing I had a clearer ending to
give you, that I could say the survivors are completely
at peace now that I could tell you there'd been
some sort of reckoning with those who perpetrated these injustices. Denny,

(41:19):
now in his eighties, is still trying to find a
way to get reparations for the survivors of Mount Meg's,
but that's not a promise that he or we can make.
The true story, as always, is a little more unsatisfying
than the stories we want to tell. Earlier, I asked

(41:40):
what justice for these survivors would look like. But maybe
the truth is that justice here is impossible. There's no
way of making whole what was broken on that stretch
of land outside of Montgomery. The harm cannot be undone.
We asked, if you could talk to the people who

(42:02):
abused you, what would you say? And Mary thought about
Fanny Matthews and all of these years later, she found
herself wondering what Fanny had gone through, what kind of
pain she might have experienced herself to do what she
did to Mary and so many others, What happened to

(42:23):
her to make her so treacherous. You know, I'm softy too,
as bad as it was, and I haven't so I'm
not gonna lie to usday. I've forgiven her, Okay, if
she told me what happened to her, I probably have

(42:46):
a soft spot for her too. If I knew something
that happened, listen, I don't know, I don't know, I'd
probably end up loving her too. So maybe there's something else,

(43:10):
a bit of comfort maybe, or even hope. And the
fact that despite it all, many survivors still have the
capacity for forgiveness. Despite it all, so many of them
are still trying to make the world a little better,
And fifty years later, they're still here, still suffering, still remembering,

(43:34):
but still surviving all the same. Unreformed. The Story of
the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children is a production
of School of Humans and iHeartMedia. This episode was written
by me Josie Deffie, Rice and Taylor von Laslie. Our
script supervisors Florence Burrow Adams and our producer is Gabby Watts,

(43:57):
who had additional writing and production support from Sherry Scott.
Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crowley, Brandon Barr, Matt
Arnette and Me. Sound design and mixes by Jesse Niswanger.
Music is by Ben Soli. Additional recordings are courtesy of
the Alabama Center for Traditional Culture. The songs featured in
this episode are Scalaway by Spiritual Voices of Whitehall, Alabama,
Walk with Me by Helen McLoud, and I'm a Suspect

(44:20):
by Lonnie Holly courtesy of Jack Jaguar. Special thanks to
the Alabama Department of Archives and History, Michael Harriet, Floyd Hall,
Kevin Nutt, Van Newkirk, and all of the survivors of
Mount Meg's willing to share their stories. If you enjoyed
this episode, please leave us a rating and review wherever
you get your podcasts. If you are someone you know
attended Mount Megs and would like to be in contact,
please email Mountmegs Podcast at gmail dot com. That's Mt

(44:44):
m e Igs Podcast at gmail dot com. School of
Humans