Truth is the Only Real Hope
The UnReformed podcast has been in my feed for months, but I put off listening to it until last week. I knew it would be hard to listen to, but once I started, I couldn’t stop; the story is too urgent.
Unreformed: the Story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, is written and hosted by Josie Duffy Rice and tells the history of a harrowing detention facility little known outside of Alabama, where for decades Black children were sent and tortured for the “crimes” of, among other things, running away from home and having no parents. Instead of being educated, the children imprisoned at the facility in Mt. Meigs, AL, were forced to pick cotton and tend the crops that were then harvested and given to the white trustees of the facility. The children themselves often starved.
The brilliant musician and visual artist Lonnie Holley was among these children. Duffy Rice begins the story of Mt. Meigs with Holley who, along with a small number of other survivors featured, anchor the series with their bravery, empathy, and honesty. Their voices provide listeners with a thread that feels like hope, but that hope is deceptive. Because they are, as Duffy Rice tells us, “the lucky ones.” The majority of kids sent to Mt. Meigs spent the rest of their lives in and out of the adult carceral system, many with life sentences, many on death row.
I’ve spent my life thinking and worrying about and caring for children. Recently, a friend and I were talking about what it feels like to be Jews watching the mass destruction of life in Gaza, what it has felt like for years to watch a government enact violence on people, including children, with systematic force. What it feels like is anguish—at the loss of life, at the way an entire people must live in fear and instability each day. What it feels like is a perpetuation of the kind of systematic violence our own people were forced to experience for centuries.
In UnReformed, Duffy Rice is telling just one story of systematic American violence, and the ripple effect of that violence on not just the children who were imprisoned but the adults they became and the communities they were a part of. It’s a singular story as well as a part of a larger narrative about who we were, who we continue to be, and the kinds of people we believe deserve our care. (Propublica’s and Serial Production’s podcast The Kids of Rutherford County tells a different but connected story about very recent efforts to imprison and punish mostly Black and Brown kids in Tennessee.)
It’s hard to listen to these stories the way it’s hard to sit with the reports of the systematic sexual violence against Israeli women on October 7 and the daily reports of bombings in Gaza. But listening to Duffy Rice’s meticulous reporting and nuanced storytelling, it feels to me like the only true hope we have is if we’re willing to do just that: bear witness. It’s the least we should do. Then comes action.