They Had No Voice: My Fight for Alabama's Forgotten Children

They Had No Voice

My Fight for Alabama’s Forgotten Children

by Denny Abbott

with Douglas Kalajian

Foreword by John Walsh

NEWSOUTH BOOKS

Montgomery

NewSouth Books

105 S. Court Street

Montgomery, AL 36104

Copyright © 2013 by Denny Abbott. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.

ISBN: 978-1-60306-209-1

eBook ISBN: 978-1-60306-277-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013001543

Visit www.newsouthbooks.com

To my wife, Adele, who inspired me to write this book, and to my children, Court, Kim, and Drew, the best a parent could ever hope for.

And to John Walsh, the best child advocate this country has ever seen.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

— Martin Luther King Jr., in Strength to Love

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

1 – Learning the Limits of Social Theory

2 – Seeking Justice

3 – Into the Fray

4 – Money Trumps Ideals

5 – A Home for Every Child

6 – The Long Good-bye

7 – Starting Over

8 – Mt. Meigs, the Rest of the Story

9 – A Call for Help

10 – Hindsight

Foreword

John Walsh

I have known Denny Abbott for nearly three decades. We’ve worked together, traveling all over the country in our quest to improve the resources regarding missing and exploited children, and worked on developing and improving legislation as well as keeping the public informed. From the start, I have always understood that his tenacity in the service of righting what he sees as wrong was almost without equal; I have seen him in action, how hard he works, how uncompromising he always was in our efforts together.

We first began to work together after my wife, Revé, and I announced, in the aftermath of the discovery that our son, Adam, had been murdered, that we wanted to set up a nonprofit group that would focus on the tragedy of missing and exploited children. Denny had been working with a group that wanted to expand to serve that same need and offered an established organization with experience that would give us a fine foundation. So, in 1982, Revé and I joined the board of directors of the group, and its name, Child Advocacy, Inc., was changed to the Adam Walsh Child Resource Center, Inc. Denny became the national director of the new organization.

The center, with six offices in four states—California, Florida, New York, and Ohio—kept us very busy. We traveled around the country, speaking to legislative groups and others about the need for legislative reform that would provide more protection for children. This led us into all kinds of interesting research and into drafting model legislation that would address the problems that surfaced in our research. Ultimately, the Adam Walsh Center merged with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, based in Washington, D.C.

While I had some awareness of Denny’s fight for the rights of black children in detention in Alabama in the 1960s and early 1970s, and knew he had sued the state and been fired for his efforts—that he had been willing to suffer for his beliefs—I did not know the whole story. I encouraged him in his efforts to tell his story for two reasons. First, it’s a good story, and I wanted to know the details and thought others would find the story interesting, too. Second, the world needs stories like Denny’s, now more than ever. We need to brighten fading ideals and establish new models of true public service and strong character. We need the details of costs and rewards, the facts of the process that prove that one person can stand up for what is right and help abolish what is wrong.

John Walsh

is the founder and leader of the national movement to protect missing and exploited children. He is also well-known as the longtime host of America’s Most Wanted.

Introduction

When I was a young man in the 1960s, it was my job to deliver black children to a slave camp on the outskirts of Montgomery, Alabama.

I want to make it clear from the start that I’m not using the word slave as a figure of speech, and I’m not exaggerating for dramatic effect. I’m talking about a place where children as young as twelve were held by brute force and put to hard labor in the fields. They were worked until they dropped, and when they dropped they were beaten with sticks. Often they were beaten for no reason at all, and sometimes they were forced to have sex with the men who beat them.

The most horrifying fact about this place is that it was run by the State of Alabama.

Its formal name was the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children at Mt. Meigs. I was a probation officer for the Montgomery County Family Court, a boy’s counselor, as the job was euphemistically titled. My duties included transporting juvenile offenders from the detention center in downtown Montgomery to this so-called reform school, which wasn’t much of a school at all and was in far greater need of reform than the kids who were sent there.

I truly had no idea just how awful that place was at first. I was only twenty-one when I got the job, just three years ahead of the oldest boys in my charge, and I was probably a little slow to catch on because the children who returned to Montgomery after serving a term at Mt. Meigs were unlikely to confide their fears and misery to a white man who carried a badge and handcuffs.

But over the years, I heard enough and saw enough and sensed enough about Mt. Meigs to understand that it was a place out of time run by people who were out of control. I tried, time and again, to do something about it. For a long time, I did what civil servants are trained to do: I filed reports. I wrote up every detail of every complaint that came my way and I sent them to all the right people. Every one of those reports came back with the same reply: Complaint unfounded. I was always disappointed, but I was never surprised. The simple truth was that nobody in a position of authority cared if black children were being abused, even if the abusers were the very people sworn to protect them.

At least I was doing something, or trying to. This is what I told myself. I might have kept on telling myself that if the five bravest girls in the world hadn’t come to my office one day. I was chief probation officer by then, a big shot in a big office. I still can’t fathom the courage it must have taken for those five poor, black teenagers to come knocking at this white man’s door to tell their stories. I don’t know what made them think I’d even listen, but I did listen, and what I heard was heart-breaking. Each of them had been recently released from Mt. Meigs. They showed me their bruises and scars as they told of being beaten with hoe handles and fan belts and brooms. Two of them had been sexually molested by men who worked there. They’d seen a pregnant girl beaten so badly she miscarried.

That day, Mt. Meigs became the crossroads of my life. I promised those girls and myself that I would find a way to change that place if I had to tear it down board by board. That decision put me at odds with just about everyone I knew as well as the people I worked for. It was the first step on a long path that eventually cost me my job and made me a pariah in the place where I’d grown up.

Before I tell you the rest, please bear with me while I tell you a little more about myself and about Montgomery, Alabama. You may already be thinking that all this sounds like something that happened long ago in a very strange place, but you are half wrong.

It wasn’t really so long ago at all.

Storms of My Youth.

My mother and I stood on the front porch, watching the swirling, roaring mass as it wobbled our way. I can’t describe it any better than that after all these years, but I’ll never forget the fear in my belly.

I could not run away, because my feet were off the ground in an instant. My mother scooped me up and then, as soon as we were inside, pulled me down to the floor beside her. We both knelt and prayed, and we kept on praying until the monstrous thing had passed.

I had no real idea then what a tornado was, or what it was capable of doing, because I was only five years old. It wasn’t until much later that I realized how lucky we were. The death toll in Montgomery alone on that day in February 1945 was twenty-six, with dozens more killed and injured as twisters blew apart homes and shops all across Alabama and Mississippi. The Associated Press report said the one that barreled through Montgomery actually picked up a freight train and ripped apart fifty box cars, scattering them like match boxes.

This is how I remember my mother, cradling me against disaster. Goldie Magdalene Abbott was a woman of deep and abiding faith, which she had good reason to call upon daily. My father was drafted into the army during World War II when I was little more than a toddler, so Mom was left alone to care for me. It was a full-time job. I was what they called a sickly child, born with a raft of health problems that dogged me into adulthood. I had eczema so bad I was forced to wear gloves to keep from scratching through my skin. I also had asthma, and my breathing often became so labored that my mother had to call the doctor to rush over. Who wouldn’t believe Dr. David Monsky was the answer to her prayers? He never failed to come to my rescue, even though he knew from experience there was no money to pay his bill.

We were poor enough to qualify for public housing, an apartment in a six- or eight-unit complex at 9 Pill Street. I didn’t think it was a bad place at all. The Alabama River ran along the back of the property, and when you stepped out the door you almost always caught a whiff of fresh bread from the bakery two blocks down. It was enough to make a boy hungry, which was okay, because poor as we were we never lacked food—and my mother was a great cook. She baked fresh biscuits every morning so I could have them with my grits and eggs before going off to school. I’m sure she’d have baked another batch in the afternoon if I’d asked her to. She never stopped doting on me, although I somehow couldn’t appreciate the luxury of being an only child and used to pray for a brother or sister. My mother had at least one miscarriage after I was born, but she never had another child. I remained her baby until the end of her life. I can still see her trying to comb my hair as I walked out the door to go to college.

Everything about my mother was sweetness and light, including her voice. She