Journalist Josie Duffy Rice’s new podcast investigates the abuse at a reform school in Alabama
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Journalist Josie Duffy Rice says the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, also known as Mount Meigs, was supposed to be a progressive place for young boys to go for reform — but things changed when the State of Alabama took it over.
“It traumatized every person that went through those doors,” said Duffy Rice.
On Thursday’s edition of “Closer Look,” Duffy Rice explained that the school’s troubled history is now the focus of her new investigative podcast “Unreformed: The Story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children.”
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Duffy Rice further explained that the facility was a slave plantation in the 1960s where children were forced to pick cotton — physically and sexually abused and, in some cases, died as a result of abuse.
“The impact of Mount Megis resonates beyond just the people who went there; it’s their families, it’s the people they harmed, it’s their loved ones, it’s their kids — and there’s been nothing from the state of Alabama.”