Historically, across the South, what Kennedy might now call “wellness farms” were part of a large network of institutions designed to deal with children and youth who were given various labels like “feeble-minded,” “mentally deficient,” or “delinquent.” The labels, and therefore the institutions, were often interchangeable. They began with “colony farms” for wayward youth. As eugenic concerns about disability rose and state hospitals became overcrowded, states opened new “schools” like Gracewood in Georgia (1921) or the Partlow School and Hospital in Alabama (1919).[2] But none of these early places accepted Black children. Black families were usually left to cope on their own in the Jim Crow south, or found their young people confined in the adult carceral or mental health system.
In Alabama, educators at the Tuskegee Institute recognized the problem and formed a group led by Margaret Murray Washington (Booker T. Washington’s wife) to build a facility at Mt. Meigs about halfway between Tuskegee and Montgomery. The model for Mt. Meigs followed the philosophy of the Institute itself – that what Black youth needed was the physical discipline of agricultural or mechanical labor to provide a grounding in the practical skills for life in the Jim Crow south. For Black leaders at Tuskegee, the approach to “racial uplift” sometimes merged with eugenics, showing how pervasive this thinking could be. However, their approach to their own young people was one of character building not oppression.[3] The focus on farm labor was a recognition of the reality of life for Macon county sharecroppers, so the curriculum at Mt. Meigs revolved around crop farming, basic reading and writing, and basketball.
In 1911 Mt. Meigs was taken over by the “State Institutions” branch of the Alabama state government, and once under the control of the state, conditions deteriorated rapidly. In 1969, when local Civil Rights activists brought a case against the state for maintaining racially segregated youth services, even the conservative appellate court was appalled by what they found. In their decision the judges wrote, “the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children is inferior in every way …, its principal activity seems to be in raising cucumbers…Academics are not stressed: many of the children have never been to school…There are 14 teachers for 460 students. One group goes to school for six days while the other group is out farming, and then the groups alternate.” The court also described in detail the overcrowded facilities, such as 106 girls living in a single building so crowded they were forced to share beds. There were no welfare or social workers, no psychologists, and the current superintendent used to be the Farm director. “On these facts,” the judges wrote, “the Negro school would flunk Plessy v. Ferguson. Its overcrowded condition and plainly inferior facilities are enough in themselves to require the immediate and simultaneous desegregation of all three schools.”[4]