Founded in 1911, The Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children was a juvenile correctional facility in the Mount Meigs community near Montgomery, Alabama. The juvenile facility was notorious for the abuse inflicted on Black youth. As late as the 1960s, inmates were forced to pick cotton from early morning to late evening, with physical and sexual abuse commonplace. “This was functionally a slave plantation,” concluded the journalist Josie Duffy Rice, who researched the school’s history for a podcast series.
Among those who endured those horrors was the 73-year-old acclaimed visual artist and avant-garde musician Lonnie Holley, who was arrested at 11 years old. “I was like the Jungle Book child,” Holley related in 2018. “I was cast away from society.”
Years later those memories continue to haunt Holley to the point of experiencing night terrors. Holley tries to exorcize those past demons on the unsettling “Mount Meigs”, a stand-out track off his recently released compelling fourth album Oh Me Oh My.
Listening to lyrics such as “They beat the curiosity out of me/They beat it out of me/They whooped it/They knocked it!” can be jarring, but sometimes it is necessary to address the realities of the recent past, in order to move forward. Reconciliation doesn’t come from whitewashing history.