Alabama Boys Industrial School

The Alabama Boys Industrial School was a secured school for the rehabilitation of juvenile delinquents in Roebuck.

It was founded in 1899 through the efforts of Elizabeth Johnston, who argued strongly for remedial education for boys who were more often sent into the coal mines as leased convicts. She headed a committee of the Alabama Federation of Women's Clubs which recommended that such a school be governed by volunteers who were also mothers of boys. She successfully lobbied the Alabama State Legislature for funds to start the school in a log cabin adjoining Roebuck Spring with five offenders assigned from the Birmingham Municipal Court. Johnston served as president of the board and lived in a house on campus. She insisted that bars and locks should not be used on the dormitories and addressed the boys assigned to her care as "son".

The Alabama Boys Industrial School became a model for state reformatories during the 1920s. Johnston remained the head of Boys Industrial School until her death in 1934.

By 1969 the Boys Industrial School had 202 students. The treatment of white boys at the Roebuck facility and of white girls at the Alabama State Training School for Girls in Chalkville was contrasted sharply with the treatment of African American offenders at the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children at Mt Meigs, near Montgomery, where offenders were subjected to hard labor and corporal punishment rather than to education and other remedial programs.

In 1975 the Alabama Department of Youth Services took over the school and continues to operate it as the Vacca Campus.

References

“Founder of Boys School in City Is Called by Death.” (December 21, 1934) The Birmingham News

• Avery, Mary Johnston (1944) She Heard with her Heart. Birmingham: Birmingham Publishing Co.