A Home for Wayward Boys: The Early History of the Alabama Boys’ Industrial School by Jerry C. Armor (review)

Nostalgia glosses the pages of Jerry C. Armor’s A Home for Wayward Boys: The Early History of the Alabama Boys’ Industrial School as he constructs a past where white reform school students were acceptably mischievous and simply in need of moral and educational guidance. A former juvenile probation officer, Armor has written an institutional history of the Alabama Boys’ Industrial School (ABIS), which began in 1899 as a result of the efforts of Elizabeth Johnston. The daughter of a North Carolina planter who died in a Civil War prison camp, Johnston began ministering to convict laborers in Birmingham’s coal mines after the war. She ultimately decided to create the school as an alternative to prison for white juvenile offenders. Underage African Americans continued to languish in convict labor camps until black Alabamians founded a reform school for minors in 1911. Armor posits, without evidence, that Johnston would have likely supported integration if possible, even though ABIS only integrated by court order in 1970.

Johnston was a tireless warrior who successfully lobbied the Alabama legislature and set up the school’s all-female board of directors. Here especially the insights of women’s and gender historians would have provided perspective for Johnston’s accomplishments. Armor does not cite the work of a single academic historian until the brief epilogue. Additionally, Armor discusses the Christian faith of Johnston and others in a manner befitting a religious text, arguing that God was an active agent. Armor asserts, for example, that “God must have been involved,” and that “the Lord truly began to work” (pp. 45, 46).

After an extensive chronological narrative of the school’s founding, Armor organizes the rest of the work as a thematic overview of early-twentieth-century school life. He briefly discusses the school newspaper, military training, sports, and work activities designed to teach job skills. Academically, ABIS was mostly a remedial school, as children were far behind their appropriate grade level. ABIS’s disciplinary practices were unusual for a reform school: there were no guards or detention areas for students before World War II. A few chapters include more quoted material than the author’s own words, resembling an institutional sourcebook. Refusing to engage the work of other historians until the closing pages minimizes the appeal of this book for a broader audience.

The author does not make a historical or historiographical argument to unite the text, and his conclusions about the present state of the criminal justice system would likely rankle many historians. To meet new federal standards for the treatment of juveniles, Alabama radically reorganized ABIS in 1975 and changed its name to Alabama Youth Services, Vacca Campus. Armor depicts the new juvenile delinquent as younger, hardened, and much tougher to reform. Instead of examining the continuing racial inequalities within the Alabama legal system that contribute to black majorities in juvenile and adult detention centers, Armor relies on the tired Reaganite straw men of illegal drugs and single-parent homes as the explanation. He also hints at the dwindling influence of Christianity in government institutions. Gender historians will raise an eyebrow at Armor’s assertion that biology can explain the relative dearth of female criminality. Rescuing ABIS from obscurity is an important task, but the author misses an opportunity to contribute to the broader dialogue on southern educational, legal, and cultural history.