Cheltenham inmate described violent abuse, confinement

Like hundreds of runaways before them, three young men were caught by the police and sent back to the Cheltenham School for Boys in March 1946.

What awaited them was a weeklong confinement in a basement cell, no food for five days and severe beatings with a 24-inch leather strap, one of the youths told a Baltimore judge in April 1946.

Charles Richardson, who spoke with the judge, recalled being questioned by a staff member after his recapture.

Richardson was told to stand up. “I didn’t get up fast enough and he hit me in the face with his fist,” Richardson said. “Then he said we’d get our beatings in the morning.” Richardson said he was whipped at least 72 times during his monthlong stay at Cheltenham.

The Cheltenham School for Boys, as it was called after the state of Maryland took control in 1937, was the first juvenile detention center for Black boys in the Southern United States. It was notorious for its abuse, neglect and labor exploitation. At least 243 boys died during their time at Cheltenham between 1873 and 1942, Capital News Service has reported. 

Gov. Wes Moore is expected to sign a bill later this month creating a state commission to investigate what happened at Cheltenham. For the commission, the Richardson case could be one of the most detailed firsthand accounts of a Cheltenham youth facing violent abuse at the institution.

Richardson wasn’t the only Cheltenham inmate who faced violence from the staff. Internal records describe similar abuse, both before and after the state of Maryland assumed control of Cheltenham.  The state took over after years of reports and investigations citing deplorable conditions at the institution.

A 1935 grand jury report, written by a government-appointed monitoring committee, said two youths were confined in a small room as punishment when the committee visited. 

“One was lying on a cot, the other standing in the corner, he having an infected leg,” the report stated. “The room looked like a dungeon.”

The committee repeatedly recommended the state either take over the institution or close it down.

Six years after the state assumed control, former cottage master Charles Butcher sent a letter to the Cheltenham Board of Directors hoping they would improve the conditions for the youths. 

Butcher said despite the superintendent’s assurances that corporal punishment was rarely used, staff whipped the youths or struck them with their fists and feet. One of the cottage masters was even nicknamed “Joe Louis,” a professional boxer at the time. 

The former employee said the youths were locked in cells for one to four days, “sometimes a good deal longer,” before being brought to a discipline committee. They were frequently starved during their confinement. 

“If the boy is unfortunate enough to be placed in certain of the cottage cells these are pretty lean and hungry days,” the 1943 letter said. The letter also said youths often received five to 25 lashes as punishment. 

Richardson described his ordeal to Judge Charles E. Moylan of the division for Juvenile Causes of the Supreme Bench of Baltimore and an advocate for the children at Cheltenham. Richardson lasted three days in Cheltenham before he and two young men, named Nathan Wilmer and William Gibson, escaped and were caught less than 10 miles away. The ages of Richardson and Wilmer are unknown, but census records show Gibson was around 20 years old.

Upon returning to Cheltenham, the youths were kept in the dining room that night. In the morning, a security guard took them to his office. He told them to undress, bend over on his desk and the guard whipped them 39 times on their backside with a leather strap. When another security guard questioned them the same day, Richardson said the guard whipped him 10 times on his back for not speaking fast enough. 

“In the same week he (a guard) beat me again on the back and the strap hit this place again and makes it bleed again,” he said. “That is why it is still on there and stayed so long and I got sores other places where I have been beaten. I have one down by my privates.”

Capital News Service obtained a transcript of Moylan’s questioning of Richardson from the University of Baltimore’s archives in a collection of Baltimore grand jury working papers. This transcript serves as the only surviving document of Richardson’s abuse. CNS didn’t find coverage of Richardson’s case in a news database search. 

The transcript includes a description of the wounds on Richardson’s body from the beatings, including a scab 1 1/2  inches long on his upper thigh next to his genitals, described as “raised, and very sore in appearance.” He had four other scars and scabs on his upper leg and one on his back, which was 2 inches long. 

The three youths were held in a basement cell known as “the dungeon,” which Richardson described as 6 feet long “and as wide as my arms.” He said they were in the cell for a week and weren’t given anything other than water for five days. 

“No heat, nothing but pipes running across the wall. We had two mattresses and two blankets between the three. Insects come and crawl across you,” Richardson said. 

The only times the youths were taken out of the cell was to use the bathroom and to clean the dining room after the others finished eating. 

On the fifth and sixth day, they received slices of bread, and on the last day they were given one meal. 

Moylan was vocal in the press about his disapproval of the institution during that time, and tried to help the youths. Just two days after Richardson spoke to the judge, Moylan obtained funds from local service organizations to expand Cheltenham’s recreational program, The Baltimore Sun reported. 

“I cannot understand how boards of governors can meet month after month and fail to realize that the job of rehabilitation of these boys cannot be accomplished just on the taxpayers’ money, but only if each man personally tries to help,” he told The Baltimore Sun.  

The Afro-American, which extensively covered the abuses at Cheltenham, said Moylan had “for quite some time exhibited interest” in the institution. 

“I can’t send these boys here or other boys and girls elsewhere and just forget them,” Moylan said, according to The Sun. “Under the law they are still the ward of the court and I stand in loco parentis (‘in the place of a parent’) to them.”