BALTIMORE – Charles Elmer Blagmond was one of 243 youth who died at the House of Reformation for Colored Boys in Cheltenham, Maryland, a notorious juvenile detention center for Black boys and teens.
It’s unclear why Blagmond was detained by the legal system; hundreds of boys were rounded up on vagrancy or similar offenses. Just one year after landing in Cheltenham, Blagmond died on Nov. 21, 1931, at the House of Reformation. The death certificate said he was 19 and listed the cause as tuberculosis, an infection that took the lives of many youth at the facility.
Blagmond ended up “lost to the system,” said Cheryl Hill-Herder, a distant cousin. “There are no records of incarceration or criminal histories,” she said, reflecting on the history of her family, “just poor people trying to find a place where they could work for adequate food and shelter.”
In 1930, the approximate year Blagmond entered the House of Reformation, Black Baltimore boys represented 72% of the population at the facility, according to Cheltenham’s 1930 biennial report. One study of Cheltenham said by 1940, Black boys in Baltimore were more than five times as likely to be incarcerated than their white peers, according to research by Jason Mayernick, assistant professor at Metro State University.
Maryland lawmakers have approved a formal commission to investigate neglect and abuse at the House of Reformation after discovery of a mass grave site in the woods near the facility, now known as the Cheltenham Youth Detention Center.
There are few details known about Blagmond’s life. Yet his story reflects the broader experiences of Black youth in Baltimore — especially those who ended up incarcerated at the House of Reformation — while revealing the systemic barriers that have long shaped their families and communities.
Mass incarceration of Black Baltimore youth doesn’t look any different than it looked like in the past, said Nneka N’namdi, executive director of the Baltimore-based social justice organization The SOS Fund. Youth of color from Baltimore City were referred to juvenile intake at nearly four times the rate of white youth in fiscal year 2025 according to the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services. That period alone, 87% of youth charged as adults pending transfer at the Baltimore City Juvenile Justice Center were Black.
“Young people find themselves living in communities that are, instead of being lauded for being children, instead of having their imagination and their ingenuity fed into, they are being targeted for incarceration,” N’namdi said.
Redlined and Incarcerated
Blagmond grew up in the neighborhoods of Poppleton and Heritage Crossing, West Baltimore neighborhoods near Sandtown-Winchester where Freddie Gray lived some decades later. Many other boys who ended up at the House of Reformation also called historically segregated, Black neighborhoods in Baltimore home.
A working-class family raised Blagmond and by age 18, he worked as a wagon helper.
Blagmond’s family migrated from rural Virginia to Baltimore, likely not far from where they once lived as slaves and remained as sharecroppers, according to Hill-Herder. “They were a tight-knit family community who migrated north in small groups with a hope to survive better than they could at home,” she said.
Blagmond’s family wasn’t unique in their journey to build a new life in Baltimore; migration of African American families from nearby states and the South in the early 20th century increased Baltimore’s Black population from 15% in 1910 to 46% by 1970, based on historical census data.
While cities like Baltimore “became a haven” for Hill-Herder’s ancestors, white city leaders in the early 20th century perceived the overall increase in Black population as a threat, seeking to segregate and displace Black families, according to Antero Pietila’s book, “Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City.”
White Baltimore residents and leaders imposed discriminatory housing ordinances and created homeowners associations to segregate the growing population of Black residents in the early 20th century. By 1937, six years after Blagmond’s death, the predominantly Black neighborhoods of Poppleton and Heritage Crossing were among those shaded red in 1937 on a Home Owners’ Loan Corporation’s map of the city – labeled “hazardous”, “dangerous” and “least desirable,” giving rise to the term redlining.
Blagmond came from the Baltimore neighborhoods where redlining and increased incarceration of Black youth were intertwined realities. “The areas – the physical designation of the redline gave a geographic demarcation for where people were to be devalued and criminalized,” said N’namdi.
Displaced but Fighting Back
Blagmond is buried at the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Baltimore, but his precise gravesite location remains hidden beneath overgrown grass in an unkempt cemetery. Meanwhile, Blagmond’s former Poppleton neighborhood also is fighting to preserve its heritage.
Poppleton, once identified as a “negro slum” by the Baltimore Housing Authority, saw many Black residents displaced in the 1930s with the construction of low-income apartments known as the Edgar Allen Poe Homes, according to Nicole King, a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. The apartments are right across the street from Blagmond’s address on North Schroeder Street was in the 1920s.
Sonia Eaddy, president of the Poppleton Now Community Association, is leading the charge against community displacement and for “just development.”
For generations, neighborhoods like Poppleton were home to families simply trying to live and raise their children, N’namdi and Eaddy said — families like Blagmond’s.
For Eaddy, young people want to protect their communities but they need also rely on advocates like her to challenge systemic barriers that have shaped their youth.
“They’re waiting for you to do something, to help them. ” Eaddy said.
