In winter 1939, a 15-year-old boy wore the same thin clothing that he wore in the summer. He ate scraps of boiled leftovers from guards; food that was “fit only for pigs.” For the slightest provocation, he would be beaten with a rubber hose. 

“We are made to stand on one foot and hold the other up, and one hand must touch the toes and the other hand is held straight out. If we don’t keep this awkward position, we get beat more,” a boy told the Afro-American newspaper in December 1939. 

A Capital News Service analysis of the news coverage of the House of Reformation for Colored Boys at Cheltenham showed stories about abuse of the boys appeared in the Afro at roughly 3.5 times the rate of The Baltimore Sun, Maryland’s largest paper. The Afro was created to provide news about the Black community that wasn’t covered by white newspapers. 

The House of Reformation, now known as the Cheltenham Youth Facility, was founded in 1873 to keep Black boys out of adult prisons. Cheltenham offered the boys little to no education, unsanitary conditions and forced labor, CNS has reported. 

Capital News Service examined 1,023 articles written between 1872 and 1949 from The Sun and the Afro to analyze the difference in coverage of the House of Reformation facility. Of those articles, 704 were published by The Sun and 319 were published by the Afro. The difference in the number of articles is partly because The Afro-American was launched in 1892, whereas The Sun, founded in 1837, was already in circulation when Cheltenham was founded in 1873. 

Capital News Service’s analysis revealed that coverage of Cheltenham ebbed and flowed between the two papers. From 1922 to 1934, the Afro consistently reported more on the House of Reformation than The Sun. This was a period of ongoing controversies and grand jury investigations about inmate abuse. 

 

Abuse at the institution

A Capital News Service analysis examined the disparate coverage of abuses at Cheltenham in the Afro and The Sun. CNS searched for keywords and their variants to find articles about abuse: hit, struck, bludgeoned, shot and injured. Instances of abuse against the boys at the institution were examined, and totaled 50 articles for both newspapers. 

Just 19 of the 704 articles from The Sun fall under this category. This makes up just 2.7% of The Sun’s coverage of the institution, compared to 31 of 319 Afro-American articles, or 9.7% from The Afro. 

The Sun emphasized the boys’ violence toward each other and the white guards. It rarely covered the violence that the boys experienced at the hands of school officials, according to the CNS analysis. One 1936 Sun article referenced “apprehension over an alleged growing tendency toward violence among the 400 Negro inmates of the institution.”

The Sun wrote 115 articles that referenced Black boys being sentenced to the House of Reformation and the Afro wrote 50 articles about the boys’ sentencing. The CNS analysis also found that the Afro provided more in-depth coverage of the boys sentenced to the institution and criticized unfair practices.

Many of the Afro’s articles condemned the way Black boys were sentenced to the institution, whereas The Sun mainly wrote about the crimes the boys committed to get them sentenced there. 

The Sun Response

In 2022, the Baltimore Sun’s editorial board publicly apologized for news coverage and other content that oppressed Black Marylanders. They acknowledged the newspaper’s founder, Arunah S. Abell, was a Southern sympathizer who supported slavery and segregation. 

The apology addressed offenses to the Black community, such as publishing classified ads in 1837 that advertised enslaved people or offered rewards for their return, or editorials that sought to disenfranchise Black voters. The board said The Sun has taken steps to make amends by developing a style guide to ensure its coverage of marginalized communities, among other measures.

Baltimore Sun Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Trif Alatzas issued a statement responding to the Capital News Service analysis: “Your findings reinforce a documented failure in how communities of color were covered during that era; failures that mainstream newspapers, including The Baltimore Sun, have publicly acknowledged.

“In 2022, The Sun issued a formal apology to Black Marylanders for past coverage that caused significant harm. Unfortunately, the disparities you identify in the Cheltenham reporting are consistent with that broader history,” Alatzas said.

“While we cannot account for specific editorial decisions from as far back as 150 years ago, such coverage does not meet our standards today. Our responsibility is to report on institutions and all communities with fairness, accuracy, and humanity,” he said.

“Your work is a valuable contribution to understanding journalism’s role in shaping public perception,” Alatzas said. “We wish you well with it.”

‘Making change’

To Alexis Taylor, managing editor of the Afro, the newspaper’s coverage was “the foundation of the change we see today.” She referred to the state of Maryland investigating the Cheltenham abuses and acting to provide a proper burial for the boys. Gov. Wes Moore last week traveled to Cheltenham, unveiled a historic marker about the facility and spoke about its painful history.

“Seeing the stories that we printed over 100 years ago, and seeing the change that has come today, to the facility it was, it was moving,” Taylor said.

One example Taylor cited was a Sept. 3, 1898, Afro article entitled “THE PUNISHMENTS HAVE BEEN TOO SEVERE.” The newspaper wrote about a grand jury report that stated the boys at the institution faced punishments that were “better suited for hardened adult criminal adults than incorrigible youths.”

“We know why it wasn’t in mainstream white-owned press,” Taylor said, referring to the minimal coverage of abuses. “We know that they didn’t want a record of what was happening, the same way that you have people in power now who are trying to suppress and change the record that we do have.” 

Letters to the editor

Both The Sun and the Afro published letters to the editors about the conditions of Cheltenham. But the writers expressed sharply different perspectives. 

The Afro covered boys’ first-hand accounts of the staff’s abuse, as well as letters from the children’s parents. 

“I was beaten up just as bad as can be by Mr. Harry Carroll and Mr. John B. Pyles, November 21, 1924, for nothing,” 18-year-old George Washington wrote to the Afro. “Mr. Pyles took and hit me cross the head with the cane he walks with about 2 or 3 times and it stunt me and also put a knot on my head about just the size of a hen egg.”

There was no record of Washington’s beating in The Sun’s coverage.

Taylor said these letters from the young inmates were remarkable. “I think that’s so powerful that those teenagers reached out to the Black press, that those teenagers knew that if they could just let someone in the Black community know what was happening to them, that change would come,” she said.

The Sun mostly published letters from Cheltenham staff and visitors, who defended the institution and denied claims of hunger and abuse. 

“I was impressed with the schools and its methods. The boys seem to be happy, well treated and well fed,” one visitor wrote to The Sun in May 1913. “The teachers told me that punishment is seldom required, but the discipline seems to be excellent.” 

Today, the Afro continues to cover the Cheltenham Youth Detention Center and its dark history. According to Taylor, the Afro has published at least six articles about the institution in the past year. 

Taylor described the Afro’s coverage of Cheltenham as consistent with the mission of the Black press.

“I always tell our interns at the Afro, we’re not just writing fluff pieces and recording history – what you’re really doing is making change,” Taylor said. “To that end, that is the mission of the Black press. We wish to plead our own cause. For far too long, others have spoken for us.”