Every day, Black boys sorted straw and worked the foot treadle of the broom binding machines in a dim basement, trapped in a tinderbox filled with dust and flying chaff that clouded their lungs.
Prisoners of the House of Reformation for Colored Boys at Cheltenham, the boys had been contracted out to a local broom manufacturer that paid the institution in exchange for their work.
It was all part of a systemic pattern of forced child labor that played out over more than 60 years at the facility, the first of its kind for Black boys in the Southern United States, according to Capital News Service.
Boys were required to do manual labor beginning from the institution’s first day of operation, CNS found in a review of historical documents, including Cheltenham annual reports and local news coverage, from 1873 through 1937. Many details about labor conditions came from reports created by a Baltimore grand jury, a panel of citizens appointed through the court system to monitor the facility.
Although officials called it a reform school, grand jury reports show work was prioritized over health and education. Cheltenham reports from 1883 and 1895 show that boys attended school for only half a day. The other half was spent on hard manual labor on local farms, the broom factory or other ventures, according to Cheltenham annual reports.
“The schooling these boys get is a farce,” a May 1930 grand jury report concluded.
Firetrap Labor
Boys were sent to Cheltenham for various offenses. Some were accused of vagrancy, “vicious conduct,” or stealing. Others had no capable guardians to take care of them, administrators said in an 1873 report.
Older, stronger boys were hired out to farms. But the institution’s administrators found smaller children could still contribute to Cheltenham’s earnings. Boys as young as 7 worked in factories, knitting stockings. Others were employed caning chairs, weaving baskets and making brooms.
The broom factory was infamous for its dangerous working conditions. A lack of proper air circulation in the factory could “produce an occupational disease, affecting the respiratory tract and in later life might serve as foci for tuberculosis,” according to a January 1930 grand jury report. Just four years later, the Child Welfare League of America called for the factory’s shutdown.
A Baltimore grand jury raised alarms about the broom factory at least seven times between 1926 and 1937, the year when the state of Maryland assumed formal control of Cheltenham.
“The present broom shop is a menace to the life and health of the boys employed therein,” according to a May 1927 grand jury report. “Filled as it is with a mass of inflammable material, with great quantities of straw and dust and with but one exit at the far end of the shop, a spark might easily start such a blaze as would cut off many of the boys from escape.”
A fire indeed broke out in the broom factory’s storage room, Cheltenham officials reported in 1930, burning it to the ground. Still, the factory remained active until at least May 1935. That year, for the seventh time, the grand jury report described the infamous workshop as “entirely unsuited and very hazardous.”
Forced Labor Income
Private companies and farmers paid for the boys’ labor, but it’s unclear how much the children actually received. It is clear that earnings from child labor were used to fund Cheltenham. In 1883, about 9% of its total funding came from contract labor. By 1911, that number was almost 6%. And in 1926, 15% of Cheltenham’s revenues came from the boys’ labor, with about half coming from the broom factory.
The money the boys earned was needed to help make ends meet, according to grand jury reports and Cheltenham documents.
Cheltenham had received “half-hearted and insufficient support” from the state for years, especially compared to the white House of Refuge for Juvenile Delinquents, now the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School in Baltimore County, according to a 1927 grand jury report. From 1922 through 1927, the state had appropriated $15,000 annually — or about $280,000 in today’s dollars — to the institution. But in 1926, the state gave $135,360 to Hickey — equivalent to about $2,527,230 today — more than Cheltenham received in both state funds and outside revenue combined. Cheltenham also received funds from the City of Baltimore, which were about double the state contribution.
‘Worked just like slaves’
The exploitative practices are built on an existing legacy of forced child labor.
After Maryland abolished slavery, county courts across the state allowed farmers to indenture more than 3,000 Black children to work on their land, according to a study by Richard Fuke, associate professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada. Just six years after that practice ended, Cheltenham again offered up children for indentured servitude.
Farm labor arrangements, which a grand jury described as a “system of virtual peonage,” dated to at least 1875.
“We have been reducing the number of our inmates by indenturing those first received into the House,” Cheltenham’s superintendent wrote in 1875. The practice continued for just under 60 years.
In a review of census records from 1920 and 1930, CNS found two Cheltenham boys, ages 11 and 16, were described as servants while living on farms in Carroll and St. Mary’s counties. One died at Cheltenham, just two years later.
Sent as far away as the Eastern Shore, the institution’s staff had no way of supervising the boys’ living conditions.
“They would hire the boys out with mean people who hated colored people and the boys were worked just like slaves,” one former Cheltenham inmate told the Afro-American, a Baltimore-based Black newspaper, in a letter to the editor in 1925.
A man told the Afro-American he was hired out after being sent to Cheltenham in 1907 as a 7-year-old orphan. He was soon sent to work on nearby farms. Years later, he recalled the treatment “became so unbearable that he was forced to run away after several severe beatings.”
Throughout the mid-1920s, grand jury reports chronicled contract farming at the institution. A 1927 grand jury report said the institution charged as little as 50 cents a day for the boys’ labor, or around $9.49 in present-day value. By 1926, almost half of the boys at the institution were hired out.
But boys committed at Cheltenham told the Afro-American they were paid little for their work, if at all.
“At one time I was supposed to be earning $5 a month—I earned it, but I never received it,” one former Cheltenham inmate told the newspaper in 1934.
State Takes Over, But Problems Persist
Outside criticism of the conditions at Cheltenham — from organizations like the NAACP, the Child Welfare League of America, the Afro-American and the head of the American Federation of Labor — mounted before the state’s eventual takeover in 1937. Even after the state took over Cheltenham, grand jury reports continued to criticize the institution.
“For twenty years, succeeding Grand Juries have urged reforms at this school, but their recommendations have not been carried out,” a member of the grand jury wrote in August 1939.
By 1940, 70 years after Cheltenham’s founding, it was still no better than a prison, according to a grand jury report.
“Cheltenham should be changed into a training school for Colored Boys,” a May 1940 grand jury report said, “rather than a preparatory school for the House of Correction and the Penitentiary.”
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