Taft Youth Center
Taft Youth Center | |
| Location | 900 TN-301, Spencer, TN 38585 |
|---|---|
| Built | 1918 |
The Taft Youth Center was a center for troubled youths in Bledsoe County, TN.
History
Originally founded as the "Tennessee Reformatory for Negro Boys" in 1918[1], the reformatory immediately gained notoriety for its poor living conditions and extent of its punitive punishments. A caption on the back of a photograph of the reformatory wrote:
The dining-room was cold, with broken windows and doors, gloomy, dirty and bad-smelling. The food was prepared by the boys themselves. The arrangements were unsanitary. There were no tables. The boys sat on long rough benches, and their plates and bowls were placed on horizontal boards fastened on the back of the bench. The boys ate in silence. The dormitories were cold, dirty and disorderly. In one room there were forty-three beds for ninety-three boys. Many beds had broken springs or no springs, and in many cases the mattresses rested on the floor. Each bed had a blanket and a mattress unspeakably filthy. The boys said they slept naked, two or three in a bed, and this was confirmed by the guards. There is no school of any sort at present. There is no vocational training. There is no religious instruction.[2]
The school often had runaways as there was no fence around the reformatory, punishments included whippings and extended sentences. A nationwide survey on reformatory's for juvenile delinquents named it "the most desolate and forbidding."[3]
References
- ↑ "TDOC Historical Timeline" (PDF). tn.gov. Archived from the original (PDF) on Feb 14, 2025.
- ↑ "Luminous-Lint - Online exhibition - Crime and Punishment: Photographic evidence". web.archive.org. 2022-12-29. Retrieved 2025-02-14.
- ↑ Cohen, Andrew (April 1, 2014). "The Lynching of James Scales: How the FBI, the DOJ, and State Authorities "Whitewashed" Racial Violence in Bledsoe County, Tennessee". Texas Journal on Civil Liberties & Civil Rights: 299.
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