Failure of political vision and leadership has been both a tragedy and an opportunity for Alabamians: tragedy in that so many opportunities to advance progress and justice have been delayed or lost entirely; opportunity in that when leaders fail, ordinary citizens either have to reconcile themselves to conditions they consider unconscionable or change them. In the case of Elizabeth Johnston, she vowed to challenge injustice. A club woman and deeply religious, married to a prominent bank president and the sister-in-law to a governor, she had just the right combination of moral compass, organizing ability, and circle of influential friends to transform the way in which troubled (white) boys were treated in the state.
As volunteer Sunday School teacher for a decade in the prison camp operated by Pratt Coal Company north of Birmingham, she was appalled at the age of some child convicts (some as young as 14). Believing that all children, even wayward ones, deserved love, attention, decent housing, food, education, and opportunity to learn a trade, Johnston began to lobby her powerful friends to establish a boys’ industrial school. She first mobilized the newly created Alabama Federation of Women’s Clubs, then her larger circle of business and political leaders, always willing to do the dirty work of lobbying and carefully expending the resources obtained from them.
Reading about this remarkable woman, her passionate desire to help boys that others abandoned, her self-education as a construction manager, her indefatigable energy, is enough to inspire the reader. But there is a much larger cast of actors in this drama: social workers and ministers; club women; prison reformers; the first (and barely trained) superintendents of the school, learning as they administered; and the boys, learning to believe in themselves because so many influential adults believed in them. Whether the reader is captivated by the skilled craftsmen some of the boys became, the band they formed, the impressive record of their service in World War II, or merely the responsible lives so many graduates lived, every reader will be informed about an institution which demonstrates the limitless possibilities of the human spirit.
This is a book about a little-known subject that will amaze, inform, and inspire the reader.
Wayne Flynt taught more than 6,000 students, mainly at Samford and Auburn universities, during a 40-year teaching career. He also authored or co-authored 13 books, primarily about Alabama.