Child Welfare and Juvenile Justice
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Newspaper report about the high number of births in Georgia's prison camps. Female wardens and prisoners provided makeshift clothing for infants, and the writer notes that many children were sent elsewhere, likely to orphanages. “Babies in Prisons,” Henry County Weekly, May 18, 1900, p. 6.
Courtesy of Georgia Newspaper Project, Georgia Historic Newspapers.
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Report detailing a gathering at the Carrie Steele Orphan Home. African American community members, including Selena Sloan Butler, discussed the work of the Home and the need for juvenile prison reform. “Mass Meeting Sunday for Negro Orphanage,” Atlanta Georgian and News, Mar. 31, 1911, p. 8.
Courtesy of Georgia Newspaper Project, Georgia Historic Newspapers.
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Minutes of the Athens Woman's Club discuss the joint effort of the local white women's club, Martha Holsey, and the local African American Baptist Church in establishing a Black orphanage and daycare. Minutes 1899-1911, p. 93.
Courtesy of Athens-Clarke County Library, Athens Woman's Club collection.
Children and adolescents were also victims of Georgia’s convict lease and chain gang systems. Many children were conceived and born in prison camps, and various penitentiary records indicate that an average of twenty-five children lived in the camps in any given year. Male and female juveniles, most of whom were African American, were often charged and sentenced to adult chain gangs for petty crimes like vagrancy, playing dice in the street, and trespassing.
African American women such as Carrie Steele Logan and Martha Holsey founded philanthropic institutions to keep children out of the prison system. Carrie Steele Logan established her Orphan Home in Atlanta, which cared for children born in convict camps, juveniles accused of petty crimes, and children orphaned by the convict lease system. Steele Logan worked directly with the Atlanta Police Department to send African American adolescents to her orphanage to receive rehabilitation and education rather than be sent to the chain gang to perform backbreaking labor alongside adult prisoners. In 1907 African American seamstress and Athens clubwoman Martha Holsey worked with the all-white Athens Woman’s Club to establish a Black orphanage and daycare for working mothers.