Fresh out of college, David Stuart put off graduate school to take a job close to his West Virginia home as a counselor at the Youth Development Center at Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. Known locally as the Morganza, the facility was founded in the nineteenth century as a farm for orphaned boys. By the 1960s, the Morganza had long been burdened with a sinister reputation when it was converted into a detention center for Allegheny County youth convicted of crimes ranging from petty theft to armed robbery, rape, and murder. Reporting for duty during the racially turbulent and riot-torn summer of 1967, Stuart describes the life of students and staff in what was, in reality, a youth prison camp.
Confronted with the glaring shortcomings of the reform school's methods of rehabilitation, Stuart irritated the bureaucracy, advocating for detainees whose only crimes were a lack of education and belonging to the wrong race or economic class. He confronted an establishment that refused to distinguish between hardened criminals and those who would benefit from actual reform. In The Morganza, 1967 Stuart offers a brutally honest—at times touching—insider's view of a juvenile justice system that was badly in need of fixing.
Acknowledgments Author's Note xi
Chapter 1 We Have a Job Opening 1
Chapter 2 Students Will Be Rehabilitated 3
Chapter 3 Let's Break Him In 7
Chapter 4 The Tower 16
Chapter 5 Rabbit 23
Chapter 6 A Day Off 30
Chapter 7 Where's the Graveyard? 34
Chapter 8 I'm Black! 43
Chapter 9 Not Behind the White Fence 50
Chapter 10 Mr. Davenport, We Have to Talk 57
Chapter 11 Sorry About the Fork Thing 64
Chapter 12 Nefertiti 71
Chapter 13 What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate 76
Chapter 14 Jelly Baby 87
Chapter 15 We Got Duppies Up on 2 93
Chapter 16 The Price of Identity 101
Chapter 17 Daddy 109
Chapter 18 Billy, I Have Something to Tell You... 118
Chapter 19 Dammit! It's Rabbit Again... 131
Chapter 20 Cat Missing 139
Chapter 21 Happy Halloween, 1967 149
Chapter 22 Who? Who? 158
Chapter 23 Her Majesty's Dance 171
Chapter 24 I'll Take Extra Shifts 179
Chapter 25 The Changing of the Guard 190
Chapter 26 Punish Me! Punish Me! 196
Chapter 27 Sanna's White ... It Gonna Open for You 202
Chapter 28 We Lost Four? 212
Chapter 29 It's an Inside Joke 217
Epilogue 221
Overview
Fresh out of college, David Stuart put off graduate school to take a job close to his West Virginia home as a counselor at the Youth Development Center at Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. Known locally as the Morganza, the facility was founded in the nineteenth century as a farm for orphaned boys. By the 1960s, the Morganza had long been burdened with a sinister reputation when it was converted into a detention center for Allegheny County youth convicted of crimes ranging from petty theft to armed robbery, rape, and ...