A fallen gravestone, marked only with the initials J.B., in the woods that have overtaken a graveyard for Black youth in Cheltenham. (Photo by William J. Ford/Maryland Matters)
Recent news of a long-abandoned burial site near Maryland’s House of Reformation for Colored Children – a Blacks-only youth prison opened in 1873 to remove youth from adult prisons – has sparked much-needed grappling with the state’s legacy of disparate treatment of youth of color and laws that disproportionately prosecute Black children as adults. This comes against the backdrop of actions by President Donald Trump to erase uncomfortable history, as well as to prosecute 14-year-olds as adults in Washington, D.C.
Between the 1880s and 1939 there were likely more than 230 children buried, in mostly unmarked graves, in a wooded area adjacent to the House of Reformation in Cheltenham. Before its opening, Black youth, some as young as 5, were sent to Maryland’s adult prisons. The House of Reformation opened nearly two decades after the House of Refuge – the reform school established in Baltimore to remove white children from Maryland’s adult prisons…