JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
In a wooded area near the Cheltenham Youth Detention Center in Prince George's County, Maryland, there's a burial site - headstones hidden under decades of leaves and debris, a few engraved with names, dates of birth and death. But most of the graves are marked only by scattered, unmarked cinder blocks. Those abandoned graves are believed to belong to Black children who died 150 years ago and were forgotten. Vinny Schiraldi is one of the people who rediscovered this site. He's the former secretary of Maryland's Department of Juvenile Services. He visited that site recently and joins me in studio now to talk about it. Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
VINNY SCHIRALDI: Thanks for having me on, Juana.
SUMMERS: Can you just start by telling us a bit about the history of what we now know as the Cheltenham Youth Detention Center?
SCHIRALDI: Sure. Back in the 1800s, most places in the country didn't separate kids from adults when they locked them up. In the 1820s, Boston and New York established the nation's first houses of refuge. Maryland established its first house of refuge, but for white children only, in 1853. Twenty years later, they established the House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children in Cheltenham, Maryland, for Black youth - took about 400 kids out of adult prisons. The youngest was 5 years old. He could...
SUMMERS: Wow.
SCHIRALDI: ...Fit through the bars in the prisons. And that was the beginning of the Cheltenham facility.
SUMMERS: Vinny, I know that you just visited the site. Can you describe it for us and tell us what it was like?
SCHIRALDI: It's a site I've seen now three times, and it is as sorrowing and sad and grim every single time you see it. There's two parts to the site, one where there are a bunch of gravestones with young people's names on them, and you see 13-year-olds, 15-year-olds. But the other, to me, is worse because that's just a row of old, dilapidated, moss-covered cinder blocks. And you don't see them all at once because they're so difficult to see. Generally, what happens is you're standing there and you see, oh, there's one here, and then you look, you know, eight feet, there's another one and then another one and another one. So now you're looking at five rows of them. And then you look to your left and your right, and you see about six aisles. So you know you're in a site where many, many children have been buried in unmarked graves.
I cannot imagine what the conversation was like between the state and the parent that ended with the kid being buried in an unmarked grave. My guess is no conversation. And I have to say, it makes me suspicious about what the causes of death were.
SUMMERS: You've talked elsewhere about the importance of the state of Maryland reckoning with this part of its history, not repeating the mistakes of the past. What could or should that look like?
SCHIRALDI: So we toured the facility recently with Senator Will Smith.
SUMMERS: Maryland State Senator Will Smith, right?
SCHIRALDI: Yes, Senator Will Smith. And Senator Smith last year and now has announced again this year that he's going to sponsor legislation to stop the practice of young people being automatically tried in adult court in Maryland. There's still - the most serious charges will be automatic, but all the rest, a judge will make that decision. Maryland sends more young people to adult prison than every other state except Alabama. We send kids to adult prisons at twice the national average. Ninety-one percent of them are youth of color. Eight out of 10 of them are Black.
So, you know, it's easy to stand in this field in a formerly segregated facility and shake our heads at what our ancestors were doing. But, you know, we asked, what's history going to write about us? And so, yes, we want to mourn, we want to acknowledge, we want to heal, but we also want to act.
SUMMERS: What do you hope happens with these graves physically?
SCHIRALDI: I want it to be treated like a cemetery. I want us to find out the names of those young people and do more historical investigation. I want at least - at least - a stone with all those young people's names. I want to be able for people to get to those graves and mourn children because I'm sure they have extended family in Maryland. I want us to preserve the stones 'cause they're deteriorating and falling apart like we would do for any other cemetery.
And I want us to pass this legislation so we stop throwing today's kids away. We did this before. We need to apologize for it. And I, as secretary, apologize for it. It was a terrible thing for the state and the system I ran to do this to young people. And I don't know that I will ever forget it.
SUMMERS: Vinny Schiraldi, former secretary of Maryland's Department of Juvenile Services, thank you so much.
SCHIRALDI: Thank you for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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