Contested Commitment: Policing Black Female Juvenile Delinquency at Efland Home, 1919–1939

In 1937, a fifteen-year-old black girl from Tyrell County, North Carolina, found herself pregnant.1 She was academically gifted and desired to “go away” during her pregnancy. The county representative believed a stint at a local reformatory would serve her well. In theory, Efland Home was such a place; a space that, as the slogan went, would “Save Our Girls” and help curb black female juvenile delinquency.2 The young woman had made her “first mistake” and being sentenced to the institution would ensure she would “go in peace and sin no more.” Yet by 1937 Efland Home was a failing project: fiscal difficulties compounded staffing problems and an expanding runaway epidemic. Though the record on the girl’s fate is unclear, serving time at Efland would not have been easy. Just twelve years after the reformatory opened, many state officials opined that a young black woman would be better off in a local jail than at Efland Home.3 Efland’s rapid demise reveals not only changing concepts of how private and public institutions understood black female juvenile delinquency, but also how the young black women themselves negotiated the terms of their confinement.

When the North Carolina Industrial School for Negro Girls opened in 1925, it was not a unique undertaking. Colloquially named Efland Home for the town in which it was located, the reformatory began as the brainchild of Charlotte Hawkins Brown and other members of the North Carolina Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs.4 Fitting within the broader black Washingtonian ideal of industrial education and serving to correct sexually deviant behaviors, the institution embodied tenets of racial uplift. Yet by 1939 Efland Home—and the project of controlling unregulated young black female sexuality—had become unsalvageable. This article argues that the fall of Efland was compounded by unstable leadership, young women’s resistance by running away, and the state’s unwillingness to adequately fund the school. In the process, policing young black female adolescence revealed complex and shifting meanings of black girlhood/womanhood, productive citizenship, and Christianly correction.

As early as 1919, the federation cited the need for an institution to reform, rehabilitate, and redeem young black women who had engaged in illicit sexual behaviors. Their concerns were not without reason. Early twentieth-century North Carolina, like many other states across the country, was deeply embroiled in industrial growth, urban attraction, Progressive Era politics, and Jim Crow realities. Some of the youngest laborers, namely teenage boys and girls, flocked to cities to help support their families or make an independent living, leading to national concerns that vice-filled streets would corrupt impressionable adolescents. Unregulated young working-class black female sexuality posed a unique challenge to reform-minded women, particularly those engaged in racial uplift projects that aimed to combat the perceived moral depravity of black women and girls.

Against this backdrop, North Carolina’s black clubwomen understood themselves as exceptionally positioned to “save Negro womanhood.”5 They were, after all, middle-class ladies who embodied respectability, religious piety, moral rectitude, and charity—the precise characteristics they feared young poor black women had lost to urban sensuality. According to Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Efland Home was designed for those under age sixteen who were “destined for pregnancy, prostitution, or prison” and it was the duty of the clubwomen to give these young women “a second chance.”6 Yet in 1902 Brown had opened the Alice Freeman Palmer Memorial Institute, an elite private finishing school for black youth, which quickly became one of the most respected such institutions in the country.7 In campaigning for the need to curb black female juvenile delinquency, Brown and the federation made clear that a parolee from Efland Home and a graduate of Palmer Memorial Institute could never attain the same social status—the former would become “farmers, mechanics [and] house girls,” and the latter would bolster the black elite through racial uplift and civic responsibility.8 Moreover, although the federation rallied behind the slogan “Save Our Girls” to solicit funds for establishing Efland Home, they implied that “our” was not necessarily inclusive—their daughters, nieces, and sisters were Palmer Memorial Institute–bound. Given the club- women's multifaceted appeal to build an institution correcting young black female juvenile delinquency, contested definitions of black womanhood emerged. Shaped by class, age, religion, and education, these delineations fluctuated as black reformers adapted to the changing urban landscapes.

When Efland Home opened a month behind schedule on October 16, 1925, it represented the tensions present in the club- women's propaganda campaign. The delay was the result of incomplete barbed wire installation on the windows.9 From its inception, Efland was designed both literally and figuratively as an institution of control. Governed by an eleven-person board of trustees with at least two white members, the reformatory was to be managed by a superintendent trained in social work, aided by an assistant.10 Committed by local juvenile and criminal courts, the young women sentenced to the institution were labeled “inmates” and, according to the school’s bylaws, Efland Home staff reserved the “sole right and authority to keep, restrain, and control these girls” until the trustees approved their parole.11 Working with the State Board of Charities and Public Welfare to determine admission numbers and county apportionments, the reformatory functioned not as a preventative measure but as a private alternative to prison. Indeed, the state-run institution for delinquent white girls, officially known as the State Home and Industrial School for Girls and colloquially referred to as Samarcand Manor, excluded black female adolescents.12 As a result, black girls and young women accused of minor infractions and social transgressions risked imprisonment alongside those charged with more violent crimes. Thus, Efland filled a necessary void as clubwomen emphasized reform over punitive correction in the establishment of an institutional home for black girls.

Though Efland Home’s cottage was new, both its first superintendent and youthful offender had spent time at the Virginia State Industrial School for Colored Girls, run by Janie Porter Barrett.13 Considered the first such establishment and preeminent model for rehabilitating young black female juvenile delinquents, the Barrett School offered tangible evidence of a successful reformatory.14 Yet Efland’s trajectory quickly diverged from that of its predecessor. What started out as a nine-room, seven-bed cottage in rural Orange County was, within a decade, an overcrowded and geographically isolated penal institution.

Turnover Not Takeover: Leadership Transitions at Efland Home

From the beginning, Efland Home grappled with constant staff turnover. The first superintendent, Ms. Carrie M. Brooks, stayed just over a year before being forced to resign in December 1926.15 According to the federation and the home’s board of trustees, though she had been hired as “a woman of executive ability” with “exceedingly industrious habits,” very quickly she became unprofessional.16 In January, Mrs. Mary E. Hill left the Barrett School to work at Efland Home, staying roughly through the end of the decade.17 During her tenure both Mrs. Rose [Rosa] Morrow and Charles Fuller were on the reformatory’s payroll during 1927, yet by 1928 their names disappear, replaced inconsistently with Mary Lynch.18 By 1930, Mrs. M. L. Clinton and Mrs. Bertha Vincent were acting superintendent and assistant, respectively.19 During the spring of 1931, Mrs. Jessie G. Benton replaced Mrs. Clinton, yet her tenure would be short as roughly a year later a new matron assumed leadership of Efland Home. Throughout the early 1930s, the roles of superintendent and matron grew increasingly muddied at the reformatory, revealing the extent to which funding difficulties and staffing changes required constant modification of day-to-day responsibilities. In fact, two unnamed male superintendents oversaw the administrative duties of Efland Home during these years while female matrons rotated on an almost yearly basis.20

In July 1932, Mr. J. H. Blue ushered in a new wave of leaders who, individually, often became the only functioning adult at Efland Home on any given day, even if more than one individual was listed on the federation’s payroll.21 Additional blurring of responsibilities and duties increased throughout the rest of the decade, making titles more perfunctory than representative of the daily happenings at the school. Working first as the matron and then as the superintendent (with Mrs. Sadie F. Powell as the new matron), Mr. Blue stayed at Efland Home just under two years. During the summer of 1934, Mrs. J. A. Lassiter and her husband were hired. She served as the matron and he as the farmhand, though the couple quickly adopted every role required to keep the school afloat. Invested in making the best out of what was a dire financial situation, the Lassiters genuinely regretted needing to leave Efland Home to tend to personal concerns at their farm in the eastern part of the state.22 Mrs. Lassiter penned a heartfelt note about her commitment to the cause, reflecting that it had been “our pleasure to encourage them [the girls]” and resolving that her efforts to continue such work would be “unceasing and never-tiring.”23 In stark contrast to the diligence with which Mrs. Lassiter recorded her dedication to Efland, the final matron, Mrs. Lula B. Henderson who was hired in April 1935, proved controversial if not blatantly negligent.24 While she would be joined by Miss Hilda Allen a few months later and an unnamed male farmhand by the end of the year, Mrs. Henderson’s leadership marked a dramatic decline not only in the daily functioning of Efland Home but also in the public sentiment about the very utility of the institution.

Indeed, the transition from the Lassiters to Mrs. Henderson represents the most marked shift in leadership style at Efland, revealing in a matter of two years just how quickly the reformatory’s model of controlled rehabilitation morphed to punitive correction. In late February 1934, just three months before the Lassiters were hired, fourteen young women, ranging in age from 10 to 17, resided at the institution.25 Though earlier reports noted that the cottage technically had the capacity to board fifteen individuals excluding staff, by the mid-1930s the classroom had been converted to “sleeping quarters” and the dining room served as a makeshift schoolhouse.26 By October, although only ten young women were housed at Efland Home, more than thirty were on the waitlist, and an inspector from the State Board of Charities and Public Welfare opined that with “proper facilities” seventy-five to one hundred adolescents could benefit from such services.27 That the reformatory, given the right amount of funding and support, could increase its size six times over and still find young women to occupy every bed speaks volumes about the perception of this “problem” across the state. Whether or not this issue was as big as Inspector William R. Johnson described is beside the point: his goal, and the federation’s goal, was the eventual state takeover of Efland Home, which necessarily required rhetoric proving that black female juvenile delinquency was a pressing concern in 1930s North Carolina and needed to be policed accordingly.28

At the time of the Lassiters’ employment, state officials recognized the shortcomings of Efland while still promoting its utility, citing the young women “happily engaged” in canning and commenting on the cleanliness of the cottage as proof that the domestic component of the club- women's mission functioned as well as could be expected given the funding situation.29 More than spotless living quarters, the mental and moral cleanliness of the young women at Efland Home intrigued state inspectors. When Johnson noted that the young women called Mr. Lassiter “Daddy” and Mrs. Lassiter “Mother,” he revealed one way the club- women's aspirations could complicate the penal undercurrent that established the institution.30 Though the practice of calling matrons “mother” was common in reformatories for young black females across the country, this was the first time such nicknames were mentioned within the specific context of Efland Home. Whether the Lassiters instituted this policy or the young women took it upon themselves to use the more affectionate names is unknown, yet it is clear that an attempt at recreating a pseudo-nuclear family structure was underway at the reformatory in 1934.

Most telling of Mrs. Lassiter’s commitment to the cause (and others’ commitment to her work) are the meticulous reports she compiled during her tenure. Though Mrs. Lassiter had a teaching certificate, the textbook education curriculum had disappeared at Efland Home. She had to choose between teaching for the sake of academics and teaching for the practical goal of keeping the institution open: a dichotomy which, according to the club- women's framework, should never have had to exist in the first place.31 To show just what kind of work was taking place outside of the classroom, Mrs. Lassiter noted that the sign at the end of the road had been painted that fall; writing letters and Christmas cards had also been a recreational activity that season; young women had preserved nearly 500 cans of produce during the summer; and they baked numerous cakes from October to December.32 In the seven months she noted Efland Home’s accomplishments, more than one hundred religious services were held at the reformatory, while an additional two services required the young women to travel.33 Although a recreational outing to Durham took place that fall, no extracurricular trips had been taken over the summer.34 A variety of donations, ranging from food, clothing, money, and books to radios, glasses, runners, and “Vicks Vaporub [sic]” were graciously accepted.35 Still, the institution was sorely short on resources.

Perhaps most surprising in Mrs. Lassiter’s reports, however, is that nearly 700 people visited Efland Home in seven months, averaging out to more than three individuals every single day.36 Although some visitors were clearly state officials and members of the federation, the sheer number of people coming in and out of Efland Home suggests that more than just a few clubwomen and state representatives had a vested interest in the reformatory. Indeed, the level of traffic at the institution is reminiscent of a spectacle—perhaps the idea of black female juvenile delinquency and its supposed rehabilitation were truly a sight to see. Despite geographic isolation, people wanted to witness the club- women's vision in operation.37 While it is unclear exactly what role visitors played in the daily happenings of Efland Home, their presence highlights the tension between public and private constructions of reform.

Flight: Running Away and Corporeal Punishment

Visitors, matrons, and superintendents were not the only ones entering and exiting Efland Home at an alarming rate. Throughout its fourteen-year history the reformatory experienced fluctuating numbers of runaway adolescents, peaking in the mid-to-late 1930s. Mrs. Mary E. Hill, the late-1920s matron, reported having no issues with young women running away during her tenure, and additional records maintain a humble but productive environment in which the young women showed “great improvement.”38 They gathered flowers to place in the cottage’s rooms, picked cotton under strict supervision but played in the front yard unchaperoned and participated in the academic and domestic requirements of Efland Home.39 The employees shared a car, maintaining it at their personal expense, while the girls maintained livestock including cows, chickens, pigs, and a mule.40 This is not to suggest that young women did not attempt to escape from Efland Home in the early years, but the inconsistency with which they might have done so did not raise concerns for the federation or state officials.

By 1934, however, Mrs. Lassiter noted that of the three young women who ran away between May and October, only one had been recaptured. An additional six had been paroled, leaving thirteen at the home by the end of the year.41 With the hiring of Mrs. Henderson in April 1935 (and Ms. Hilda Allen later that year), a sudden change swept through the reformatory. In May, a “running away epidemic” sparked serious concern.42 Miss Corinne Cannady, acting on behalf of the City of Greensboro, visited the institution and was so troubled by the noticeable transformation that she wrote a letter the following week to Mrs. W. T. Bost, North Carolina’s Commissioner for Public Welfare.43 In observing the new staff, she explained: “I regret very much to see the sudden change which has come about since Mrs. Lassiter left. … I hope you will have some investigation made at once concerning the apparently deplorable condition which exists there now.”44 Miss Cannady had gone to the reformatory to return a twelve-year-old who had run away because “the matron whipped her with a board.”45 The young woman also told Miss Cannady of others being locked in small rooms with only bread and water for days on end, and though the city representative was initially hesitant to believe the runaway, she soon changed her mind. She noted: “It would be hard for me to describe to you the unfavorable impression which was made on me while there at the home.”46

Miss Cannady had a vested interest not just in the maintenance of Efland Home but also in its success. She served as the liaison between the Greensboro juvenile justice system and the reformatory’s administration, and hence understood that the more “successful” Efland Home was, the less young women who would ultimately pass through the juvenile courts and local jails. She was one of a number of county and city officials who spent time, money, and other resources to return escaped young women back to the reformatory. Whereas earlier records do not elucidate why young women chose to run away from Efland Home, this twelve-year-old’s narrative describing physical violence as her motive to leave speaks volumes to the change in leadership and the downfall of the reformatory. Previous matrons were hired under the assumption that they embodied middleclass ideologies of reform, rehabilitation, and discipline, yet Mrs. Henderson’s tactics of physical punishment arguably did not align with the club- women's initial vision.47 Though isolating adolescents from their peers and instituting “quiet time” was a relatively common form of disciplinary training during this time, the young woman’s insistence that “girls were often locked in a room” and given minimal food for days on end reveals that the matron used punitive methods of control that more closely resembled those in prisons and other correctional facilities.48

During this visit, Miss Cannady learned that her returnee was not an isolated incident. Mrs. Henderson’s public admission of an escapee problem reflected a noticeable shift from the Lassiters’ tenure. As of mid-1935, young women were both fleeing from the reformatory in larger numbers than ever seen before, and they were also becoming more vocal in explaining why they chose to run away, elucidating the deteriorating conditions at the institution. One Saturday in May, for example, four of the ten young women on Efland Home’s roster were kept overnight in the “detention room” in Greensboro. They all “gave the same reason for running away that Mary gave at the time she first ran away.”49 Though only speculative details about Mary remain, this brief reference to young women’s deliberate, collaborative, and active insistence on physically removing themselves from the reformatory emphasizes the dramatic effects the leadership turnover had on their daily lives. No longer was Efland Home functioning as a well-intentioned but underfunded facility: it was a mere shell of what it had been under the Lassiters’ administration.

Perhaps due to Miss Cannady’s inquiry, William Curtis Ezell, a representative of the State Board of Charities and Public Welfare, visited Efland Home a few days later. He spoke with Sheriff Sloan, one of Efland’s local police officers who had been called to check in on the facility a number of times. At that time, only twelve young women were at the school, all between the ages of 10 and 15.50 Agent Ezell relayed the sheriff’s experience by explaining: “[He] noticed Supt. Henderson spoke harshly to girls. [He] thought she was having trouble managing; doubted if she had [the] personality and tact to handle [the] situation. Office had been called more for run-a-ways [sic] than when former superintendent was there.”51 Echoing Miss Cannady’s concern regarding Mrs. Henderson’s disposition to properly care for the young women at Efland Home, Sheriff Sloan expressed some reservation about the latter’s ability to manage the institution. Both visitors commented that Mrs. Henderson’s interactions with the young women at the reformatory did not meet their own general expectations examining the relationship between matrons and wayward youth.

Agent Ezell’s report not only explored the reality that more and more young women were running away from the institution than in previous years, but also the possibility that some of the escapees were playing into their labels of “delinquency” in order to flee. The local grocery store owners were aware of rumors of young women escaping from Efland Home with the help of an older white man, as well as the inclusion of possible sexual favors, revealing the extent to which the community knew about the day-to-day happenings at the reformatory. 52 It also suggests that even though many young women were sentenced to the institution for sexual deviancy, they could negotiate sex to change their circumstances. Even so, the sexual exploitation of black girls is often unwritten in the historical record; after all, part of the impetus for founding Efland Home was rooted in the vulnerability of young black women not just to the vices of urban life, but to men (and women) who could take advantage of their sexual naivety. Within the confines of the reformatory, the unequal power dynamics between adults and adolescents, community and “inmates,” and the state and the federation, created complicated circumstances in which decisions were rarely black and white.53 Still, it is productive to consider the possibility that the young women who chose to engage in sexual activities in exchange for their freedom were demonstrating a level of sexual shrewdness. The irony of this possibility should not be overlooked: the very types of behaviors that could have landed young black women at Efland Home in the early twentieth century were the same types of behaviors potentially fueling their escapes.

By the summer of 1937, challenges with runaways and funding threatened the viability of Efland Home. Miss Allen had walked away from the reformatory and Mrs. Henderson was the sole adult responsible for the young women’s survival. To gauge the seriousness of the problem, the state sanctioned three consecutive studies of the institution that would culminate in an August meeting of the federation’s executive committee to decide the future of Efland Home. All three reports highlighted an increased problem with runaways, a demonstrable turn to corporeal punishment, and a contested relationship between the young charges and Mrs. Henderson.

As of early June, not only were young women regularly leaving the institution without permission, but they did so with relative ease. One report explained: “About two weeks ago three girls left but returned the same night about nine o’clock; since that time three others have left. One was returned Sunday from Greensboro, the other two are still at large.”54 The fact that young women ran away for less than one day implies a level of fluidity between the reformatory and the local community that is not recorded in earlier reports of Efland Home. For the young women to have returned the same night means that they did not go very far, which in turn suggests that locals often interacted with these individuals and likely chose not to report them missing.

Detailing the punitive shift that occurred under Mrs. Henderson’s leadership, Agent Johnson offered one of a number of written accounts of physical abuse at Efland Home. He noted:

One girl was locked in a room for a misdemeanor. Shortly before my arrival, one girl had snatched a whip from the matron and tossed it across the room. According to the matron’s own story, told in the presence of two other visitors and myself, she said—“I choked and beat her until she foamed at the mouth! I tried my best to kill her. I beat her so much until I forgot the noon prayers.” This information was unsought and told in a boasting manner.55

Without the oversight of another adult to balance physical punishment with something more akin to the club- women's initial vision of Christianly goodwill, Mrs. Henderson’s corporeal treatment reveals just how far removed Efland Home was from its original goals. That she tried to beat a young woman until she forgot her noon prayers highlights the tensions between the benevolent salvation narrative preached by the middle-class clubwomen in the early 1920s and the penal day-to-day existence that plagued the reformatory by the late 1930s. Christianity was an earnest mechanism that the federation used to justify their initial cause, yet by 1937 it was being coopted into a punitive project. For Mrs. Henderson, physical altercations became an acceptable way to combat black female juvenile delinquency. To the state, however, such behavior wrought an unfavorable conclusion: the young women at Efland Home “might be better off” if the reformatory was closed.56

In early July, fourteen young women (aged 11 to 16) resided at Efland Home, but three had run away and had not yet been caught.57 A fourth had fled but was returned. Young women were not only locked inside a “detention room” as punishment, but they were also contained inside the main cottage itself. Despite being a fire hazard, the building was so structurally weak that “the girls would likely find no great difficulty in breaking an exit through the barbed wire window guards in case of fire.”58 Wracked with financial difficulties that made it impossible to maintain an up-to-code edifice, Efland Home’s physical spaces—in terms of both corrective rooms and flimsy construction—enabled young women to contest their containment. During no earlier visits did any state official note the existence of a specific “detention room” in Efland Home, yet by 1937 this structure was crucial to Mrs. Henderson’s version of discipline.

Just over a week later, the Greensboro Juvenile Court called the North Carolina Division of Institutions and Corrections, stating that a number of young women from the reformatory were being held in the local jail.59 Six young women ran away on July 4, carrying suitcases and clothes with them as they tore through window screens and barbed wire in their sleeping quarters. Two other young women were in the same room but did not leave with the escapees, while three others were staying in another part of the cottage. Discovery of the young women’s absence was not made until the following morning, permitting them a considerable number of hours to travel away from Efland Home. At the time the court was involved, five of the young women had been caught, but the sixth remained at large.60 This unique situation meant that there were more young women who had escaped from the institution than were still at Efland Home at this time. Indeed, the “running away epidemic” Mrs. Henderson had described two years earlier seemed to be growing.61

Perhaps it is not just ironic that the young women fled on the fourth of July. Their summertime escapade signifies a collaborative plan to leave Efland Home. That six of the eight young women sleeping in the large room escaped after tearing through barbed wire suggests that the two who stayed behind witnessed their counterparts flee and, for whatever reason, decided not to follow. That the escapees slit barbed wire characterizes their resistance to punitive and coercive treatment and is further proof that the physical structure of Efland Home was being literally destroyed during the late 1930s. Moreover, the young women’s foresight to carry their personal belongings with them reveals that they believed their escape would be permanent. For the one young woman who still remained at large, perhaps a form of success had been realized.

Upon their capture, the young women explained to the court representatives that they “did not get enough to eat and did not like Mrs. Henderson … and just didn’t like the place.”62 The escapees noted that they were “not going to stay at Efland.”63 Thus, the young women embodied defiance as they spoke freely of the likelihood that they would run away again. If caught, they would be returned by the same court representatives, revealing a cyclical relationship between the reformatory and local officials. This interaction between Greensboro officials and Efland Home’s runaways attests to the changing environment of the institution and the newfound power the young women had to stay or leave, even if both stints were only temporary. Given that the young women gave various reasons for fleeing, it is clear that there was not one catalyst that encouraged them to join together to escape, but that a series of smaller issues, ranging from inadequate food to intolerable staff, snowballed to the point that they felt they had to leave.

In response to the large number of young women who ran away from Efland Home, Mrs. Henderson advocated for even more stringent punishment. She believed that “they should have strong detention quarters outside the building in order to both punish and hold escapees and others.”64 That Mrs. Henderson sought to counter the runaway problem through punitive measures reveals the extent to which the club- women's original salvation narrative had morphed into something more penal. Prior to Mrs. Henderson’s role as matron there was never any indication that detention would be a form of punishment employed at Efland Home, yet in visitation reports from the late 1930s the idea of physically containing young women inside enclosed quarters was fairly commonplace.

Fight: Funding Failures and Expressed Resistance

Although runaways were one of the largest problems at Efland Home during the late 1930s, Mrs. Henderson still had to contend with day-to-day survival, compounded by financial difficulties. To assess the institution’s needs, she requested a state-run analysis of deficiencies at the reformatory, as well as recommendations for improvement.65 When the “Psycho-educational Survey of North Carolina Industrial School for Negro Girls” came out at the end of 1935, its damning findings defined the state’s black female juvenile delinquents as mentally deficient, suggested that the federation’s vision had never been realized after more than a decade of trying, and offered a series of unrealistic recommendations to the board of trustees. This report noted almost all of the flaws of the institution but provided no realistic feedback: the cracks of the reformatory were exposed and crumbling. At this time, state funding was a mere $1,400 per biennium and the possibility of a state takeover to alleviate some of the financial stressors—so emphasized in the early years—was now nonexistent.66

Although the survey perpetuated the notion that sexual deviance was the most pressing concern for young women at Efland Home, it also analyzed the mental aptitude of the young black women at Efland Home in comparison to their white counterparts at Samarcand Manor. The “Mental Status of the Children” findings were more damning than any of the other results because they suggested a level of racial and mental inferiority which challenged the club- women's vision of balanced education and reinforced the racial hierarchy of Jim Crow North Carolina. The section offered: “We found the children but slightly below the average of the white children at Samarcand Manor, the correctional institution for white girls. Because the majority of them are mentally deficient, we find that they are markedly retarded in school.”67 Oppositional to the club- women's mission to encourage two paths of knowledge acquisition at Efland Home, the survey’s findings concluded that the young black women sentenced to the reformatory should be confined to acquiring vocational skills because of mental deficiencies. More reflective of social biases constructing black people as mentally inferior to their white counterparts than reporting absolute truths regarding the intellectual capacities of young women at the institution, the findings nonetheless overrode the federation’s explicit framework for building Efland Home. By 1935, then, North Carolina’s black female juvenile delinquents had become, at least in the eyes of the state, a trainable labor force locked into both domestic vocations and racially inferior status on their social ladder.68

The psycho-educational survey of Efland Home was the first such investigation undertaken at the reformatory and elucidated many of the flaws that had plagued the institution for years, including the issue of runaways.69 Though some of the critiques represented effects of chronic underfunding and understaffing, others were reflective of the 1935 change in leadership that transitioned the facility from a period of humble yet noticeable progress to one of punitive discipline and penal practices. The report surveyed the state of Efland Home as of late 1935 and concluded that many changes needed to be implemented for the institution to reach a state-defined standard of success.

Following the troubling results of the psycho-educational survey, Efland Home’s leadership made constant appeals to the state, not just for funding but for resources, connections, and knowledge. Every plea was met with a calculated response that distanced the state from the reformatory. When Miss Allen broached the subject of medical care for the young women, the response was curt: “I suggest that you get in touch with the County Health Officer.”70 Instead of connecting Miss Allen to specific individuals, including doctors and nurses, to help her acquire proper treatment, the reply placed the onus back on Efland Home’s own leadership. When Miss Allen inquired as to whether or not North Carolina’s Works Project Administration (WPA) could complete various manual labor tasks at the institution, the reply was even more dismissive:

… the WPA cannot approve a project unless the deed of the property is held by a public body, State, County, or Municipality. Since your deed is owned by a private organization, the N. C. Federation of Negro Women’s Clubs, you will not be able to get a project approved. I know of no source from which you may get the aid, except from your own insufficient budget.71

With this demeaning reply, the state spoke to its newfound understanding of the value of Efland Home. Whereas previous interactions between state officials and the reformatory’s leadership expressed a sincere commitment to the same goal of curbing young black female juvenile delinquency across the state, this recent hostility represented the changing dynamics between both parties. The source that could improve the budget, in other words, was the exact same source that was telling the clubwomen to use their own “insufficient budget” to improve the deterioration of the reformatory.

While Mrs. Henderson and Miss Allen (before her spring 1937 resignation) were fighting for financial support for Efland Home, the young women at the institution were waging a fight of their own. Theirs was an uphill battle. Based on the results of the psycho-educational survey, the average IQ of a young woman sentenced to Efland Home was 65.4.72 According to the findings, this number not only proved “definite feeblemindedness” of the adolescents in the institution, but it also placed them in the subcategory of “moron.”73 While there is no objective measure of intelligence to combat the state’s findings of the mental faculties of young women at the reformatory, the racialized and classist context out of which such results emerged suggests severe bias. Still, the lack of any educational structure at Efland Home during 1937 was the result of a crumbling institution, not acquiescence to the state’s assumptions of feeblemindedness.

The reality that young women at the reformatory received no academic or vocational training during the final years was sustained through both logistical difficulties and efforts by the young women themselves. Unlike in earlier years, the level of young black female agency preserved in the historical record starting in 1937 reveals the extent to which the reformatory was spiraling to its demise from the inside and the outside. Though it would be easy to dismiss the sudden appearance of the young women’s expressions and feelings as mere representations of what the field agents deemed noteworthy during these years, it is more productive to recognize how the young women led to the end of Efland Home.

On site, the farm was unsuccessful. The young women refused to cooperate. According to the farmer, “what they did amounted to practically nothing. … If they were to do anything he would have to start right with them and supervise their work. … Or if they didn’t want to work they told him so and there was nothing he could do about it.”74 The fact that the young women not only refused to do the work but actually told the farmhand that they did not want to complete the tasks suggests a shifting power dynamic in this particular component of the reformatory’s training. The farmer could not make them work, even if he wanted to, and this negotiation of labor is not seen during any of Efland Home’s earlier years, suggesting that the institution’s framework was growing weak enough for the young women to push back against the very system which had been designed to contain and control them. How the young women managed to leverage this type of autonomy remains a mystery, yet what is known is that their unwillingness and inability to work would have irreversible effects on the survival of the institution.

Efland Home Falls: Contesting Delinquency

Between running away, physically destroying the reformatory’s property, and refusing to do any work, the young women at Efland Home were not passive victims of their sentences. By the late-1930s, they were major contributors to the rapid fall of the institution. Couple young women’s resistance with funding inadequacies, and the federation’s vision was nearing hopeless. As state representatives and others began to see Efland Home as more harmful than harmless, the reformatory faced scathing critiques. After the August 1937 meeting of the federation’s executive committee and state officials, the future of Efland Home was perceived to waver between two options: being shut down entirely and being overhauled to operate efficiently.

When the new year dawned, Mrs. Henderson wrote a report to the Executive Committee trying to put a positivist spin on the previous year’s events, explaining that “our industrial and home training efforts have been recognized and complimented by friends and some officers of the State Department of Education and Public Institutions.”75 She reflected that juvenile delinquency was one of “the big problems of to-day” and argued that Efland Home was “helping though little, in preventing a larger increase.”76 While at first glance Mrs. Henderson’s comments seem incongruous with the three summer visitation reports exploring themes of physical abuse, dangerous infrastructure, runaway epidemics, and a rather defiant young black female incarcerated population, her specific wording reveals the extent to which she was selectively disclosing information in order to advance a fundraising agenda.

Perhaps most elucidating about Mrs. Henderson’s report is a tally at the bottom naming eight young women who were dismissed from Efland Home during 1937 alongside five others who escaped and had not been caught.77 Another two had been paroled that year.78 These statistics reveal that despite any pretenses of “success” Mrs. Henderson tried to portray, Efland Home did not function the way it had been designed. Young women ran away so often that it was impossible to say anything about those who had been dismissed without also acknowledging those who fled. This reality limited any perception of success that Mrs. Henderson tried to impose: the institution was failing.

After Mrs. Henderson’s report at the start of the year, the remainder of 1938 followed in a blur of constant reports condemning Efland Home. Coming from a variety of individuals associated with the state in one capacity or another, the year was plagued by never-ending disapproval. In April, George H. Lawrence explained that he would rather “have a negro girl to be confined to the county jail as committed to the school at Efland.”79 In his estimation, the jail would at least ensure the young woman’s access to regular food, a luxury at the reformatory according to various escapees. Using an assured meal as his example, Lawrence emphasized the reality that state-run institutions were bound to maintain certain standards that did not have to exist at a privately owned facility like Efland Home.80

In his rather detailed condemnation of Efland Home, Lawrence highlighted an array of problems at the institution and argued that it was doing more damage than good. His conclusions explained: “Apparently girls are locked in the little building most of the day as well as night and in that respect little different from a jail. … My own feeling is that the place is worse than useless because it is entirely an ineffectual attempt for care an at institution.”81 To Lawrence, all of the problems at Efland Home compounded such that the institution served as a fac¸ade for combating black female juvenile delinquency but failed in its mission. More troubling, the reformatory had become a purely penal institution, comparable to a haphazard jail. Thus, despite the initial project of racial and moral uplift espoused by the clubwomen more than a decade earlier, the late 1930s reflected a punitive approach to supposed salvation.

For much of the rest of the year, critiques of Efland Home were interspersed with an effort undertaken by the federation, with the support of some state officials, to acquire a new plot of land on which to restart the project of building and maintaining a reformatory school for young black female juvenile delinquents. Though eventually the Division of Institutions and Corrections would reach out to reformatories across the country that accepted both male and female children in an attempt to see if a merger with Morrison Training School for Negro Boys in Hoffman would be more feasible than starting over, the broadest general consensus during the year was that Efland Home would cease to exist in its current state. The new strategy, then, emphasized the idea that combating black female juvenile delinquency was a state responsibility, as opposed to one entrenched in the black community, and sought to capitalize on this reality in the 1939 General Assembly. The plan, in some ways very similar to the one embarked on by the clubwomen in 1919, was to contact well-placed individuals in the state and solicit enough sympathy from them to warrant a financial guarantee from the state legislature. Though a handful of individuals pledged their support, this backing was not enough to ensure the survival of the institution.82 At the end of the year, William Curtis Ezell visited Morrison Training School to inquire about the merger and was assured that the superintendent “seemed rather enthusiastic about such prospect.”83 Yet none of these elusive appeals to improve the plight of wayward young black women in North Carolina came to fruition. In October 1938, the board of trustees of Efland Home voted to close the facility on March 1 of the following year.84 The original North Carolina Industrial School for Colored Girls had failed, and the remainder of the year was spent trying to figure out the best way to pick up the pieces. It would be many years before the federation and the state could agree on how to (re)address black female juvenile delinquency.

One month after the board meeting, Charlotte Hawkins Brown and Minnie S. Pearson penned “An Open Letter to the People of North Carolina” as a final effort to appeal for funds from the state’s citizenry. Describing the troubling trajectory of Efland Home from its inception until its inevitable end, the clubwomen emphasized the state’s unwillingness to take responsibility for what they considered a public duty. The women wrote: “Members of no race can be hopelessly doomed to delinquency without eventually bringing a large part of the other race down to its level. Disease and delinquency know no color. The races on the lower level find each other.”85 By appealing to the potential moral destruction of all of North Carolinian society, as opposed to just the state’s black community, the clubwomen tried to portray their cause as one which, if left unchecked, threatened the righteousness of everyone. They charged that promiscuity was not a crime bound to black women and reiterated that sexual deviance was a general social concern spurred by Progressive Era reform and rehabilitation rhetoric. Yet despite such appeals, Efland Home would not be saved.

From lofty if complicated ambitions in the early 1920s to a purely punitive model by the end of the following decade, the crusade to combat black female juvenile delinquency in North Carolina was fraught with many challenges. The fall of Efland Home cannot be attributed to a single event, a particular matron, or even a specific funding cycle. Instead, a series of compounded shortcomings progressed for roughly the first decade of the reformatory’s existence, and by the mid- to-late 1930s the school had strayed far from its initial ideals. The dramatic shifts in Efland Home’s purpose reveal larger fissures regarding who, if anyone, had the power to regulate young black girls’ and women’s behaviors. Later functioning as a penal institution, the reformatory became a contested site of policing as matrons, superintendents, and other employees of the school replaced rehabilitative ideologies with violence and (corporeal) punishment. To express their discontent, young women sentenced to Efland Home ran away in increasingly larger numbers and with greater frequency during these years, encountering local authorities in the process. Through their interactions with the police and state representatives, the young women complicated their own commitments, revealing a complex set of negotiations regarding how black clubwomen and the state sought to control adolescents’ actions. Thus, employees, state representatives, and the young women sentenced to the reformatory contested the meaning of delinquency, reform, and survival as the institution struggled with financial difficulties, resulting in its troubling demise by 1939.