Changing the name of this NC prison isn’t enough to remove the stench

Back in my juvenile delinquency days, when some of Rockingham’s more compassionate citizens weren’t telling me I was going to end up dead or in prison before I reached 16, they were telling me I was going to end up in a place that in my mind was worse than either: Cameron Morrison Training School.

At that time, I didn’t know anyone who’d been to prison, but I had several friends who’d been sent to Morrison for being “bad.” Without exception, they returned to our community broken, crushed, the light extinguished from their eyes and souls. It remained extinguished throughout their lives.

This hell-on-earth opened in 1923 as the State Training School for Negro Boys in Hoffman before being renamed for former N.C. Gov. Cameron Morrison in 1939.

The name was recently changed again to Richmond Correctional Institution. Morrison was a member of the “Red Shirts,” a post-Civil War group of Confederates that violently overthrew the government in Wilmington and led the massacre there in 1898.

Removing his vile name is justified, but it is woefully insufficient to remove the stench of what his namesake institution did to my friends and to thousands of other boys.

I have friends who’ve spent time in maximum security prisons, friends with whom I would — and have — entrusted my life. Many of them admit to coming out of prison as better people than they went in as.

I also have a dozen or so friends who were sent to Morrison when we were kids. I asked friends from the area if they knew anyone who’d benefited from being sent there. Most laughed at the mere suggestion that someone could’ve emerged from that hellhole a better person.

Once I feared that I was about to be one of those unfortunate someones.

On March 5, 1971, a Friday, I asked my teacher at Rockingham Junior High, only half in jest, if school was going to be canceled on Monday because that was the day my hero, Muhammad Ali, and Joe Frazier were going to box in the Fight of the Century. “No,” she said, “because everyone is not a fanatic like you.”

Fair enough. I nonetheless spent much of the day writing an epic poem about how the fight would turn out. The teacher suddenly appeared at my elbow, snatched up the poem and took it to the principal.

Did he laugh it off or admonish me to pay attention in class? Nope. He called me to his office and threatened to call and have someone from Morrison Training School come and haul me away.

Later that year, in the same class, my buddy John handed me a folded piece of paper and said “Hey Saunders, pass this to Nancy.” My pass was intercepted by the teacher and got us both sent to the principal’s office.

The principal was irate to see me in his office again. He said he was going to send me to Morrison Training School immediately. He snatched up the telephone and began dialing.

Me, being unfamiliar with legal jurisprudence, didn’t know he couldn’t just do that. So I did what any terrified 13-year-old kid would do in such a situation: I cried and cried, pleaded for mercy and vowed not to do it again.

So, changing the name of Morrison Correctional Institution to Richmond Correctional Institution isn’t nearly enough. My solution: Burn it down. I’d pay for the privilege of striking the first match.