Reckoning With the Children Buried in 'Secret Cemeteries' Across the US

Last year, Georgetown University’s Center for Youth Justice, broke the news that 230 or more incarcerated Black children died at the Maryland House of Reformation & Instruction for Colored Children. These children died and were buried between 1877-1939 in nearby unmarked graves. Last month, the Center released research finding that there are 40 similar “secret” burial sites in 29 states where over 1,000 children were buried after they died while under the care of youth institutions. The news went viral when shared in a Washington Post piece.

Georgetown University’s Center for Youth Justice undertook this research as part of the Forgotten Children Initiative launched back in February 2026. Back in 2023, the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services started to document and report how the department has functioned, including reckoning with histories of physical and emotional abuse, exploitative labor practices, and racial discrimination. The House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children, which was open and operational from 1870-1937, is just one example.

Georgetown University’s report indicates that House of Reformation served as the first reform school for delinquent Black children in the American South. The house was originally created by the Maryland General Assembly because Black children were sent to adult jails and state prisons for criminal offenses, some as light as running away from home. Maryland children were sent to the House of Reformation for many reasons—sometimes because they were orphaned or had lost a parent or did not have a parent deemed “fit” to care for them, because they lived in poverty or were unhoused or because they were accused of minor offenses.

This latest report reveals a devastating but not entirely unknown truth—that children continue to be exploited, killed, and buried in secrecy under the “protection” of the state and federal government.

Nineteenth century prison reformers argued that children should be placed in facilities that offered religious, vocational, and personal education, but despite this arguably white saviorist goal that these institutions not be places of punishment, reform schools like Maryland’s House of Reformation became places where children were pushed into overcrowded facilities without proper food and medical care. Many children were then forced to labor without pay (often solely to enrich the institutions rather than to teach them vocational skills), to live and work in isolation, or were subject to corporal punishment.

As Georgetown University’s report indicates, a child’s reform school experience was largely based on their race, class, and age. Black and white children were placed in segregated facilities, often also separated by gender. Young Black girls specifically were especially subject to sexual violence and assault in these facilities. As expected, reform schools—later called training schools, industrial schools, juvenile reformatories, and eventually juvenile detention centers—were radically different based on whether Black or white children were living and working there.

Because of the horrific working conditions; a systemic lack of medical care; and physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, hundreds of children died at these schools. Approximately 230 Black boys died at the Maryland House of Reform & Instruction while it was operational, and when they died, they were buried in hidden or unidentified graves, likely to cover up the rampant child abuse and death that occurred under the state’s watch. In fact, the secret cemetery was only discovered through a former Maryland Department of Juvenile Services staff member, and while the first section of the cemetery dating to the 19th century included headstones with the names of the boys buried at the site, the second section (dated from the early 20th century) only has rows of cinder blocks with no name or other identifiable information.

The Department of Juvenile Services is working to identify living relatives of the boys buried on site, restore and maintain the site to an official cemetery, and erect historical markers that acknowledge how children were exploited at the site. As the Forgotten Children Initiative report reads, “The overall goal was to properly honor the youth who died or were killed at the House of Reformation and are buried at the site, and provide a more holistic and accurate understanding of the racial inequities that we see today and help with efforts to reduce these inequities moving forward.” This is key because the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services runs the Cheltenham Youth Detention Center, a successor to the House of Reformation where almost 250 boys died and were buried in unmarked graves.

But as Georgetown University undertook this study, the researchers realized this was a much more widespread problem. More “secret cemeteries” have come to light, specifically at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Florida and the New York House of Refuge in New York. These are just three of hundreds of reform schools and institutions that received federal funding to effectively abuse children for decades. At its core, these reform schools were racist institutions meant to police, mold, and erase children of color across the country.

These patterns of child death and secretive burial are also deeply connected to Native American boarding schools throughout the United States and Canada. As Georgetown University’s latest report notes, there are more than 1,000 graves of children who died in state custody that are slowly being identified. The Forgotten Children Initiative questions how many more “secret cemeteries” will be discovered and how many will still be hidden to protect the state that literally enabled their deaths.

This research is part of a global reckoning about the outright murder and covert burial of children in state and religious-run youth institutions. This summer, survivors of Ireland’s Mother and Baby Homes and their allies rallied in downtown Cork against the impending development on the lands of the Bessborough Mother and Baby Institute where hundreds of infants and children are believed to be buried. These institutions, strikingly similar to those in the United States in the 1960s during the “Baby Scoop” era, were homes for unwed mothers who would have their babies in these facilities. Their children would then be adopted out to neighboring families or would be put into a religious-run institution where abuse and neglect were rampant.

To be clear, this still exists to this day with the Liberty Godparent Home where young, single, pregnant women are coerced into giving up their children to be adopted by affluent Christian families in exchange for a full tuition scholarship to Liberty University.

This violence is also indicative of a much larger history of the Prison Industrial Complex in the United States, where people whose bodies are not claimed or whose families cannot cover the expenses to prepare and bury their loved one, are buried in prison cemeteries with simple concrete slabs or metal markers with the incarcerated individual’s name rather than traditional headstones, or their bodies might be cremated and stored or scattered according to The Marshall Project. It’s one final denial of an incarcerated person’s humanity and dignity reminiscent of what the young Black boys at the House of Reformation experienced.

The children who died (or more accurately who were killed due to abuse and neglect in state-run institutions) are the direct ancestors of the modern Prison Industrial Complex. The Prison Industrial Complex tethers together histories of slavery and sharecropping with modern prison systems where prisoners are forced or coerced to work for subminimum wages, with no employee protection. Like modern juvenile detention centers and even group homes, the House of Reformation and other reform schools served as pipelines to prisons, keeping people of color incarcerated in systems of exploited labor for their entire lives.

It’s worth noting that the House of Reformation admitted its first occupants in 1873, only six years after Maryland had abolished slavery, so at least some of the first children admitted into the House of Reformation were formerly enslaved. During a time when courts were still segregated and Black Americans were systematically denied due process, any criminal accusation against a Black child (in the time before Emmett Till’s horrific lynching) would be difficult to fight. Even before (and after) Maryland outlawed slavery, free Black individuals could be easily declared unsuitable to raise their children under discriminatory statutes, forcing minors into unpaid indentured servitude under white masters and later these reform institutions.

This latest report reveals a devastating but not entirely unknown truth—that children continue to be exploited, killed, and buried in secrecy under the “protection” of the state and federal government. It will take decades if not centuries to locate or recover the remains of children, especially children of color, whose lives and deaths were erased by the state to cleanse itself of systemic violence, if all of these children can be found at all. But as more information comes to light, this news is indicative of a much longer, and darker American history of exploiting children, especially children of color, and how this violence continues in the modern juvenile detention and prison systems.