Commemorate Black History Month and Join Us for the Forgotten Children Initiative Virtual Launch on February 25th!

Title Text over dark background, with yellow paint splashed in vertical line, within is a silhouette bust of a black boy over a cinder block

Honor the Lives of Forgotten Black Children

In 2024, Maryland officials helped rediscover long-lost burial grounds at the House of Reformation & Instruction for Colored Children (1870–1939), a Blacks-only reform school where as many as 230 children, and possibly more, died while in state custody and were buried, often only with a cinder block to mark the site. At the House of Reformation, boys as young as five were subjected to forced labor, abuse, neglect, and inadequate medical care.

In 2025, media attention brought national awareness—yet meaningful public action has lagged. Now, as evidence of similar sites emerges nationwide, the Center for Youth Justice at Georgetown University is launching the Forgotten Children Initiative: a coordinated national response that connects historical truth to urgent reforms in youth justice today.

Join us on February 25th at 2 pm ET for the virtual launch of the Initiative. We’ll dive into the origins of the Initiative, engage with the lived experience of those who were once incarcerated at the Maryland site, and begin to reckon with how the injustice of the past can help inform our striving for justice in the present. Finally, we’ll take a look at where the Initiative goes from here as we seek to restore dignity not only to the children whose deaths were concealed or ignored, but also the children who too often sit forgotten today in the youth legal system.

Registration is free; head over to the Eventbrite registration site to sign-up.