Five years in the cave

We go inside, because that is where the harvest is

Maryland Governor Wes Moore, leaders of the faith community, and state officials pray at the gravesite where children of the former House of Reformation for Colored Boys are buried at Cheltenham. — Prayer at the Cheltenham gravesite, May 6, 2026 · Flickr / Maryland GovPics, Office of the Governor

Every week for five years, Wesley Cornelious McClure, II and the McClure Foundation prison ministry have gone “into the cave” — through the doors of the Cheltenham Youth Detention Center in Prince George’s County, Maryland.

Inside, the work is steady and unglamorous: weekly visits, Bible study, and life-skills coaching with young men ages thirteen to eighteen. The ministry serves as an in-house triage of sorts — meeting boys where they are, teaching conflict resolution and responsible decision-making, demonstrating compassion and restorative justice to young people the system too often treats as statistics.

The conviction behind it is theological. In the ministry of Jesus, compassion is not sentiment — it is critique. It refuses to accept the suffering of marginalized children as natural or deserved, and it answers the empire’s numbness — “they made these decisions for themselves” — with presence, grace, and the stubborn belief that order is restored when communities are reconciled, not when children are purged from them.

Weekly visitsBible studyLife-skills coachingAges 13–18Restorative justice

The Cheltenham story · 1870–today

The boys the state forgot — and the field where they lay

A thirteen-year-old boy's tombstone dated 1885 rests atop a shallow grave at the burial ground of the former House of Reformation for Colored Boys at Cheltenham. — A thirteen-year-old’s headstone, 1885, at the Cheltenham burial ground · Flickr / Maryland GovPics, Office of the Governor

The ground our ministry walks each week holds one of Maryland’s darkest histories. In 1870, the House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children opened at Cheltenham — the South’s first juvenile “reformatory” for Black boys, some as young as five years old. Children there endured forced labor under convict leasing, beatings, neglect, and disease. It later became Boys’ Village of Maryland, and today it is the Cheltenham Youth Detention Center.

More than 230 children and youth died in state custody between 1870 and 1961. They were buried in a field behind the grounds — many in unmarked graves, others acknowledged only by a cinder block or a sinking headstone. Recent archival research, drawing on the AFRO’s own newspaper archives, brought the full scope of the mistreatment to light, and Maryland has now committed funding and an archaeological survey, using ground-penetrating radar, to find each child and restore his name.

This is the cave we have been entering for five years. The boys inside its walls today are heirs to that history — and our presence there says what the marker now says in steel: they are not forgotten.

May 6, 2026 · Cheltenham, Maryland

Governor Wes Moore dedicates the marker

On May 6, 2026, Governor Wes Moore came to the Cheltenham Youth Detention Center to unveil a roadside historical marker — at Frank Tippett Road and US 301 — recognizing the House of Reformation for Colored Boys and the children who died there.

Governor Wes Moore and Maryland state and county leaders unveil the new highway marker recognizing the children who suffered at the former House of Reformation for Colored Boys at Cheltenham. — Gov. Wes Moore and state & county leaders unveil the marker, May 6, 2026 · via the AFRO American Newspapers

Before an audience of more than two hundred — including young residents of the facility — the Governor reflected on the institution’s original ledger, which recorded boys’ entries but no exits, and led a prayer at the burial field where the archaeological work will begin.

“Loving our state does not mean lying about its history.”

— Governor Wes Moore, at the Cheltenham dedication

The General Assembly has established a commission to document what happened at Cheltenham, give a public accounting of the children who died, and determine how to preserve the graveyard and honor those buried there. For a ministry that has spent five years inside these gates, the dedication was a holy day: the state, at last, telling the truth about the ground beneath our feet.

The blueprint

Conductors on the railroad home

The five years in the cave produced more than testimony — they produced a plan, written in the tradition of the railroad men: the Pullman porters, A. Philip Randolph, and Wesley’s own great-grandfather, who worked the trains of Jackson, Tennessee.

The Paper

Reforming Justice-Involved Youth: A Mentorship Program in Our Church for Youth in the Washington Metropolitan Area

Wesley Cornelious McClure, II
A McClure Foundation Publication
Washington, DC

The paper lays out a church-anchored mentorship model for justice-involved youth leaving detention: one-on-one mentoring grounded in trust, tutoring and vocational pathways, mental-health support, family engagement, and arts-based innovation — all measured, evaluated, and shared.

Its central image is the railroad. Like the Pullman porters — whom A. Philip Randolph organized into the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first Black-led union chartered by the AFL — and like the author’s great-grandfather on the trains of Jackson, Tennessee, the church serves as conductor and porter on the journey home: tending every young traveler, “sharing semaphores” — best practices and data — between congregations, so that no young person rides alone.

Read the paper (PDF)

McClure Now · Washington, DC

From Cheltenham’s gates to the nation’s capital

Headquartered at 1717 N Street NW, the McClure Foundation is bringing the lessons of the cave to Washington — building a city where healing is organized as carefully as harm has been.

The Magnificat Center of Healing and Hope

Our family healing work — trauma-informed counseling, marriage and family enrichment, and pastoral care that blend clinical practice with the compassion of faith.

Men of Legacy & Youth Labs

Fatherhood and mentoring circles with My Brother’s Keeper, and resilience and tech labs that equip young people — especially those touched by incarceration — for purpose.

Reentry & Restorative Justice

Railroad-home mentoring and Healing Communities partnerships that walk with returning citizens and justice-involved youth, in Maryland and the District, all the way home.

Explore our DC work →