On this episode of the Sofa King Podcast, we look into the horrible history of Florida’s school for juveniles called the Arthur Dozier School. It opened in 1900 and ran until 2011. It was the subject of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winning book The Nickel Boys. The Dozier school was (in)famous for housing children who often did nothing worse than smoke a cigarette at school, be truant, or run away from home. But as punishment, they endured life in leg irons, torture, illegal restraints, beatings till they bled, rape, and even murder. Estimates are that there are a total of 98 bodies buried on the site, and one group alleges there is a cover up by the local and Florida investigation teams.

So, based on a law in the late 1800s, this school found funding and opened a couple years later. It was a large 159 acre campus with several buildings. It was segregated, so half the facilities were for black inmates and half for white. It was renamed a few times, and it switched hands as far as what governmental agency ran it. It was built to house 104 boys, aged 13 to 21. But that expanded to as young as 9, and at the height of its population, there were over 500 crammed into this space.

It as a place of tragedy and dark history. A fire killed several boys and staff. Almost a dozen died to the Spanish Flu. And in its first remodel, they built a structure that the boys called the White House. It was where they took you if you were going to be beaten. Or tortured. Or raped. Because apparently in the 1950s and 60s, the people who ran the place were sadistic. Hundreds of boys who call themselves the White House Boys came forward in the 2000s to report their bloody beatings (lashed hundreds of times till their underwear was interwoven in their flesh, and they passed out—at the hands of an ominous one armed man), their rape, and even dead boys they saw from time to time.

The White House Boys tried to get restitution or legal justice, but the statute of limitation had run out on any abuse they suffered, so it was shot down. But there were hundreds of them, so word must have gotten out, right? It did. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement ran an investigation which said they could find no forensic proof of abuse and no witnesses who  would talk.

The White House Boys think this might have been a cover up. And an article called “For Their Own Good” that came out of St. Petersburg kept it in the nation’s attention. Eventually, the Department of Justice and the and the University of South Florida each did their own investigations with rather different results. So, how many bodies did they find? What did the surviving boys recall of their tortures here? Why did nobody ever get in legal trouble? What finally got the victims a chance to legally exhume bodies of their relatives? Listen, laugh, learn.

 

 

Visit Our Sources:

https://www.npr.org/2012/10/15/162941770/floridas-dozier-school-for-boys-a-true-horror-story

https://www.tampabay.com/investigations/2019/08/18/they-went-to-the-dozier-school-for-boys-damaged-they-came-out-destroyed/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_School_for_Boys

https://www.abandonedfl.com/arthur-g-dozier-school-for-boys/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/08/16/boys-were-beaten-abused-florida-reform-school-now-colson-whitehead-fictionalizes-that-history/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/22/a-type-of-justice-florida-reform-school-yields-evidence-of-more-graves

https://dartcenter.org/content/for-their-own-good-0