The horror inflicted on hundreds of boys at a notorious reform school in Florida’s Panhandle remains harrowing for survivors to recount, all these years later. Forced labor. Brutal whippings. Sexual abuse.
For more than 15 years, survivors of Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, now elderly, have traveled to the state Capitol in Tallahassee to share their deeply painful memories and plead with politicians for justice — for them and for the dozens of boys who died at school.
In 2017, the survivors, many of them black, received an official apology. On Friday, Florida went one step further: Gov. Ron DeSandis signed legislation creating a $20 million program to provide financial restitution to victims of abuse and neglect at the hands of the state. Mr. DeSantis signed the bill in person, his office announced late Friday.
The compensation program will allow claims from survivors who were “confined” at the Dozier school between 1940 and 1975 and who suffered “mental, physical or sexual abuse committed by school personnel.” Survivors can also apply if they were sent to the Florida School for Boys in Okeechobee, known as the Okeechobee School, which opened in 1955 to address overcrowding at Dozier.
Applications will be submitted by December 31. Each successful applicant will receive an equal share of the funds and waive the right to seek any further government reimbursement related to their time at the schools.
Florida lawmakers approved the program unanimously this year. Several survivors testified at an emotional State Senate committee hearing in February that appeared to leave some lawmakers at a standstill.
“Every day, that pain is still with me,” said Richard Huntly, who leads the Black Boys at Dozier Reform School, a group of survivors, after he described being beaten so badly at age 11 that he felt as if he had left from his mind. body. “I am 77 years old now. Who lives with me everyday. I can’t help it.”
The Dozier School opened in rural Marianna in 1900 as the Florida Political Reform School. It housed children as young as 5 who were committed for criminal and other offences, including truancy and ‘incorrigibility’. Although it originally housed girls as well, they were sent to a separate reform school for girls beginning in 1913. In Jim Crow Florida, Dozier was split into two campuses, one for white boys and one for black boys, until 1968.
Reports of abuse began soon after Dozier opened and, over the decades, have been investigated by the state and subject to congressional hearings. However, the abuse continued.
The state closed Dozier by 2011. By then, former students had begun to speak publicly about being forced to work in fields and suffering from brutal and repeated beatings.
Beginning in 2012, a team of forensic anthropologists from the University of South Florida excavated a portion of Dozier’s 1,400-acre campus, searching for the remains of boys whose deaths were often listed as “unknown” or “accident.” (A fire in 1914 is believed to have killed eight boys locked in a room; others died in flu epidemics, and some runaways were shot.) Excavations focused on Boot Hill, which during segregation was a documented cemetery in the black side of campus.
The team found 55 unmarked graves, although more than 100 people are believed to have died there.
The gruesome revelations of how children were tortured at Dozier formed the basis of author Colson Whitehead’s novel “The Nickel Boys,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019. In 2022, Erin Kimmerle, the anthropologist who led the Dozier excavations, published an account of the grim work titled “We Carry Their Bones;” last year author Tananarive Due dedicated her novel “The Reformatory” to an uncle who died at Dozier in 1937 when he was 15.
