On May 12, I traveled with attorneys Mike Papantonio and Troy Rafferty to Marianna, Fla, to walk the site of the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys (formerly known as the Florida School for Boys) where from 1900 to 2011 children were beaten, sexually abused, tortured and sometimes murdered.
The town knew. The courts knew. Police, legislators, and regulators knew. Nobody did a thing to stop it.
Pap, Troy and I toured the abandoned buildings with survivors of the “reform” school. The men are part of a group that calls themselves “The White House Boys.”
The term refers to a small white building, next to the school’s cafeteria, where boys were beaten, tortured and abused.
One survivor shared, “I worked in the kitchen and what they would do is they’d come over to the kitchen, tell Mr. Edinfield to get three of us to go over and hold the child down.”
He continued, “So we’d hold five and six- and seven-year-old children down…And when the beating was over, we went back to the kitchen and went back to work.”
The boys feared the night. I was told, “At night, because of the gravel on the road, you could hear the tires coming, and the children in the dormitories would start crying because it was going to be one of two things. They were coming to take you to the White House, or they were coming to take you into the woods to do whatever it was that they wanted to do with you.”
Another survivor shared as he stood in front of the White House, “I was brought to this building behind us three times. Beaten with a leather strap, about eight inches long, four inches wide with a wooden handle on it, with metal at the tip end of it. Not only that I was raped, and sexually assaulted in this building.”
He continued, “When they beat me, blood streamed down the back of my leg to where my pants legs stuck to my thighs. And I was told if I ever mentioned it to anyone that I would never see my family again. That’s hard.”
Check out this news clip produced by the Levin Papantonio Rafferty law firm:
