The drive up to the infamous white building is long, and winding. Several decades old building along the way are falling into decay. The crunch of gravel on tires on the way there punctuate the silence on the half vacant grounds of the former Dozier School for Boys in the Florida panhandle town of Marianna, where horrific child abuse occurred for decades.
“All I heard was get up, stand in that corner. When I got up off the bed, I seemed like I was so heavy behind but I was afraid to reach behind me, for fear that all I would bring out from behind me was flesh and blood.”
“I got over 100 lashes with a strap from the small of my back to the breaks in my knees. I passed out. What woke me up is I started choking on my blood because my mouth was torn to pieces.”
“The evil that is still in those walls is palpable. You can feel it. You can hear it. You can sense it.”
This is the real story behind the Oscar-nominated film Nickel Boys, a film inspired by a novel rooted in pain, horror and trauma that survivors still experience today.
Director RaMell Ross’ film received two Oscar nominations this year. The movie is an adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Colson Whitehead’s book, the Nickel Boys, and follows the experiences of two African American boys at the fictitious Nickel Academy in Marianna, Fl. The boys experience horrific physical and sexual abuse at the school.
Today, the square, unassuming white building is surrounded by a wrought-iron gate, carefully and meticulously preserved. It stands in stark contrast to much of the dilapidation and overgrowth around it. This building, called the White House by survivors, was the main place kids at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys where children as young as five were beaten, abused, and killed.
A reform school turned nightmare
The Dozier school has gone by several different names in its history. It was the Florida State Reform School when it first opened in 1900. A second campus opened five decades later. By then, it was the Florida School for Boys. Children were originally sent there for criminal offenses, like theft and murder under the guise of receiving training and education that could help rehabilitate them.
Later, kids were sent for things like disobeying their parents, skipping school. Even being an orphan or ward of the state could land a child at Dozier. The facility soon became the largest reform school in the country.
“When we got there, I, I felt we were in a place that was like heaven,” Charles Fudge told WFSU in an interview for this story. Fudge was 10 years old when he and his brother were sent to what was then The Florida Schools for Boys for smoking and skipping school. The year was 1960.
“We ended up there, and I felt, wow, this is going to be great to have a place to be to where we would be safe and not be in any trouble.”
He says that feeling lasted three days, until “I was taken down to what was called the White House and was given 31 licks with a leather strap that was just so horrifying to have been beaten like that.”
Fudge was one of hundreds of boys who were taken to the White House building and administered extreme forms of corporal punishment. He was one of many who say they were hit with a 20-inch paddle with metal rivets. When the paddle made contact with the children, it would rip flesh.
“When we took our showers, the other boys could see what your bottom looked like in your back from the length of the leather strap, and that put fear in all of the boys that was in my cottage,” Fudge said.
Many boys were sexually abused in the White House. In 2024, Bryant Middleton shared his story before a chamber Judiciary Committee.
“Yes, look at me. I was sexually molested by state employees,” he said, looking lawmakers in the eye. “That’s hard to say for a man my age. I’m almost 80. Four children, 15 grandchildren, two great-grandchildren. Yes, it’s difficult to talk about, but if I don’t talk about it, who will?”
Segregation aided in reinforcing the abuse.
The campus, like most public places in the south at the time, was segregated by race. A road ran through the middle marking the boundary. Both sides had their own church, dormitories and dining halls and guards enforced That separation of races with violence.
“If a white boy spoke to a black boy, that was an automatic go down to the White House for a beating. And that was vice versa. If the black boys attempted to talk to us, they would get the same beating as we did so we were not allowed to communicate with each other,” said Fudge, the president of the Official White House Boys advocacy group.
The children were forced to work without pay. This included harvesting crops, manufacturing bricks and other dangerous jobs for pre-teens.
When he was 11-years-old, Richard Huntly cut sugar cane at Dozier, and “In doing so, I accidentally struck my right foot and cut off the top of my toe,” he said in testimony before a Florida legislative committee.
“The state of Florida held us life slaves,” White House Survivor Ralph Freeman told state lawmakers. “I went to a field. I worked every day, and I never got paid for it, but I see my country talking to other countries about making their children work for nothing. This happened on American soil, people. This happened in Florida.”
Unearthing the horrors
For years, there were the rumors. Kids, disappeared in the night. Families informed that their children passed away without explanation. Even less communication. And few bodies ever returned home.
At the edge of the campus is an area called Boot Hill. White and black boys were buried there starting in 1950’s. No markers were placed until the 80’s. For decades it was unclear how many boys died at Dozier until the survivors and families of the dead began speaking up.
In 2009, the then still-active youth correctional institution on the former Dozier campus failed a state inspection. Investigative reporting from the then-St. Petersburg Times also shared the stories of survivors and families of those who died at Dozier. Those factors prompted investigations from the state and federal government, which confirmed the historic and recent allegations of abuse and violence at Dozier.
That was the start of the process to fully uncover the horrors of the reform school.
In 2012, the state of Florida granted permission for a forensic anthropology survey led by University of South Florida Associate Professor Erin Kimmerle. Her mission: determine how many bodies were buried at Dozier and return those remains to their families.
“This is a story about children who went into state custody, died and were never given back. Their families weren't given an answer. Their remains weren't given back. And that's you know, why this is so important,” Kimmerle said during an interview with WFSU for this story.
“We knew that there were crosses there that were put there in the 80s, so they didn't necessarily correspond to graves, but that was kind of a starting point. So the question was, well, can we figure out how many burials are actually here?”
Records were messy and incomplete. Initial state estimates predicted about 30 unmarked graves on the campus.
“Even at that time, it was highly contested and debated, because the black children had been abandoned and found days later, and the state physician said the bodies were piling up,” said Kimmerle.
When her team started excavations, they recovered 55 bodies, 24 more than the state estimated in its report. Kimmerle ran DNA tests to match the children to their living relatives. The results were mixed.
“It's a challenge, because they were children, right? So they don't have direct descendants. They themselves never had children, so you're looking for aunts, uncles, cousins, second cousins kind of working out laterally. And the reason we want maternal relatives is because when you have remains that are old or have been degraded, what's called degraded DNA, then the type of DNA that we typically get is called mitochondrial DNA, and that's passed on through the maternal side of the family.”
There was a disproportionate number of black boys who died, who were buried at the school, who didn't have death investigations or death certificates issued. And of the bodies recovered, only eight were positively identified and returned to their relatives. The rest were reburied in either Tallahassee or Marianna.
A long road to justice
In 2017, Survivors of Dozier received a formal apology from the Florida House and Senate.
From there, they kept going to the legislature for the next several years seeking damages. Each time, they spoke with lawmakers and went to committee meetings to tell their stories.
“A man stabbed me in my legs with a railroad spike attached to a pole. Weeks later, they took their kids to Atlanta to a basketball game, and everybody was planning to run, and I couldn't run because my leg was busted open,” said Freeman.
During his testimony, survivor Bryant Middleton made more emotional appeals to lawmakers.
“Can you imagine the screams from a five-year-old being restrained while getting a monstrous beating from a six foot five 260-pound man that were your child? I've been doing this for 16 years. Let me put that in perspective for you. If your child had started the first grade the first day, the amount of time that I've spent coming to Tallahassee, speaking with the governor, working on two committees with the Secretary of State, your child would be starting grad school,” he said.
“We are asked to talk about this over and over and over. It don't stop. I'm 77 years old now. That lives with me daily. I can't help it,” said Huntley.
Finally, in 2024, the Florida Legislature unanimously passed a $20 million program for survivors to get damages. Sen. Darryl Rouson, D-St. Petersburg, was one of the lawmakers who sponsored the legislation.
“No amount of money,” said Rouson, “is adequate, but at least the voices that we heard today were not just the voices of those who came here, but they're speaking for the missing. They're speaking for those that we can't talk to, but we can pray for.”
The application process for the money is still ongoing. The state expected about 500 survivors to take part in the program. So far, more than 1,000 have applied.
Today, The White House still stands on the former Dozier School for Boys campus. Next to it are several statues depicting what the boys experienced. A bed and paddle like the one that beat them, and a fan that was turned on to help drown out their screams. Several statues of young boys, black and white, standing lined up.
People have left toys, flowers, and pretty rocks at the memorial.
Several of the buildings, like the dormitories and churches, are crumbling. On other parts of the campus buildings are renovated for government purposes. Several schools are located just yards away from the White House.
“Most of us guys had decided that if we never got a penny, but people found out the abuse that had taken place that they may never, ever hear of another child being beaten and abused, some of them raped, if, if that never happens again in the state of Florida, in the whole United States, then we did something good for little children,” said Fudge.
The money is as close to justice as any survivor will get. Due to the passage of time erasing evidence and the deaths of several potential witnesses, none of the direct perpetrators of the abuse the White House Boys experienced were ever charged with a crime.
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