A leader of a group of former students that spoke out about the violence at the Dozier School for Boys has died.
Bill Price had been vice president of The White House Boys. The group said that staff at the reform school in the Panhandle town of Marianna violently abused dozens of students for decades before the state closed it down in 2011.
University of South Florida researchers have helped identify a number of bodies buried in a graveyard on school grounds. No one has ever been charged in any of their deaths, many of which were mysterious in nature.
At a 2014 event where some of the identities were announced, Price told WUSF that The White House Boys tried to find answers for their classmates' families.
"These kids, their families don't know anything about them, they've never seen them, don't know what happened to them, so we have continued the fight," said Price.
At that event, Price also showed off a single marble that every group member carried with them -- a way to honor a classmate whose body was exhumed with a single marble in his pocket.
"Every White House boy you see will have this -- the marble in their pocket," he said as he fished a tiny brown and white orb from his pocket and Price called a fellow White House Boy, James "Harley" DeNyke, over. At Price's urging, DeNyke, a rugged motorcycle rider who was at Dozier from 1964 to 1966, pulled his own purple and white marble out of his pocket. "Everybody has their marble," Price said as DeNyke nodded in agreement. "And if you run into a White House boy, he'll have his marble."
Price died May 27 after battling cancer. He was 70 years old.
