‘White House Boys’ look ahead after lawmakers apologize for school brutality
John Bell of Leesburg stood in the Florida Senate’s public gallery in April as lawmakers apologized to him and other former students of the now-shuttered Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys.
It had taken Bell, 74, and others years of lobbying before legislators formally recognized the brutality they once endured.
Bell politely accepted their apology. But “what I felt [was that] they just got photo ops for what they were doing,” he said in an interview.
Hundreds of former students have come forward in recent years with horror stories about the state-run reform school in Marianna about 60 miles west of Tallahassee. The facility closed in 2011 after a century of operation.
They described such ordeals as beatings from staff and interrogations from a perverted psychiatrist.
But only about 18 White House Boys, dubbed with that name because of the small building where they were overpowered, showed up to the apology. Many were unable to make it.
“Probably 85 percent of White House Boys are felons,” said White House Boys Organi-
On John Bell’s second day, a man came to watch the boys shower. He stared and snickered “It was him,” Bell said. “The psychiatrist.”
zation President Jerry Cooper, 72. “[They] couldn’t get it together.”
Today, Bell is thrice-divorced and not on speaking terms with his children. He lives in a small home he had built in 1996 beside a lake near downtown Leesburg.
For the retired plumber, the apology and Gov. Rick Scott’s approval of $1.2 million for memorials and reburial of unidentified remains found on the property brings an end to Bell’s fight for justice. But public recognition has also meant private reckoning.
“For years, I didn’t think about it,” said Bell, who was released from the school hundreds of miles from his home in Fruitland Park in Lake County in 1960 at age 16.
Fighting for the cause has meant baring naked the cruelties he suffered.
Sent to the sprawling 1,400-acre reformatory for trespassing in an abandoned home, Bell said his eight months there were punctuated with regular inquiries from his therapist about whether he had incestuous feelings amid an atmosphere where boys disappeared and beatings were normal.
Bell said he was thrown into solitary confinement rooms, held under scalding hot showers that left him bedridden for weeks and had all of his teeth, which were rotted, pulled without numbing medication.
On his second day, a man came to watch the boys where they showered. He stared and snickered, Bell said.
“It was him,” Bell said. “The psychiatrist.”
Meant to keep tabs on his mental progress, the psychiatrist would ask Bell and other boys sexual questions about their mothers. At 15, Bell said it was the first real discussion about sex he had had with anyone.
He said that helped to warp his views and is something he holds partly responsible for his lifelong trouble with relationships.
“I just broke it off with a woman three weeks ago,” he said. “She kept wanting to know what I was doing all the time.”
When Bell first returned home, he had difficulty telling others what happened.
His parents didn’t receive any of his bi-weekly letters, and he received none of theirs. He told them what happened, he said, but “they couldn’t believe it.”
Cooper, the White House Boys Organization president, whose foot was stomped on and shattered at the reform school, said with the lawmakers’ formal recognition, he’s done all he can for the group.
“Look how far we’ve come,” he said. “It took … years to get this apology, but at least we got it.”
But Bell isn’t done. He spends much of his time amassing his stamp collection, fascinated by the scope and history embodied in the tiny slips of paper.
”There’s a postage stamp on every subject imaginable,” he said.
He doesn’t see why that shouldn’t include the White House Boys.
He hopes his case will be buoyed by the formal recognition of Florida officials and plans to write the U.S. Postal Service about creating such a stamp.