More graves may be unearthed at Dozier School
Workers who were preparing for a massive cleanup of a fuel storage site near one of the nation’s most notorious reform schools have discovered something far worse than ground pollution: evidence of 27 possible “clandestine” graves.
A company hired to evaluate underground storage tanks adjacent to the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna performed a series of ground-penetrating radar tests on a parcel a little less than 500 feet from what is called the Boot Hill Cemetery at Dozier, an infamous youth prison west of Tallahassee linked to more than a century of chilling abuse.
A report on the study said there are 27 “anomalies” on the parcel consistent with human burials. If the 27 anomalies are, in fact, human remains, the total number of known burials on the campus would rise to at least 82 — though University of South Florida researchers who have studied the campus extensively believe there may have been 100 or more deaths at Dozier since its opening in 1900.
“Unmarked graves, by conscious design, are made to be hiding places,” said Jack Levine, a Florida children’s advocate who had raised concerns about Dozier when he was a young social worker for the state. “What stays hidden almost forgives the crime.”
Originally called the Florida State Reform School, Dozier was established in 1897 as a progressive alternative to the more brutal methods of confining delinquent, incorrigible and orphaned youths. Children would “receive careful, physical, intellectual and moral training” on a bucolic campus ringed with pines and oak. It fell far short of that ideal almost from the beginning, as visitors encountered children chained in irons.
Dozier cycled through periods of short-lived reform followed by spasms of sometimes hellish abuse. In 2008, a group of mostly 60and 70-year-old men formed what they called the White House Boys, named after a squat, nowdecrepit cinder-block building on campus called the White House.
That’s where officers took them, they said, to be beaten — sometimes scores of times — with a leather strap inlaid with metal. The boys would be forced to lay prone on a filthy cot in a cell that became speckled with blood and slivers of human flesh. Some of the men also said they had been taken to a “rape room” where officers sexually assaulted them. Others say were aware of children who were killed there.
The youth camp was shuttered in 2011, around the time the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division reported “systemic, egregious and dangerous practices exacerbated by a lack of accountability and controls.” The practices included excessive force, punishment for “minor infractions,” lack of staff training and little treatment for youths with addictions or mental illness.
In December 2018, Florida deeded the Dozier campus over to Jackson County, a move to which many of the White House Boys strongly objected. Many of the now-elderly detainees favored turning the site into a memorial or museum.
In a letter to a Jackson County commissioner, Gov. Ron DeSantis said he had asked the state Department of Environmental Regulation and other agencies “to develop a path forward” from the discovery.
“Representatives of these agencies will be reaching out to meet with county officials as the first step to understanding and addressing these preliminary findings,” he added.
Dozier was segregated prior to 1968, as was much of the South, including rural Jackson County in the Panhandle. The reformatory was really two campuses bisected by Penn Avenue, one for white children to the south, and another — decidedly inferior — campus to the north.
The 27 soil disturbances that are believed to be graves were found within the African American sector of the reform school.
Fifty-five sets of remains already were found buried in what is commonly called Boot Hill Cemetery, which held 31 white PVC pipe crosses in neat rows that bore no relation to the bodies interred below. Some of the boys perished during a fire in 1914. They had been confined in “dark cells” in the basement of a dormitory when a fire erupted.
But they are only a part of Dozier’s deadly drama: The USF researchers, given permission by the state to document the school’s history, estimates that nearly 100 boys died at the youth prison during more than a century of its operation.