The Dozier School for Boys dates back to the turn of the century in Florida and its history is a dark one.
The reformatory school taught thousands of young boys in the small city of Mariana in the Panhandle for over 100 years. During that time, there were hundreds of documented cases of physical assault, torture and even death. But the school remained open.
Beginning in 2008, a group of five former students began sharing stories of wrongdoing online. Some of them were known as the "White House Boys," because they suffered violent beatings in a small white building on campus, many in the 60s. The school was shut down in 2011 due to budgetary issues. In 2012, an anthropological team from the University of South Florida surveyed the site and found dozens of unmarked graves.
The USF team, led by Erin Kimmerlee, returned last week to examine whether there may be an additional 27 unmarked graves. No bodily remains were found but their investigation continues. Former Tampa Bay Times investigative journalist Ben Montgomery has interviewed many of the survivors from the school over the last decade. He's the author of three books and now a visiting professor of journalism at USF. Montgomery spoke with Luis Hernandez about the stories he’s heard from survivors and how they're coping.
WLRN: You have a story like this that covers over a century and you have all these victims and many seemingly unbelievable stories. What was your approach in trying to unravel all of this and to make sense of it from the beginning? Montgomery: The question was: Is this true? Are the stories, that these men these grown men are telling right now, are they true? And it took a handful of interviews for me to understand that this is the absolute truth. This trauma had so affected these men. There was no way they could have triggered the waterworks, the crying as they told me about it -- often for the first time -- while I was doing my interviews.
So my approach was that I'm going to talk to as many people as I possibly can. And it turns out that was very easy from the beginning. I called one of the original five known as the White House Boys. Robert Straley lived in Clearwater. Robert died about six months ago. I called him up and I said ... 'anybody who contacts you, please just pass along my phone number because I'd like to talk to everybody I possibly can.' And men started coming out of the woodwork. What started as five men who had found each other online very quickly in a matter of about a year had grown to more than 400 men. And so we're in hot pursuit of the truth. And once we started looking at the historical record and realized that people had been reporting on this place and blowing the whistle on this place for 100 years, it became very clear to us that this was in fact true. And we wondered what the institution was like in modern times. This place had been given so many chances to change its ways and reform itself and yet boys were still being treated poorly in 2009 and 2010. You spoke with a number of these men who attended the school in the 1960s, one of them was Jerry Cooper. Tell us a little bit about him.
Jerry was miffed that there were people who were calling him a liar. And Jerry is a kind of guy who can get things done. He has a temper and he'll tell you that. It made him angry to no end that there were certain people, Jackson County locals and otherwise, who said that he and his his brothers in the White House Boys were making all of this up. And so Jerry submitted himself and paid for it himself to a lie detector test to try to prove that he had in fact been beaten in the White House. He says that he took 135 lashes when he was taken to the White House, which is the only person I know of who says he received that many licks.
NPR reporter Greg Allen talked with Cooper back in 2012. Cooper told Allen, 'You didn't know when they were coming. These were not spankings. These were beatings, brutal beatings.' Did you get the impression in talking with these men that they may be suffering right now from some form of PTSD?
Oh absolutely. From the very first day I started doing interviews it became clear to me that this trauma that they experienced as children had manifested itself in a variety of ways and now some of them have physical scars on their backsides. Others have had problems with their lower backs and their hips. So that physical trauma you can see. The emotional trauma manifested itself in a number of different ways. I've talked to guys who can't sleep with the lights off. These are men in their 70s and their entire lives they've slept with the lights on because they're still scared of the dark.
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