The White House Boys: An American Tragedy (16 page)

Colon, who said he was only 14 and weighed less than 100 pounds, still can feel the fury. “I can tell you that at that moment, there’s absolutely no doubt in my mind, I could have stuck my hand through his heart and his chest cavity and ripped his heart out with my hand and bit it in his face,’’ he said.

Some of the boys had to be taken to an infirmary to have small pieces of cotton underwear extracted from their buttocks with tweezers and surgical tools, they said.

“Your hind end would be black as a crow,’’ said Haynes. “It had a crust over it. Your shorts will be embedded into your skin and would have to be pulled out. And when they pulled them out, it hurts even worse.’’

Though such beatings and abuse often were justified under a “patina of social beliefs’’ that physical discipline could rehabilitate troubled children, Davidson said, decades of academic research has made clear that such punishment serves no real purpose.

“Everything we know about psychological trauma in abused and neglected children tells us that this will create a lifelong emotional scar which will color every aspect of childhood and adult development,’’ Davidson said.

In recent months, some of the White House alumni discovered one another through the gripping narratives they had posted on Internet blogs. A handful will deliver brief statements in front of The White House on Tuesday, before DJJ administrators dedicate a commemorative plaque and plant a symbolic tree.

After the ceremony, the men plan to visit a small clearing apart from the new Dozier, in a remote corner of what used to be the black children’s campus, where a cemetery with the graves of 32 who died there sits—including the victims of the 1914 fire. The graves are marked by unadorned metal pipe crosses—but bear no names.

The men say they pushed memories of the White House as far back as their minds would let them. Some of the men say they fought episodes of anger and rage, but mostly went about living their lives. Some of the men have sought counseling, they say.

‘THERE FOREVER’

Roger Kiser, a Georgia man who was taken to the reformatory on June 3, 1959, has been married six times, divorced five times. He said he had trouble expressing love, though he finally got the hang of it when he became a grandfather.

Straley, the Clearwater man, said he has rationed the time he spends out of his house since he began trembling one day at a Wal-Mart, prompting another shopper to ask him what was wrong.

It took the videotaped death of a 14-year-old Panama City boy, Martin Anderson, at a state juvenile boot camp in 2006 to bring the memories flooding back. Though the two would have had nothing in common, Straley said he felt a sudden surge of anger, clenched his fists and cussed—much as Martin might have done.

“The thing is in your head fresh as a daisy,’’ Straley said. “That feeling is there forever.’’

Said Colon, the Hialeah boy who returns to Dozier yearly to hand out scholarships to current detainees: “You don’t get over it. You learn how to bear pain.’’

Carol Marbin Miller, “Reform school alumni recount beatings, rapes” from
The Miami Herald
(October 19, 2008). Copyright © 2008 by McClatchy Company. Reproduced with permission of McClatchy Company via Copyright Clearance Center.

Appendix V. News Article on
Unmarked Graves

Unknown graves at Fla. reform school
investigated

By BRENDAN FARRINGTON
Associated Press Writer

T
ALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP)—A former inmate at a Florida reform school known for severe beatings decades ago says he remembers walking into a laundry room, peering through a foggy dryer window and seeing a boy tumbling inside. Afraid of retribution, Dick Colon walked away.

But Colon now wonders whether the boy he saw could be buried near the school. Florida law enforcement said Tuesday they have started an investigation into the enduring mystery: Who lies beneath the more than 30 white metal crosses—bearing no names or dates or other details—at a makeshift cemetery near the grounds of the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, where youngsters were routinely beaten and abused in the 1950s and ’60s.

“I think about it very often because I feel guilty. I felt as though I could have walked over there and opened the door and tried to give him some help, but then what the hell was going to happen to me if I did?” said Colon, now 65 and living in Baltimore. “That particular kid was never seen again.”

Gov. Charlie Crist ordered the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate at the urging of Colon and other men who committed crimes as boys and were sent to the school. The agency was tapped to find out what was in the graves, identify any remains and determine whether any crimes occurred.

“Justice always cries out for a conclusion and this is no different,” Crist told reporters. “If there’s an opportunity to find out exactly what happened there, to be able to verify if there were these kinds of horrible atrocities ... we have a duty to do so.”

The Department of Juvenile Justice has no records that explain what’s in the cemetery near the 108-year-old reform school.

One theory is the graves contain the bodies of six boys who died in a 1914 school fire. But that would only explain a fraction of the markers.

Current school superintendent Mary Zahasky hopes the graves do not contain children.

“When I first saw it—those kinds of things tug at your heart. I’m a mother myself,” she said. “I just can’t imagine having my child buried out there like that.”

Colon is part of a group of men who call themselves “The White House Boys Survivors” because they suffered abuse in a small, white building known as the White House. It contained two rooms where guards would beat children, one for black inmates; one for whites.

The boys were forced to lie on a bed, face down in a pillow covered with blood, spit and mucous, and were repeatedly struck with a long leather-and-metal strap for offenses as slight as singing, or talking to a black inmate. They described beatings so severe that underwear became imbedded in skin.

The Department of Juvenile Justice acknowledged the abuse in October, placing a plaque on the now-closed white building.

“The staff was so brutal that just even the slightest frown on your face or even the slightest word out of context could cause you to be sent down to the White House and be viciously beaten to the point that you would become unconscious and bleed profusely down your legs and your back,” Bryant Middleton, 63, of Fort Walton Beach, said Monday.

After the October ceremony, Department of Juvenile Justice staff took five of the former inmates to the cemetery, which is located near the facility that used to house black inmates. An adult prison now stands on the property.

“This is a big occasion for the state of Florida,” Michael O’McCarthy, 66, who was sent to the detention center when he was 15 for stealing auto parts, said of the investigation. “Rarely do state or federal governments like to admit that they have committed this type of egregious, destructive kinds of crimes, especially to children.”

At least one former reform school student said the men’s stories may be exaggerated.

“They were justified in giving me these paddlings because, hey, I was wrong,” said Phil Hail of Anniston, Ala., who remembered going to the white building once for getting low grades in 1957. “It comes down to if you abide by the rules, you’re not punished.”

Hail’s description was similar to what the other men described, but he said the school wasn’t a “house of horrors.”

“Was (the school) run with a very strict hand? Yes, it was,” he said. “Were the paddlings very severe? Yes, they were.”

Brendan Farrington, “Unknown graves at Fla. reform school investigated.” Copyright © 2008 by Associated Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Appendix VI. OP-ED Article on
Memories of State Abuse

http://tallahassee.com/article/20081023/OPINION01/810230307

Our Opinion: Memories of state abuse
can’t be erased

In the 1950s and ’60s, the Florida State Reform School in Marianna, where many young male offenders wound up, had a notorious reputation. Backyard scuttlebutt, especially among teenagers, is often wildly exaggerated, so the tales of terrible beatings were easily dismissed. After all, they came from young men whose credibility was unreliable to begin with.

They weren’t exaggerating.

In an emotional ceremony Tuesday on the grounds of the institution now known as the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, the Department of Juvenile Justice, which oversees the facility, acknowledged the horrific abuse.

State officials invited five men—they call themselves the “White House Boys” after the whitewashed cinderblock building where they were mercilessly beaten—to attend a two-hour ceremony at which they were allowed to make uncensored statements about their experiences. Healing was the goal.

Mike McCarthy, 65, recalled “blood spattered all over the walls.”

Associated Press reporter Brendan Farrington covered the event. He described “a dark room barely big enough to fit the bed (Mike McCarthy) and other children lay in while they were beaten so badly he said some had to have underwear surgically removed.”

Roger Kiser, 62, was sent to the reform school after running away from an orphanage in Jacksonville where he was being molested. He said when he got to Marianna, he realized he was better off at the orphanage. The Associated Press picks up his account.

“When I walked out of this building . . . when I looked in the mirror, I couldn’t tell who I was, I was so bloodied. From that day forward, I’ve never forgotten what rotten SOBs the human being can be.

“Nobody treated me with respect, I was nothing more than a dog,” he said. “I certainly hope things have changed. I pray to God.”

In the building across from the White House, the victims said, was what they called the rape room.

“They were monsters,” 62-year-old Robert Straley of Clearwater said of the state employees who abused him. “Oh my God, the things they did.”

After all five men spoke, Gus Barreiro, a former lawmaker who now oversees DJJ’s residential programs, unveiled a plaque outside the White House.

“In memory of the children who passed through these doors, we acknowledge their tribulations and offer our hope that they found some measure of peace. May this building stand as a reminder of the need to remain vigilant in protecting our children as we help them seek a brighter future.”

It is rare for a government agency to acknowledge even errors of policy, but more rare to acknowledge such dire human behavior stemming from judgments that one can only assume started from the top. This week’s acknowledgment improves the credibility of DJJ, of course, and the public can only hope that such horrors are now truly part of the past.

Tallahassee Democrat, editorial, “Our Opinion: Memories of state abuse can’t be erased” (October 23, 2008). Reprinted by permission of the
Tallahassee Democra
t. All rights reserved.

Appendix VII. A Brief History
of the Facility

From the Florida Archives

B
efore the official opening of The Florida State Reform School on January 1, 1900, Florida counties had very few outlets for troubled youths. Lawmakers had hoped that this institution and others like it would provide proper housing, education, employment, and rehabilitation for children who were convicted of illegal activities or were merely dependents of the state. Although the initial intention was good, the execution of the plan failed miserably. Life at the school was often brutal; in 1903, a legislative committee reported that it found “[inmates] in irons, just as common criminals,” and in 1911, a report of a special joint committee on the reform school said, “the inmates were at times unnecessarily and brutally punished, the instrument of punishment being a leather strap fastened to a wooden handle.”

The leasing out of convicts for free labor was traditional during this era, but not all the children living at these institutes were convicted criminals: many were simply wards of the state. It was reported on a number of occasions that these children, some not even twelve years of age, were forced to perform to the same standards set for their adult counterparts. Those who failed to meet these standards received severe beatings. This was confirmed in 1911 by the legislative committee hired to report on the living conditions at the school. The ages of the children ranged from nine to eighteen years old. However, counties had jurisdiction to hold anyone up to the age of twenty-one. Many of the boys were treated as hardened criminals and served on chain gangs, which were frequently used during the 1920s as a way to maintain control over a group of convicts. Boys were shackled together to prevent them from escaping or overpowering their guards.