The White House Boys, as a group of grown men now call themselves, kept one of The Florida State Reform School's most shameful secrets for half a century: what was done to them inside a squat, dark, cinderblock building called The White House.
Guards viciously beat the adolescent boys with a leather lash that was part sheet metal inside of The White House building.
The building still stands on the grounds of what is now called The Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys. A graveyard, bearing crosses made of metal pipes, mark the graves of 32 unidentified bodies in an overgrown field near the school.
EMILY MICHOT / MIAMI HERALD STAF
...The four men, all of whom suffered from brutal beatings while students at the Marianna-based school for delinquent boys in the late 1950s, sent letters to Gov. Charlie Crist, the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. attorney general alleging that the boys were victims of state-sponsored hate crimes and murder....
