VALDOSTA — As Florida legislators debate their responsibility for atrocities committed at the Dozier School for Boys, a Valdosta man is watching closely.
Ralph James Freeman was incarcerated at the Marianna, Florida, reform school in 1972. He endured the hardships described in the legislature’s hearings, and he stands to benefit if the legislature follows through with the proposal to pay reparations.
Freeman, now 66, said he was 15 when he was sent to Dozier, and in horrible irony, it was by his own choice. He was homeless when he saw the school depicted on television.
“It looked like paradise,” he said, so to get himself arrested and sent there, he called in a bomb threat to his school.
He got his wish, but he found himself not in heaven but in hell.
“The torture started immediately,” he said. “I got beat so bad, and the man told me the reason I beat you [is] so you’ll know what’ll happen if you do something.”
He said the guards beat the children with leather straps like barbers use to hone their razors.
“They beat you until your underwear is embedded in your skin,” he said.
And the beatings weren’t the worst part. Other survivors recounted rapes and other tortures. Some of the children simply disappeared.
Escape attempts were common. Freeman said they once took a field trip to Atlanta, and every student on the trip tried to run away. He never saw some of them again, he said, so he doesn’t know if they got away or if they were killed.
Freeman said during one of his escape attempts, a guard stabbed him with a stick that had a railroad spike on it. He showed the scar where he said the spike impaled his thigh. He showed scars on his abdomen where he said guards woke him up by pouring scalding hot water on him.
Freeman stayed at the Dozier School for “nine horrible months,” until overcrowding forced his release. Throughout his time there, guards had reiterated that he couldn’t tell anyone what happened there, and if he did no one would believe him. It was a long, long time after he left before he told anyone, but he’s carried the mental scars throughout his life.
Freeman has been married four times, and he said each of his wives could tell about finding him in the corner crying and unable to explain to them why.
The Dozier School opened in 1900 and, according to some online sources, reports of abuse started not long afterwards. A second campus was opened in Okeechobee in 1955, and it was also plagued with abuse reports.
In the 1980s and ‘90s, survivors of the school began to band together and share their stories. They became known as the White House Boys, a reference to the white building at the school where many of the beatings took place. In 2009, they persuaded then-Gov. Charlie Crist to investigate the school. Following investigations by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the Civil Rights Division of the US Justice Department, the school was closed in 2011.
The next year, a survey by the University of South Florida using ground-penetrating radar found 55 unmarked graves on the school property. Subsequent investigations have found 25 more, and the White House Boys believe there are 183 of their classmates who are unaccounted for.
Many of the bodies buried there were exhumed to a cemetery in Tallahassee, Freeman said, where they’re buried under markers that say, “Here he rests. Unknown but not forgotten.”
“Nobody knows whose child it is,” he said, although DNA samples have been taken to try to match them with living relatives and identify them that way. Records of the original burials are either poor or non-existent.
USF anthropologists presented a report to the Florida Cabinet in 2016 that showed most of the deaths were caused by illness, but others were the result of beatings, gunfire, and drowning and there was a correlation between attempted escapes and mortality of the children, according to an article in the Tallahassee Democrat.
The State of Florida apologized to survivors in 2017, and a monument was erected on the school’s campus in 2023.
Twin bills now working their way through the Florida Legislature would establish a compensation fund for inmates at both the Dozier School and the Okeechobee School between 1940 and 1975. Neither the House nor Senate versions specify how much money will be allocated to the fund, but both say the fund will be split equally among all eligible applicants.
If approved by both houses and signed by the governor, the law would take effect in July and former inmates at the schools would have until Dec. 31 to apply for compensation.
Freeman said he’s glad to see the bills moving forward, but he’s bothered by the 1975 cutoff date. The school continued to operate 36 years beyond that.
“What about kids after that?” he asked. “They were tortured too.”
According to Florida news sources, the state House could vote on its bill at any time. The Senate bill was scheduled for an additional committee hearing Tuesday morning.