KLU KLUX KLAN (KKK) at The Florida School For Boys - Arthur G Dozier

The Florida School for Boys

also known as the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys (AGDS), was a reform school operated by the state of Florida in the panhandle town ofMarianna from January 1, 1900, to June 30, 2011.For a time, it was the largest juvenile reform institution in the United States. A second campus was opened in the town of Okeechobee in 1955. Throughout its 111-year history, the school gained a reputation for abuse, beatings, rapes, torture, and even murder of students by staff. Despite periodic investigations, changes of leadership, and promises to improve, the allegations of cruelty and abuse continued. Many of the allegations were confirmed by separate investigations by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in 2010 and the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice in 2011. State authorities closed the school permanently in June 2011.Source  ( 1 )

 

'A concentration camp for little boys'

Dark secrets unearthed in KKK county [1]

 

For years, almost no one at the Dozier School even knew about the burial ground in a clearing in the woods on the edge of campus. It was forbidden territory. The soil here, churned in places by tiny ants, holds more than the remains of little boys. Only now is it starting to give up its dark secrets: horror stories of state-sanctioned barbarism, including flogging, sexual assault and, possibly, murder.

 

That the Arthur G Dozier School – a borstal for delinquent boys founded in 1900 – was not a gentle place was well-established. Boys as young as six were chained to walls, lashings with a leather strap were frequent and, in the early decades, children endured enforced labour, making bricks and working printing presses. When it was closed in 2011, it had already been the subject of separate federal and state investigations.

 

But, as suspicions deepen about how the boys in the burial ground died, pressure is growing again on the state to shine new light into the darkest days of the school in Marianna, a Florida Panhandle town that once was a bastion of the KKK and the site of the 1934 lynching of Claude Neal. The pressure is coming from some of the school's survivors, from relatives of boys who died here, and from Florida's top US Senator, Bill Nelson.

 

"Where there is smoke, there is fire," Senator Nelson declared last month, calling on the state to delay plans to sell off the 1,400 acres occupied by the old school so that a team of forensic anthropologists from the University of South Florida can complete a project begun last year to comb the campus for more graves. He wants any bodies found exhumed, identified and returned to the families they came from.

 

So far, the team, led by Erin Kimmerle, has focused its work around the once-secret cemetery. It knows that as many as 98 boys died at the school between 1914 and 1973. Since starting last year, Professor Kimmerle has found 19 previously undiscovered graves in addition to the 31 marked by steel-pipe crosses. That means 50 graves so far. Forty-eight have yet to be located, assuming graves were dug for each body.

 

"It's more than we anticipated," she says. "Our purpose is to explain who these children were, what happened to them and to understand what the story is that should be told." The official stance – that all the children died from accidents, such as fires and drownings, or natural causes – does not impress her. She cites the case of one child, Billy Jackson, whose cause of death was listed as kidney failure. There is a record of his being beaten two weeks earlier and admitted to hospital. "Common sense", she asserts, says he died from the beating.

 

The place of Dozier in Florida's history is already set and it's a shameful one. That is thanks in part to a group of Dozier survivors who call themselves the "White House Boys" because that was the colour of the small building where the floggings used to take place. A decade ago, they began finding one another by email and social networks and sharing their painful memories. In a book that Roger Dean Kiser eventually wrote about his time at the school – The White House Boys: an American Tragedy – he called it a "concentration camp for little boys".

 

Robert Straley, who has built a web site called whitehouseboys.com, was 13 when he was remanded there. Even now, he recalls the wardens with fear, including the one-armed Troy Tidwell, who, he says, beat him on his first day. "They were just totally out of control up there," he said. "The ones that got the most beating were the 11-year-olds. They liked to beat the little ones because they didn't have to be afraid of them coming back after them with a brick in the hands. The older the boys, the less beatings they got."

 

In the town of Marianna, conversations about the school are difficult. Calvin Creamer, 62, knew the school cobbler who made boots with markings in the heels so they could track the boys down if they ran away – and the leather straps for the floggings. "They were mean people to start with," he said of the men who dispensed the discipline. "Back then, it was torture for those boys. And the police didn't care either. They would strip them down and strap them to 50-gallon drums bear naked, and then they'd beat them."

 

Thomas McSwaine, 42, runs a pet adoption shelter in one of the old warden's cottages on the campus and has heard all the stories. About the worst is of one night when the wardens woke up some boys on the white side of campus – this was before desegregation – brought them to a field in the dark, gave them guns and told them to shoot anything that was moving. "When they flipped those lights on they saw all these black kids running across the field and they had to shoot them."

 

John Trott, 70, was a student of juvenile justice in Florida when he went on a class visit to the school in 1965 or maybe the year after. "They took me to see a dormitory and the bunks were packed in so tight they were right up against each other. There were 50 or more kids and no one was awake watching them. I knew that wasn't right," he says, before adding, "I am sure there were sexual assaults, kids on kids, but as for staff on kids, I didn't see that."

 

Years later, working for the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice, Mr Trott found himself visiting Dozier annually. Now retired and living in Marianna, he spoke of what he knows. The more grave allegations he has trouble accepting. "I am not going to deny they used the strap. But the bodies and things … I don't buy the murder allegations. But I can't prove they didn't happen."

 

Professor Kimmerle plans to extend her search far beyond the little cemetery on Boot Hill into other areas of the campus. She is also seeking permission to begin the process of exhuming bodies and transferring them to a state medical examiner. If such stories as the one told by Mr McSwaine are true, and she finds evidence of boys having been shot, Dozier would instantly become a crime scene and Florida would be forced to open a much wider criminal investigation, which in turn could lead to prosecutions.

For now, though, she has the more modest goal of helping people such as Glen Varhadoe, whose uncle, Thomas, arrived at the school on 22 September 1934 and was dead before the end of October. A letter was sent to his mother two weeks later, too late for a funeral and too late for questions to be asked. The alleged cause of death: pneumonia and anaemia. "How could a child of 13 who was in perfect health go to a school in Marianna where the mean average temperature was about 29C and die of pneumonia in 35 days unless he was being mistreated somehow?" he asked last week.

 

No one has ever been able to say where exactly Thomas Varhadoe was laid to rest. Now, his nephew thinks there is some small chance that Professor Kimmerle and her team will find him at last. If they do, he will reclaim him. "That's my mission. I just want to bring him home." Away from Marianna.

 

'They had literally ripped the skin off from his lower back to below his butt. It was like hamburger meat'

Robert Straley was sent to the Dozier School in 1963 for running away from home. He was 13 years old and, as he tells The Independent on Sunday, he got into trouble straight away.

"I was 105lb then and I was already being pushed around a little in the dormitory. I went and sat with a group of boys and they were talking about running away. I was tired of running and I didn't think the place looked so bad. I said, 'No, I am going to stick it out here.' But someone behind heard us talking and snitched on us. At about eight o'clock, Troy Tidwell [a warden] took us down to the White House. They opened the door and they lined us up against the wall. They had turned on an industrial fan to make a big racket to smother the noise of the boys.

"I was at the end of the line. I had never heard anyone scream and cry out in real pain like that and it was shocking. When the boys came out, their heads were down and their hands were buried in their crotch; they had glazed eyes and they were walking kind of stiffly.

"When it was my turn, I was already in shock. It was like a dream. You can't believe it's happening.

"I walked in and there was this single cot with a stained mattress. They told me to lay down and not to let go of the bed rail. I did let go of the rail because I had to see what it was they were hitting me with. When I turned, two men were on me, they grabbed my arms and legs and I got 10 more lashes. But I could see what it was: it was maybe four inches wide and least one inch thick and double-sewn, and it had a metal sheet in between. It was as heavy as a baseball bat.

"If you ran away they would give you 100 lashes with this strap. I will never be able to forget this one boy. He was 15, I think – maybe a little bigger than me – and they had literally whipped the skin off from his lower back to below his butt. It was just like hamburger meat."

UPDATE December 27th, 2011.  SECOND GRAVEYARD VERY NEAR FSB GROUNDS DISCOVERED BY JERRY COOPER.  Camera crew located cemetery, took pictures, didn’t find any evidence of mechanical clearing, although the cemetery is now visable from the road which it was not viewable before. Evidently someone besides Jerry Cooper has been in there over the last few days, the question is why now, after decades of neglect ? Source : [1]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Friday, December 2, 2011

 

Department of Justice Releases Investigative Findings on the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys and the Jackson Juvenile Offender Center in Marianna Florida.

 

WASHINGTON – Following a comprehensive investigation, the Justice Department today announced its findings that the state of Florida’s oversight system failed to detect and sufficiently address harmful practices at both the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys and the Jackson Juvenile Offender Center (JJOC), which together constituted the North Florida Youth Development Center (NYFDC).

 

Despite the closure of these horror facilities, the deficiencies found by the United States implicate the continuing oversight obligations of the state. The state’s lack of adequate controls permitted these violations to persist. It is incumbent upon the state to ensure that the unconstitutional conditions of confinement identified in the report do not exist at its other juvenile justice institutions.

 

The United States announced its investigation of the NYFDC facilities on April 7, 2010, in accordance with the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. On May 26, 2011, Florida’s Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) announced the pending closure of Dozier and JJOC.

 

The facilities were officially closed on June 30, 2011, and the residents were transferred to juvenile justice institutions throughout the state.

The Justice Department found reasonable cause to believe that a pattern or practice of unconstitutional conduct and/or violations of federal law occurred in several areas, including:

Failure to adequately protect youth from harm;

Unconstitutional uses of disciplinary confinement;

Deliberate indifference to youth at risk of self-injurious and suicidal behaviors;

Violations of youth’s due process rights; and

Failure to provide necessary rehabilitation services.

These violations were the result of the state’s failed system of oversight and accountability. To protect the youth in its remaining facilities, the state must take immediate measures to assess the full extent of its failed oversight with the assistance of experts in juvenile protection from harm issues. The state must also strengthen its oversight processes by implementing a more rigorous system of hiring, training and accountability, more at link [1]

Two Cemeteries at Dozier School For Boys Marianna Fl, One For White Boys and One For Colored Boys and the Murdered Boys?

 

Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna Florida also known as the Florida State Reform School, questions still remain about if there are individuals buried at a second Cemetery called ”Number 1″on the South Side of Dozier “Boot Hill”about a 1/4 mile from the “White House” torture chamber.

 

Florida Industrial School for Boys, Grave Search Results, Records 1 of 65 total matches. Cemetery notes and/or description: This small field is located in the woods on the present grounds of the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, a state juvenile correction facility. Originally known as the Florida State Reform School (Established in 1900) and later the Florida Industrial School for Boys, the institution has a notorious reputation as an abusive place in its earlier years, complete with a torture chamber known as the “White House”.

 

The cemetery was active from about 1914 to 1952. Since death certificates were not required prior to 1917 and subsequent records are not complete, it is not known how many people are interred here. State Investigators believe at least 81 are buried here and at another location about 500 yards to the north.

 

The argument for two locations is bolstered by the fact that it was not the custom in the days when the cemetery was active to bury whites and coloreds at the same site (The races were also segregated at this facility). 31 metal crosses were erected at this location near extant shallow indentations in the ground in 1996 to replace concrete/rebar crosses from the 1960′s that had been removed and stored near the site…It is believed wooden crosses or no markers were originally employed…

 

It appears from the 2009 FDLE investigation and information obtained from School records that both white and “colored boys” were buried in the same cemetery, this does not ring true in the Deep South from 1919 to 1952, especially in Marianna Fl where an active KKK chapter was in operation up until the 1960′s.

 Ku Klux Klan (KKK) activism in Florida increased as a reaction against the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Sixty one (61) African-Americans (Negros) were lynched in Florida from 1921-1946. Among the more notorious murders by Klan members in Florida was the lynching of the Negro Claude Neal in Marianna Fl.  Neal’s lynching was followed by a race riot in the town of Marianna in which white KKK rioters attempted to drive all blacks out of the city. 

TIME MAGAZINE; RACES: They Done Me Wrong, Monday, Nov. 05, 1934.

ACTUAL NEWSPAPER NOTICE..NEGRO LYNCHING..Macon (Georgia) Telegraph, and in the Marianna Daily Times-Courier October 26, 1934. 

“Big Preparation Made for Lynching Tonight“.GREENWOOD, Fla., Oct. 26—Local citizens have been preparing all day for the lynching of a negro scheduled to take place here tonight. This morning a mob seized Claude Neal, 23, from a jail in Brewton, Ala., where he had been held in connection with the murder of white girl which took place here several days ago.  “All white folks are invited to the party,” said the announcement issued by the mob’s Committee of Six.

In January 1949, Klansmen held a motorcade through Tallahassee FL before newly- inaugurated governor Fuller Warren, a former Klansmen himself.  Florida Governor Fuller Warren was born in Blountstown Fl which is just 35 miles south of KKK run Marianna Fl.  Florida Gov. Fuller Warren (Jan 4th, 1949 to Jan 6th, 1953) was linked to the Marianna-Blountstown KKK klavern.  Florida Gov. Fuller Warren was educated locally in the public schools of Blountstown Fl from 1919 to 1923.  Burial Gov. Fuller Warren: Nettle Ridge Cemetery, Blountstown Calhoun County, Florida, USA.

 

The Ku Klux Klan membership roster in Florida during the 1940′ to 1960′s included sheriffs, lawyers, doctors, wealthy businessmen and city councilmen — and the Florida governor, Fuller Warren.

  

 During the 1930′s to the early 1960′s, the violence and murder of young boys at the Dozier School for Boys was covered up by local Guards, Administrators, Sheriff’s and all the way up to the Governor.

 

During the 1970s and 80s, the Klan splintered into competing factions and its membership declined. That trend continued in the 1990s. Today, although its numbers are relatively small, Florida has one of the more active Klans, and its commitment to racial hatred and prejudice have not gone away.

 

White boys and Negro boys were not buried together in the Dozier School for Boys “Boot Hill” Cemetery between 1900 and the early 1960′s in KKK run Marianna Fl, ”Get Real it never happened“, there must be a second Cemetery.

 

Ku Klux Klan  [1]

 

The Ku Klux Klan (KKK), informally known as the Klan, is the name of three distinct past and present far-right organizations in the United States, which have advocated extremist reactionary currents such as white supremacy, white nationalism, and anti-immigration, historically expressed through terrorism. Since the mid-20th century, the KKK has also been anti-communist.

 

The current manifestation is splintered into several chapters with no connections between each other; it is classified as a hate group by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center. It is estimated to have between 5,000 and 8,000 members as of 2012.

 

The first Klan flourished in the Southern United States in the late 1860s, then died out by the early 1870s. Members adopted white costumes: robes, masks, and conical hats, designed to be outlandish and terrifying, and to hide their identities.

 

The second KKK flourished nationwide in the early and mid-1920s, and adopted the same costumes and code words as the first Klan, while introducing cross burnings.  The third KKK emerged after World War II and was associated with opposing the Civil Rights Movement and progress among minorities. The second and third incarnations of the Ku Klux Klan made frequent reference to the USA's "Anglo-Saxon" blood, harking back to 19th-century nativism and claiming descent from the original 18th-century British colonial revolutionaries.

 

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