They were only children when they were sent to reform school by the state of Florida to learn from their misdeeds.
Now senior citizens, the state of Florida is preparing to compensate the men who endured horrific abuse at the hands of state employees at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna and the Florida School for Boys at Okeechobee.
WATCH: WPTV gives a voice to survivors of brutal abuse at Florida reform schools
The compensation and the formal apology that preceded it came more than a century after Florida established its reform school program, which led to the deaths of dozens of children and left scores of boys traumatized for life.
WPTV interviewed men who attended both reform schools in the 1960s, spoke with investigators who looked for human remains on the campuses during the 21st century, and reviewed historical and legal records to better understand how long the state knew about the abuse that persisted inside its reform schools for decades.
Arriving at Okeechobee
All eight survivors who spoke to WPTV said the population at the Florida School for Boys at Okeechobee and the Dozier School overwhelmingly came from vulnerable communities and fractured families.
“We were poor. My father left when I was about nine years old,” said James Anderson, who was sent to Okeechobee as a teenager. “Then I had a stepfather [who] came along — ex-military. And we didn’t get along too good.”
Anderson, now in his seventies, said he rebelled and developed a habit of drinking beer and stealing cars.
Michael Anderson also “chose stealing,” in his words. He isn’t related to James, but they knew each other during their time at Okeechobee in the 1960s.
“We were very poor,” Michael Anderson said. “I went to Okeechobee for stealing a $3 shirt.”
James Harkcom said he wanted to go to Okeechobee to answer for his theft habit as a 15-year-old in 1967. He said he was fed up with his mother’s abusive boyfriends.
“I didn’t want to go back to that house,” Harkcom said.
Willie Brown grew up in a large family in the Orlando area. They were poor, and his parents were working a lot, Brown said.
Brown couldn’t remember why he was sent to Okeechobee for the first time, but he remembers having a “real bad attitude.” He was sent to the school a second time for violating probation after his first stint.
“I think it was because I got in a fight with a guy,” Brown said.
The men recall a well-maintained campus in rural Okeechobee, with clean buildings and a working farm. Boys were assigned to work jobs on campus. (James Anderson was a baker, he said.)
“When you first get there, they seem polite. They go over the rules, tell you what you should do, what not to do,” Brown said.
Breaking the rules meant you were, in campus jargon, “going down.”
Going down
The men who endured a stay at The Florida School for Boys at Okeechobee describe brutal beatings that took place as punishment for breaking school rules.
“’[Going] down’ is when you go to the to the room — a designated room where they beat you,” Michael Anderson said.
In separate interviews, the four survivors of Okeechobee similarly described the disciplinary protocol.
“I can remember it like it was yesterday,” said Harkcom. “It's just like a concrete block room. Only 12 by 12 — something like that maybe. And in there against the wall is this, it's like an army cot. It’s metal. And it's got a little rise on it, maybe three or four inches, like a crossbar going over it.”
WATCH: Michael Anderson recounts 'excruciating pain' of beatings
The men described being shown a large, leather paddle with a solid reinforcement in the middle, before they were told to lay face-down on the cot, grip the crossbar, turn their head toward the wall and remain silent while they were beaten across their backside about 20 times.
If they screamed, the men said, they were told the count to 20 “licks” would start over.
Some of the men likened the sound of the beatings to that of a shotgun, and the aftermath left the skin on their buttocks blackened and hardened. Harkcom and Brown both said their families were not allowed to visit them until their wounds and bruises had healed.
“It was excruciating pain and went right up — right up into your solar plexus,” Michael Anderson said. “It feels like your soul is being beat out of you.”
The beatings were so traumatizing, it drove some boys to try to escape.
“I said to myself, ‘I don't care. I'd rather the snakes, gators or whatever else get me, other than continue to stay here and take these whoopings,’” Brown said.
Brown recalls scaling a fence and running when no one was looking.
“The barbed wire caught my knee. But I kept going,” Brown said.
Brown said he was walking down a highway when a state trooper found him and brought him back to campus. He believes the trooper’s intervention saved his life.
“Because he caught me and took me back, he had knowledge that I did escape,” Brown said. “If something happened to me, then an investigation would have started to find out what happened. And I think that's the only thing that saved me from actually being disappeared.”
Harkcom’s escape was also thwarted by law enforcement.
While Brown escaped alone, Harkcom said he was with other boys when they climbed the fence and ran toward downtown Okeechobee.
“It seemed like every other car had the keys in it. So we just got in and took off,” Harkcom said.
Harkcom said he and his peers stole clothing, food and multiple cars as they got as far as they could from Okeechobee. They made it as far as Tennessee before they were caught and returned to Okeechobee, where Harkcom said he spent 72 days in solitary confinement.
When Harkcom emerged from solitary, he said he was beaten again.
How did Florida’s reform school system get to this point?
To understand where things went so wrong at the Florida School for Boys at Okeechobee, it’s important to understand how it all started.
Florida’s first reform school opened in 1900 in Marianna, a small town roughly an hour west of Tallahassee, by car.
The Florida School for Boys would later in the 20th century be named the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, where a team of forensic anthropologists would unearth the remains of 55 children in 2012.
Dr. Erin Kimmerle’s report on the team’s findings painted a grim picture of life at the school.
“The town of Marianna competed to get this institution built there,” said Kimmerle, the University of South Florida professor who led the team and investigated the deaths. “I'm like, ‘Why would it be so important to get a reform school in your town?’”
After investigating historical records, Kimmerle and her team learned the answer to her question: profits.
Funded by the state, the school also got $50 per child from the county that sentenced them there.
As Kimmerle discovered, leadership at the school wanted more.
“Having so few inmates makes the crop come in slow; I fear we will not finish gathering the corn by January,” wrote the school’s superintendent to the board of managers in 1906.
Historical records show school leaders successfully lobbied state lawmakers for changes.
Sentences became longer, and the reasons behind them were more vague. Kimmerle uncovered records of kids as young as age six, sentenced indefinitely for things like “delinquency.”
The $50 fee was also eliminated, removing a financial barrier for the county courts.
From there, the school’s population grew. So did the profits.
Historical records show the state investigated the reform school between 1903 and 1913. Through that investigation, Florida lawmakers found out about the school’s convict leasing program, which by 1913 had generated $3 million in revenue and had children as young as 10 years old laboring with adult convicts in cotton fields and phosphate mines.
The 1913 investigation also documented the poor health and safety conditions at the school.
Kimmerle said many children died within months of arriving at the school, often from a chronic infection or malnutrition.
The superintendent of the reform school resigned in the wake of the 1913 investigation and the legislature provided more funding. The money was used for improvements to the white side of the racially-segregated campus.
The campus eventually became its own industrial compound. Children were tending crops, making bricks and operating a printing press, which at one point provided printed materials at the state house.
Kimmerle learned that if a child’s sentence at the school ended, they wouldn’t always go back home.
“If your parents couldn't afford to, you know, send you a bus ticket home, you would get hired out for labor, let's say a local farm or someplace, and basically have to work for your room and board,” Kimmerle said. “Some of our youngest, the five- and six- and seven-, eight-year-olds — the same thing. They've actually been paroled out as houseboys."
According to Kimmerle, the houseboys were mostly African American. Some of them died while in the custody of the family they worked for, and were brought back to the school for burial.
Others, Kimmerle found, died more gruesome deaths.
“Others ran away, died of exposure, died of blunt injury to the forehead. We don't know what caused that injury,” Kimmerle said. “One died of a gunshot wound.”
The Florida School for Boys at Okeechobee opened in 1959, after the Dozier school became too crowded.
“It was really a duplicate, or a clone of Dozier. The people who ran Dozier went there and set it up. They had all the same policies,” Kimmerle said.
Yet, no graves have ever been found on the grounds of the Okeechobee campus. Kimmerle said there’s a reason for that.
“I think what happens in the 50s and 60s, is you do see a shift in burial practices and kind of professionalization with undertakers,” Kimmerle explained. “So it's not that there weren't necessarily deaths occurring, but they weren't buried there.”
In 2015, the Okeechobee County Sheriff’s Office used cadaver dogs and other resources to search the grounds of the school, which at the time was operating under the control of a private company contracted by the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice.
“Sadly or luckily, depending on how you look at it, we did not find any… bodies that were buried on that property,” said Okeechobee County Sheriff Noel Stephen, who was second in command at the agency at the time of the search.
WATCH: Dr. Erin Kimmerle on the 'unanswered questions' many families faced
Stephen said the investigation on the Okeechobee campus lasted roughly six months.
“The investigator was very confident that he had everybody identified,” Stephen said. “We could not find any missing boys from Okeechobee. Everybody that we could pretty much find on that ledger we had obituaries for, or we had talked to them ourselves. So we had a completely different situation here than what had been found and discovered in Marianna.”
Decades of failed reforms
Attempts to improve safety at the Dozier and Okeechobee reform schools have been ongoing for decades.
“People aren't supposed to be treated that way,” Stephen said. “That's definitely wrong by every standard and imagination.”
In 1983, a class action lawsuit against the Dozier School was filed by former students, alleging that children were being “hogtied, shackled and often held in solitary [confinement].”
The case led to a consent decree in 1987, which established safety and educational standards at both Dozier and Okeechobee, which at that time was called the Eckerd Youth Development Center. The decree also instituted stricter criteria for sentencing minors to these institutions and improved access to legal assistance.
However, a judge withdrew Dozier from the decree in 1995, ruling that the school had complied with the established standards. The same ruling was made for Okeechobee the following year.
Sheriff Stephen noted that over the years, “[Okeechobee] went through several years of private entities running it. We in law enforcement and those private entities struggled due to wrongly classed inmates that was in their facility that were creating problems. So we were constantly having calls for service to the school.”
The Dozier School closed in 2011, shortly after a merger was announced with a nearby maximum-risk youth detention center. The state cited financial reasons for the shutdown.
Later that year, the U.S. Department of Justice released an investigative report stating that staff continued to use solitary confinement and “force as a first resort” — sometimes unprovoked — as recently as 2010.
“Florida’s oversight system failed to detect and sufficiently address the problems we found at Dozier,” the report said.
The Okeechobee campus closed its doors on December 31, 2020. The Florida Department of Juvenile Justice announced it would not renew its contract with the private company operating the school, although the state did not publicly disclose the reasons behind its decision.
The closure of the reform schools would not close the book on the dark chapter in Florida’s history.
Fighting for justice
In the 2000s, survivors of abuse at the Dozier School began writing about their experiences and sharing those accounts online. As the number of stories grew, the men formed a group called “The White House Boys,” named for the building on campus where boys were taken for beatings.
“You walk in that place and it stunk. It was damp,” said Roy Conerly, a survivor and the group’s Sergeant at Arms. “They’d turn on a big ol’ attic fan that was mounted in the wall. They turned it on, made all kind of racket. Because you couldn’t hardly breathe when you go in there. They had one light bulb hanging in the ceiling. And it’s — when you’re a young kid, it scares the hell out of you.”
“There was probably urine in the mattresses that you had to lay on,” said Charles Fudge, president of the White House Boys. “The pillow that they made you lay your head on — was probably moisture out of children's mouths, that would be crying and spitting and fearful of what was taking place.”
The stories of the Dozier boys echoed those of the Okeechobee boys.
“A lot of times, the boxer shorts that we wore would be stuck into the blood on our backside from where they had [sic] drawed actual blood,” Fudge said. “It was also told that if this was ever told to parents or anything, the penalties that we would pay would be 10 times more harsh than a beating.”
The fear and trauma kept many survivors silent for decades.
“I was scareder there than I was when I was in Vietnam,” said Daniel Gainer, a 77-year-old Army veteran who was sent to Dozier at age 13. “Because in Vietnam, I knew I could come back. But there, I didn’t know whether I was coming back.”
Gainer, who said he was sentenced to Dozier for stealing a car, even though he didn’t know how to drive, did not talk about his experience there until 2024.
“I just kept burying it. I wouldn’t share it with nobody,” Gainer said. “I was ashamed of it.”
Gainer said he found the strength to speak up through his faith, and through the support of fellow White House Boys.
In 2024, Florida lawmakers unanimously passed a bill to create a $20 million victim compensation fund for the survivors of the reform schools in Marianna and Okeechobee. It was a watershed moment for the White House Boys, many of whom had spent 16 years fighting for justice in Tallahassee.
“That was a joyful moment for myself, and I'm sure everybody that was part of what had happened and taken place there at Marianna and Okeechobee,” Fudge said.
Putting a price on trauma
The White House Boys have complicated feelings about the victim compensation bill.
While it was the culmination of years of hard work, the money will not erase the trauma.
To qualify for compensation, claimants would have to prove they attended Okeechobee or Dozier between 1945 and 1975, and that they suffered abuse there. According to the Florida Attorney General’s office, more than 1,000 people filed claims.
The AG’s office is currently processing the claims, which had to be filed by the end of 2024. The money will be divided evenly among those whose claims are approved.
WATCH: The White House Boys discuss their feelings about compensation bill
“If there’s 1,000 people, that’s $20,000 apiece — in today’s money,” Conerly said. “What’s $20,000 in today’s money? If you gave it to me in 1962, yeah. $20,000 is a lot of damn money. But it’s nothing today.”
“And how much money have we spent, in 16 years? Hotels, gas, food, sleepless nights. You're offering me $20,000, $10,000 — whatever?” said White House Boy Paul Elgin. “I spent more than that, you know, trying to get justice.”
Several survivors who spoke with WPTV said they struggled financially due to the setbacks stemming from their childhood trauma.
James Anderson battled with addiction and spent time in prison before earning a trade certificate and settling into a career. He said the money might help him make some needed improvements to his home.
Willie Brown spent years in prison shortly after he left Okeechobee for an armed robbery, which he denies committing. He said he still struggles to find a steady job housing.
Michael Anderson eventually moved to Berkeley, Calif., where he said he grapples with the high cost of living.
“I could pay off my credit cards,” he said. “That'd be nice.”
“I've had the media ask, you know, were we looking for reparations?” Fudge said. “I've lived with this 65 years. What's 65 years of a person’s life worth?”
“We wish we could just give them all the time back that they lost — and everything in their lives — every opportunity that they weren't able to have because of the experiences that they went through and the trauma that they were having to recover from or live with,” said Florida Rep. Michelle Salzman (R-Escambia), who introduced the victim compensation bill.
WATCH: Florida passes compensation bill for victims of reform school abuse
In an interview with WPTV, Salzman explained that she arrived at the $20 million sum for the compensation fund by examining Florida’s standards for compensating those who were wrongfully incarcerated.
“It's, I believe, $50,000 per year of wrongful incarceration,” Salzman said, acknowledging that she and others who helped craft the bill were unaware of how many people could qualify for compensation. “In a perfect world, we also would have given them a lot more money. To be honest with you, we recognize that that amount was very small.
“We had no real data on how many people were alive, how many people were going to file a claim,” she said. “We pulled data from previous studies, and it gave a figure of 350 or something people.”
Asked why only those who attended the reform schools between 1945 and 1975 were eligible, Salzman said she did not know, pointing to previous attempts to compensate the victims.
“That was the way the bill was written in the past,” Salzman said. “We tried really hard — we reached out to a lot of people to try to find out where those numbers came from, and because we could not find any reasonable response as to what those were... This is why that was that way. So our concern was that there was a real reason why it was written that way, 14-15, years ago. So we did not want to mess with the way that the time frame was chosen originally.”
Salzman said she originally attempted to find a way to penalize the families of the state employees who beat the boys, decades ago.
“They waited this long,” Brown said. “By this time, everybody who is responsible is no longer alive.”
WPTV found obituaries for the people the men identified as the ones who beat them as children.
“It would be nice to have an amount that would give us some sort of justice to where we may have a joyful ending of the years that we have left,” Fudge said.
Salzman tried to find other ways for the boys to achieve some form of justice. She said the bill will allow the boys who never graduated from high school to receive a GED, noting that she hopes to host a graduation ceremony for them in Tallahassee in the near future.
“We really wanted it to be something that could be replicated in other states, so that other people can get that same closure and validation that they deserve,” Salzman said. “We can say, you know, look — it was actually codified in statute that this happened. It will forever be a part of Florida's history.”
“I don’t have no anger in me,” Fudge said. “I realized that, you know, there’s only so many people in politics that can do so much.”
Keeping the memories alive
The Okeechobee campus now belongs to Indian River State College, which plans to build a data center there.
IRSC President Dr. Tim Moore said the college spent roughly a year surveying the land and did not encounter any human remains. He told WPTV he plans to include tributes to the boys who suffered on the campus.
WATCH: Indian River State College shares future plans for site with WPTV
“We're looking right now at certain select buildings on that property to preserve in perpetuity or repurpose, and then placard to make sure that people understood what went on there as they come through. We're proud to have this stewardship,” Moore said.
The survivors responded favorably to IRSC’s plan.
“If you’re helping somebody, come on. Bring it on,” Elgin said. “That makes me feel good.”
The Dozier campus is now under the control of Jackson County. It’s been named Endeavor Park, and the county plans to convert turn the dining hall into a museum dedicated to local history.
Other buildings on the campus remain standing, but crumbling. Doors and windows are gone or broken. Ivy has wound its way around many of the structures. Old, rusted cots can still be seen through the exposed doorways in some of the residential buildings.
The White House stands in contrast; fully preserved, freshly painted, with a sealed doorway and windows.
“The White House is protected as a monument. They're supposed to be taking care of it,” Conerly said. “They think we’re not looking, they’ll let it go. We made them paint it, to let everybody know what the hell happened.”
A memorial has also been installed next to the White House. Visitors have left small toys and tributes at the feet of statues of children. The memorial includes a recreation of the soiled cot where children laid during beatings, the paddle that was used, and the large industrial fan that survivors said would drown out the sound of screams.
A plaque beside one of the front windows of the White House reads:
“In memory of the children who passed these doors, we acknowledge their tribulations and offer our hope that they have 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.
Moreover, we offer the reassurance that we are dedicated to serving and protecting the youth who enter this campus, and helping them transform their lives.”
The plaque is dated Oct. 21, 2008; before Kimmerle and her team uncovered the mass burials, and before a U.S. Department of Justice investigation would allege abuse was still occurring on the campus.
In a quiet clearing on the opposite side of campus, sits a monument with eight identical markers. Each one for a boy whose remains were found, but never identified.
The White House Boys wonder if more human remains are still undiscovered at Dozier.
“I knew boys that ran away and they were never seen anymore,” Gainer said. “Once they ran away, that was it. You didn’t see them anymore. So what happened to them?”
“There’s 183 that are unaccounted for, that checked in but never checked out,” Conerly said. “They didn’t dig up that many. There’s more bodies up there.”
Kimmerle believes there are no more undiscovered remains.
“There’s no way of us getting away from what happened to us as children. And all we can do is pray and hope that people see what took place for us as children, that it never happens to any children at institutions ever again,” Fudge said.
