Dozier School for Boys
Florida sent boys to Marianna for decades. The men who survived made the state pay.
Florida · Closed 2011 · Compensation program 2024–2025
The Dozier campus in Marianna, Florida. Survivors named the building where boys were beaten the White House.
The story
The Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys opened in Marianna in 1900 and closed in 2011. The state sent the boys. Some were elementary-school age. Some were there for skipping class. Survivors call themselves the White House Boys, after the small white building where children were beaten. Their account became Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys.
What happened
Charles Fudge arrived in 1960, age 12, for skipping school and smoking. Years later he still could not walk up to the bed. Cecil Gardner, 14 that same year, said he was raped and beaten, and that he carried the fear into his seventies. Researchers later recovered dozens of bodies from unmarked graves. Newspaper investigations and state and federal reviews confirmed the violence the men had described. In 2017 the Florida House and Senate apologized.
Charles Fudge
“I endured on my third day here the worst beating of my life.”
Charles Fudge, sent to Dozier in 1960, age 12
Watch
WFSU’s The Real Story of the White House Boys covers the survivors, the apology, and the compensation fight. Descriptions of abuse are explicit.
What changed
The school closed in 2011. The men who did the beating were never charged. In 2024 Florida created a $20 million fund, Florida Statutes § 16.63, for living people confined at Dozier or the Okeechobee school from 1940 through 1975. The Attorney General says approved payments went out on June 30, 2025. People confined after 1975 were left out. The White House still stands, kept as a memorial.
Why this story is here
This is the clearest picture on this site of what a state can do once it admits the harm: an apology, a statute, and money. It is also a warning. It took half a century, and the law still timed people out. Michigan survivors should not have to wait that long. The sources are below.