Robert Straley was 13 when he entered the Florida School for Boys in the early 1960s for running away from home. The 1,400-acre grounds in the city of Marianna looked like heaven compared to his troubled home, he said, but on his first day, he was beaten bloody 35 times with a three-foot leather whip with a sheet metal insert.
"These were not spankings -- they were floggings," said Straley, 66 and now living in Clearwater, Fla.
"It looked like a college campus, not a reform school," he said. "There were no fences, the cottages were surrounded by trimmed hedges and tall pines and oaks. There was a swimming pool and a chapel. It looked nice, but it was a beautiful hell."
Straley was one of about 300 "white house boys," so named because they survived routine beatings in a white concrete block building that he called a "torture chamber."
"You went to the left for the white boys' waiting room and right for the black boys' room," he recalled. "They turned on the big industrial fan, which made a large racket and muted the sounds of the screams and whips somewhat.
"The first boy came out with his eyes red from crying and his hands were buried in his crotch. He was pale and shaking with blood on his pants."
The school, later named the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, closed in 2011, but it left a legacy of segregation, forced labor and brutality that is only today being fully uncovered. (more...)
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