Yet another former inmate of the infamous Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys has come forward to tell Sunshine State News that he, too, witnessed the existence of an additional cemetery on the campus grounds, back when he attended the school in 1969.
The Boss sa[id], 'See that place on the right where the trees are gone? Thats where some of you boys are buried!' Paul Thrower, 58, of Norman Park, Ga., recalls in a December 2012 letter to Jerry Cooper, president of The White House Boys, an advocacy group made up of former victims of the now-closed state reform school. I asked 'How long ago?' [and] he replied, 'I really dont know, it was before I went to work here.'
SSN caught up with Thrower, who confirmed the letter's contents.
You could tell there was something there; it was overgrown with grass amd weeds but it had definitely been cleared out several years before he says of the area shown him by his supervisor. He told us, 'Don't tell on me now, because you could get me in a lot of trouble, but that's a cemetery.'"
Thrower pinpointed to SSN, on an aerial map, the exact same location previously disclosed by Charles and George Fudge, two brothers who were at the Mariann campus nearly 10 years before Thrower served his six-month term (for skipping school): in a forest situated between Pierce Hall and the northernmost of a series of cottages (as the dormitories were called).
Thrower insists he's never met or communicated with the Fudge brothers. He is the fourth person this week to share with SSN his eyewitness testimony of the existence of a cemetery on the white side of Dozier, the area of the campus reserved for white inmates when the school was segregated, from 1901 to the abolition of segregation in 1968.
According to the state's official story, Dozier only ever had one cemetery, named Boot Hill and located in what used to be the African-American section of the Marianna campus. Supposedly, and contrary to prevailing practice at the time elsewhere in America and especially in the South the school complex did not have separate cemeteries for blacks and whites. All children who died in the state's custody, whatever their race, were buried on Boot Hill, enjoying in the grave the racial ecumenism they were denied while they were alive.
Thrower, who was 14 years old when he was sent to the controversial reform school for truancy, corroborated many of the horror stories related by other inmates who have testified (to the state and to the media) about their victimization at the hands of supervisors.
I myself was never abused, because I minded my Ps and Qs, Thrower initially tells SSN. But I knew many others who were.
He tells of children he knew who were flogged mercilessly, or kept in solitary confinement at Pierce Hall for months at a time, even though these practices were supposed to have ceased by the time he arrived on campus. He also tells of one cottage father (as dorm supervisors were called) who would enter Thrower's cottage at night, set up a small desk at the bathroom entrance, and insist on watching the boys expose their nudity while they used the toilet.
It's very hard for me to talk about this, Thrower says, his voice choking up. It's left me very, very bitter. For years no one would believe me; they'd tell me I was making it up.
He says he hopes Attorney General Pam Bondi and the University of Florida researchers led by archaeologist Erin Kimmerle pay heed to his testimony, and that of others, and dig up the one or more cemeteries now hidden on the white side of the Dozier campus.
I think there was more than two cemeteries, myself ... People would disappear and that was awful strange, he recounts. It could have very well been me in one of those [grave] spots, and I don't think it's right. It's cold-hearted as hell.
Reach Eric Giunta at egiunta@sunshinestatenews.com or at (954) 235-9116.
