(L-R) Dozier survivors Charlie Fudge, Gene Oker and Roy Connelly at the WMNF studio in Tampa, Florida on Nov. 24, 2023. Credit: Photo by Ray Roa

TALLAHASSEE — Hundreds of men who were abused as children at two notorious state reform schools are in line to receive checks of more than $21,000 in the coming days, as part of a $20 million reparations program approved last year by Florida lawmakers.

The program, years in the making, will compensate people who were at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna and Okeechobee School in South Florida between 1940 and 1975 and “who were subjected to mental, physical or sexual abuse perpetrated by school personnel.”

The 2024 legislation required the Florida attorney general’s office to set up a process to accept, review and approve or deny applications from men who attended the schools.

Jeremy Redfern, a spokesman for Attorney General James Uthmeier, said Thursday that the state Department of Financial Services is processing an initial round of checks in the amount of $21,253.98 to 926 applicants who were approved for payments. Thirteen of the 1,023 applications received remain pending.

“The remaining funds will be released pending the results of the 13 appeals, and additional payments to approved applicants will proceed as those 13 claims resolve,” Redfern told The News Service of Florida in a text message.

A group of Dozier survivors known as the “White House Boys” — a moniker derived from the white concrete building where boys were beaten and raped by school workers — for over a decade traveled to Tallahassee to share their traumas with state lawmakers.

In a Facebook post this week, Charles Fudge, one of the group’s leaders, called the imminent payments “great news.”

“Let’s remember that although there isn’t enough money in the world to compensate us for the abuse, this is at least an acknowledgement of the abuse by the state, which we doubted could ever happen,” Fudge’s post said.

Some survivors were disappointed in the amount of the payments.

“It’s not enough. I think they dropped the ball,” Roy Connerly, another leader of the White House Boys group, said in a phone interview Thursday.

Connerly, 79, was 15 years old when he was sent to Dozier. He is among a core group of people who spent 16 years trying to convince lawmakers that survivors should be compensated for their trauma.

“I’ve been living with this for 60-something years,” he said. “That’s a long time to have something on your mind.”

Connerly recalled the anxiety he experienced as a teenager on the two-block walk from the school’s office to the “dark, dingy, smelly” building with two small, bathroom-sized rooms — one for Black students and the other for white students — where beatings occurred.

“They always kept fear running through you. Mostly the White House, for me, there were some guys that had things a lot worse than I did, but it’s the mental thing that stuck with me the most. Not having any power to do anything about anything,” Connerly said.

A school employee who beat him with a wooden mallet that had long, leather strips attached to it was a “monster,” Connerly said.

“When they tell you to lay on the bed, grab the rail, turn your face to the wall, don’t move, don’t make a sound, or we’ll start over, you don’t forget. You’re terrified … that’s what sticks with me more than anything,” he said.

Troy Rafferty, a Pensacola attorney who championed the victims’ cause for years and was instrumental in the passage of last year’s legislation, welcomed the news that checks would soon be in the mail.

“It is some semblance of justice for what these kids went through, and the checks symbolize that justice for them. Listen, these folks have been through so much that no amount of money is ever going to bring back what was stripped from them. So this is our opportunity as a state to get behind them and show them that we hear them, that we are putting our money where our mouth is and trying to show some sort of justice,” Rafferty told the News Service.

Many of the approved applicants are in their 70s and 80s. At least one survivor has died since his application was accepted. A check will be sent to the applicant’s address and will be available to his estate.

Sen. Darryl Rouson, a St. Petersburg Democrat who also worked for years on the issue, attributed some of the delay in getting legislation passed to uncertainty about the number of men who were still alive and who would seek reparations.

“No amount of money can erase pain, but it can bring closure, and that’s the hope here,” Rouson said in a phone interview Thursday. “These men are dying every day, and we need to get something in their hands, the state of Florida, to say ‘I’m sorry for what you’ve suffered and what you went through at the hands of state employees.’”

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