The Smithian

Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, [where] five older black men took a road trip to Marianna, a rural town on the Florida panhandle—historic Klan country—to confront their demons on the reform school’s vast, wooded campus...[researchers] had excavated 55 sets of remains at Dozier’s Boot Hill cemetery, 5 more than they’d originally identified, and 24 more than were indicated in the school’s official records. Other campus locations remain to be searched.

The story of the Florida School for Boys is so painful...because difficult and delinquent boys are so easy to forget about. They are, in our time, the least among us, the most vulnerable, and the easiest to victimize. But this is precisely why the state of Florida should put the remaining old men on trial for crimes committed so long ago: to ignore such crimes is to compound the sin. We should not confirm the principle that some among us can be raped, tortured, or killed without repercussion. These dead boys, whose lives were discarded, should not be forgotten again.

fifty-five bodies...found in unmarked graves on the grounds of the former Florida School for Boys, in the panhandle town of Marianna.