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Erin Kimmerle digs for justice
‘We Carry Their Bones: The
Search for Justice at the
Dozier School for Boys’
By Colette Bancroft
Tampa Bay Times
It’s fi tting that Erin Kimmerle’s memoir
begins not with her carefully removing
skeletal remains from a long-forgotten
grave but with her steeling herself for a
news conference.
“We Carry Their Bones: The Search for
Justice at the Dozier School for Boys” re-
counts in engrossing and moving detail the
University of South Florida associate pro-
fessor’s work as a forensic anthropologist at
the infamous reform school in Florida’s Pan-
handle, where her team searched for, found
and identifi ed the bodies of more than 50
people who died there, bringing comfort to
families who had wondered about the fates
of their lost sons and brothers for as long as
80 years.
But to get the chance to do that work,
she had to battle “politicians, Marianna
residents, university administrators, fellow
academics and lawyers. Facing the press,
as scary as it was, would be the easy part,”
Kimmerle writes.
It’s not surprising that a lot of people did
not want the history of the school dug up,
metaphorically or literally. Founded in 1900
as the Florida State Reform School for Boys,
the rural campus near Marianna housed
boys as young as 5, many of them Black.
The school’s dormitories and other facilities
were segregated for most of its existence.
Some of the boys had committed seri-
ous crimes, but the majority were sent there
for such minor transgressions as petty
theft, running away and the catchall “delin-
quency”; some were orphans who weren’t
charged with any crime. In some cases, they
were sent there without trials and without
specifi c sentences.
Almost from its inception, the school
was investigated and criticized for the
exploitative and brutal treatment of its
child inmates. A state senate investigative
committee found boys shackled in irons and
called the school “nothing more or less than
a prison.” That was in 1903, three years after
it opened.
Over the years, the horrifying reports
leaked out, newspapers wrote about them,
politicians vowed to reform the reform
school, and the cycle repeated. Finally, more
than a century after the school opened, a
series of stories in the then-St. Petersburg
Times detailed the terrible physical and sex-
ual abuses recalled by men who had been
inmates there decades before — and their
memories of other boys who did not survive
that treatment.
The stories drew national attention.
Times reporters Ben Montgomery and
Waveney Ann Moore and photographer
Edmund Fountain were fi nalists for a Pulitzer
come to one for Black people. (She didn’t
Prize in 2010 for the series.
take his advice.)
The Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys
On her side, Kimmerle had the deter-
closed permanently in 2011.
mined families of the vanished boys, and
Kimmerle’s work would begin not long
continued media coverage
after, driven by reports that
that carried the story around
there were undocument-
the world. (The story would
ed burials on the school
also inspire author Col-
grounds, more than those
son Whitehead’s Pulitzer
buried in Boot Hill, a small
Prize-winning novel “The
cemetery on the proper-
Nickel Boys.”) Eventually her
ty with 31 marked graves.
team found support from a
Records of who was buried
there and how they died
bipartisan group of politicians
were sketchy at best. Who
ranging from former Sen.
might be buried in unmarked
Bill Nelson to former Florida
graves, and how they died,
Attorney General Pam Bondi.
was unknown.
The team fi nally got
But getting permission to
HarperCollins Publishers permission to survey the
investigate was a formidable
areas where burials were
task. Just fi guring out which
believed to be. When they found
state entity controlled the property was a
evidence of 50 graves, not 31, they went to
challenge; Kimmerle describes an aston-
round 2, fi ghting for permits to excavate.
ishing chain of buck-passing among the
Kimmerle’s description of the excavation,
Florida bureaucracy.
carried out by dozens of volunteers — stu-
Local resistance was fi erce. The school
dents, anthropologists, law enforcement
had been a major employer for Marianna,
personnel and more — is fi lled with interest-
and some of the men accused by survivors
ing details about the process but also off ers
of the worst crimes still lived there. Kim-
wrenching human moments.
merle discovered that Jackson County’s
But, Kimmerle urges the reader, their
infamous history of racism wasn’t history
families should not be the only ones to
— when she began holding meetings to
remember the boys. Our history was uncov-
keep local leaders informed, a white farmer
ered with their graves, and even the worst
told her she needed to have two separate
parts of our history have something to
meetings, because white people wouldn’t
teach us all. We carry their bones, indeed.
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