On March 5, 1959, 69 African-American boys were padlocked into a dormitory for the night at the Negro Boys Industrial School in Wrightsville, Arkansas.
But tragedy struck at dawn when a mysterious fire razed the dorm, killing 21 of the boys aged between 13 to 17 years old, while the others scrambled out of the burning building by prying off mesh metal screens from two windows.
The building burnt to the ground and the tragedy became known as the Wrightsville Massacre.
The events of that night have been a mystery and are still unknown by man. Frank Lawrence was one of the boys in the dorm that night.
“It was a carefully calculated murder that involved 21 boys but was designed to kill 69 that were housed inside of this dormitory,” Lawrence told abc7.
Lawrence dedicated his life to uncovering the truth about what actually happened on that fateful night which he refers to as the “secret holocaust”.
In April 2018, a monument in memory of the boys who died was placed at Haven of Rest Cemetery where 14 of the boys were buried, a decade after The Times wrote about the event in an article entitled “Stirring the Ashes”.
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A book by Grif Stockley, “Black Boys Burning: The 1959 Fire at the Arkansas Negro Boys Industrial School”, published in 2017 ignited the effort to create the monument.
“A whole part of this is our history with white supremacy and the way African Americans have been discriminated against historically in Arkansas. It was never separate but equal, it was always unequal,” said Stockley.
