It was one of the darkest, most shameful episodes in Florida’s grotesque history of state-sanctioned racism: dozens of children, most of them Black, beaten or shot to death, or sexually abused in a decades-long reign of terror at a secretive and remote reform school.
Early next month at the Academy Awards in Los Angeles, the horrors that befell the students of the notorious Arthur G Dozier School for Boys will be laid bare before the world, courtesy of a best picture nomination for the “transcendentally moving and frightening film” Nickel Boys, and a best adapted screenplay nod for director RaMell Ross and his co-writer, Joslyn Barnes.
The two Black teenagers who are the movie’s main protagonists, and the institution they were sent to, are fictional. But the era of Jim Crow segregation laws and white supremacy in which the movie is set was all too painfully real.
The adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel reveals stark truths about the ordeal the Dozier boys endured, including the abuse and violence inflicted upon them by staff and guards, and how white officials hid the truth for years.
“Quite literally, the boys were buried, and the history was attempted to be buried,” Ross said. “Now [the Dozier story] is elevated to academic history, to literature history, to like the annals of cinema.”
Ross’s Nickel Academy is less of a film-maker’s visualization of a brutal 1960s deep south, state-run youth rehabilitation facility than an unvarnished replica of Dozier, formally known as the Florida Reform School for Boys from its opening in the tiny panhandle town of Marianna in 1900 to its eventual closure in 2011.
In the grounds, a lime-washed building known as the White House was where children as young as six were taken after minor transgressions and chained to tables as they were flogged into unconsciousness.
There were allegations by survivors, many of them now deceased, of a “rape dungeon”; others recalled relentless thrashings with the metal buckle of a leather belt known as “black beauty”; in real life as well as in the book and movie, some children would disappear in the middle of the night, never to be seen alive again.
The bodies of those who did not return joined others uncovered during a three-year dig that began in 2013 by anthropologists from the University of South Florida (USF), whose work provided the inspiration for Whitehead’s book and ultimately Ross’s historical drama.
The USF team was led by Dr Erin Kimmerle, who uncovered human remains in 55 graves. Some were buried within a makeshift cemetery known as Boot Hill, depicted in bleak realism in the movie with crude metal crosses as markers.
Others were found elsewhere, several with gunshot wounds or blunt force trauma, or showing “substantial evidence” of malnutrition or infections. Eight, including two teachers, died in a mysterious dormitory fire in 1914; 11 more fell victim to influenza four years later.
Poorly maintained and incomplete state records showed 31 burials between 1914 and 1973, but the USF investigation placed the figure at a minimum of 98 deaths. Not all the bodies were recovered, and in 2019 another 27 “possible” gravesites were discovered.
Painstaking research and DNA testing allowed Kimmerle, who acted as an anthropological consultant for Nickel Boys, to positively identify a handful of the victims and bring what she called “a type of justice” to the families of those who died.
One was George Owen Smith who, like one of the main characters in Nickel Boys, was sent to reform school when he was found riding in a stolen car. He was 14 when he disappeared in 1940, and school officials wrote his parents that he had run away and was later found dead from pneumonia.
But a witness saw staff taking him to the White House and carrying him out again motionless. Smith’s sister, Ovell Krell, told the Guardian in 2014 that his identification and return of his body was “the end of a long, hard journey”.
Kimmerle said she appreciated the accuracy of Nickel Boys in dramatizing many of her team’s revelations. She pointed to the clear depiction of a pre-civil rights era in which young Black men and children could be sent to harsh institutions such as Dozier for smoking, truancy, being considered “incorrigible”, or simply having no other place to go.
“There’s so many stories, so much death and abuse, and just the injustice of why they were there, and who was there, and all of it,” she said.
“All these boys who died, it was one example after another of injustices before civil rights, like why do these children not have lawyers, why are they arrested without their parents notified, why are they just deemed incorrigible and sent to a labor camp for two years?
“It can be so heavy, and hard to talk about, and when I’ve spoken about the research or the history, sometimes I feel like I’m leaving the audience so down and depressed. But it’s also the story about finding peace and hope for those families, so I really appreciated the [movie’s] approach.”
Ross said he hoped the Dozier story, and his Oscar-nominated retelling of it, would be seen as a poignant “movie of the moment”. Donald Trump’s administration is attacking diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs; and in Florida, despite an official apology for the Dozier abuses in 2017 and opening of a $20m compensation fund for victims, hard-right governor Ron DeSantis is accused of being “actively hostile” to the Black community.
“It’s made me think about the way in which history is being erased contemporaneously [and] the way in which history can be like a sort of experiential monument,” Ross said.
“The thing about making work about quote unquote justice, and I like to see this film as a sort of visual justice, is that it’s always the right time, it just becomes more the right time, because these things seem to never end.
“Hopefully I’m wrong, but I’m sure that it’ll be a movie of the moment in 10 years because of the way that things are going and the way things have gone.”
