Florida Evil Exposed

An evil institution festered in Florida for more than a hundred years. The Dozier School for Boys in Marianna was founded in 1900 to provide physical, intellectual, and moral training for juvenile offenders. Marianna is a small town sixty-six miles west of the state capital, Tallahassee, a rural area that lacked jobs. At first, the school seemed a preferable alternative to prison with adults, but it soon became a place that provided free labor for local residents and captives for sadistic overlords to continue the abuse their grandfathers had inflicted on slaves. Instead of making the boys’ lives better, the exploitation and violence at this “reformatory” made their lives much worse. The cover of the book hints at the overwhelming effect it had.

There is a non-fiction book about the Dozier School, The Boys of the Dark: A Story of Betrayal and Redemption in the Deep South by Robin Gaby Fisher, written with survivors Michael O’McCarthy and Robert W. Straley. It tells how Dozier torments echoed throughout the boys’ lives until two of them found each other online in 2007. The next year they returned to the school with newspaper reporters from Tampa and Tallahassee. The resulting publicity attracted hundreds of other survivors to come forward with remarkably consistent testimonies. They established a website and began having annual reunions. Finally, in 2011, the school closed for good. Archeological excavations by a team from the University of South Florida later revealed the bodies of 55 boys buried in and around the cemetery.

Most of the survivors who came forth were white. Inspired by their stories, Colson Whitehead set out to imagine what it was like for the Black boys there. Using facts gleaned from recorded testimonies, he aimed to give the Black boys voices, thereby validating their humanity. He renamed the school Nickel Academy for one of its infamous directors, Ku Klux Klan member Trevor Nickel. Besides, the boys at Nickel joked that “their lives weren’t worth five cents.” Whitehead chose to set the novel in 1963, to offer a contrast between the isolated school and the Civil Rights activities sweeping the South. The two main characters he created also contrasted: Elwood, the earnest, high-achieving optimist; and Turner, the cynical, streetwise pessimist.

Elwood’s parents departed Florida for California when he was six, leaving his grandmother, Harriet, to raise him. He was an industrious lad who helped out in the kitchen of the hotel where his grandmother was a maid. Later, he worked after school at a tobacco shop, reading every book or magazine he could get his hands on and helping his employer, Mr. Marconi, track inventory.

For Christmas 1962, when he was 16, Harriet gave him a special gift that he treasured, an album entitled Martin Luther King at Zion Hill (click to listen). King’s words planted themselves in his mind. By listening to the record and hearing Dr. King speak about a “sense of dignity,” Elwood learned to value himself. His dignity inspired him to challenge candy stealers at the tobacco shop, which earned him a beating on the way home. [For more on King’s impact on boys like Elwood in the 1960s, see Martin Luther King, Jr. and this link.]

Mr. Hill, his high school history teacher, recognized Elwood’s gifts and told him about college classes he could take while still in high school. He could have biked seven miles to the college, but his bicycle chain had been broken in that beating. To keep his clothes neat on the first day, he accepted a ride with a stranger in a car he had no idea was stolen. He never made it to those college classes. The police stopped the car and arrested both occupants. The presumption of complicity was enough to send him to the Nickel School instead.

What happened to Elwood there is tough to read, but hard to put down. Elwood maintains his dignity by interceding on behalf of a younger boy, resulting in a beating that left him hospitalized for weeks. His character manages to triumph by the end of the novel, but in an unexpected way. Reading The Nickel Boys makes one wonder how many such places existed in 20th century America. Florida’s may have been the worst, but I remember hearing vague threats of “reformatory school” even in my wonderful Phillips TX High School.

On November 18, the Literacy Council of Palm Beach County, which links me with the young readers I tutor, hosted a Zoom discussion of Nickel Boys as the Finale of the annual Palm Beach County Read Together event. I re-read Nickel Boys and found it even more engrossing. Steve read it, too, and we both really appreciated hearing commentary by five knowledgeable Floridians. Among them were

• Ben Montgomery, a former senior writer for the Tampa Bay Times, who told of reporting on the school and its survivors a decade ago. A telling detail he noticed was that when he asked staff members at the school why they worked there, expecting to hear, perhaps, that they enjoyed working with children, they replied instead, “Oh, my grandfather worked here.” Or “My uncle said it would be a steady job.”
• Adam Davis, System Services Director of the Palm Beach County Library, put together a video about the book and its author that included a clip from Trevor Noah’s interview with Colson Whitehead. Here is the entire video of less than eight minutes.

The next day I enjoyed lunch with my friend DeDe Butcher, who had also attended the Read Together Finale. We marveled at the rich complexity of this 210-page book. Motifs of Black history are threaded throughout the narrative. DeDe’s daughter Kristin Calder is the CEO of the Literacy Coalition of Palm Beach County. DeDe lent me the excellent Study Guide of The Nickel Boys by Kathryn Cope, that  Kristin had found. This guide greatly deepened my understanding of the characters, themes, and inspiration of the book. Kathryn Cope lives in Staffordshire, England; this book, winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, is being read all over the world.

I was about to end this post by saying that I hope that confronting past evils will lead to a better future. Then I heard on Public Radio today an investigative report by PRX-Reveal on Sequel Youth Services, a national profit-making company that runs youth treatment centers in six states. The report was titled “The Bad Place.” I have yet to listen to all 59 minutes of the report, but I heard “restraints,” “unqualified staff,” and “profitability.” It was unnerving that Sequel has a center in Port Saint Lucie FL. Stay tuned!