Dozier School For Boys Essay

The Nickel Boys, written by Colson Whitehead, is a work of historical fiction that explores the lingering effects of slavery. Elwood Curtis, a black teenager growing up in 1960s Florida, is wrongfully condemned to Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory, and finds himself confined to a nightmarish chamber of horrors. The Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, a reform school that was ultimately subject to an investigation and shut down, served as the inspiration for Nickel Academy. Throughout the novel, readers are guided through the inner workings of an institution that should have acted as a rehabilitation for troubled adolescents but instead was a site of egregious injustice. By basing The Nickel Boys on a real historical event, Whitehead effectively

Cooper was admitted to the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys after being falsely accused of auto theft: “He was sent to what at the time was called the Florida School for Boys in 1961. He'd been running away from home and hitchhiking when he was picked up by an AWOL Marine driving a stolen car” (“Florida’s Dozier School for Boys: A True Horror Story”). Elwood, like Jerry Cooper, is wrongfully sentenced to Nickel Academy for auto theft. Elwood's perseverance seems to be rewarded when he is given the chance to enroll in free college courses as a senior in high school. To get there, he must hitchhike. Elwood, however, suffers an unfortunate turn of events when he takes a ride from a man operating a stolen vehicle and finds himself in a precarious situation when the driver is apprehended by police officers: “The red light of the prowl car spun in the rearview mirror. They were in the country and there were no other cars. Rodney muttered and pulled over.” (Whitehead 42). Elwood has nothing to do with the theft, but as a young Black man, it is unlikely that he will get away from the situation unpunished. Elwood is taken into custody by the police once the car

Indeed, archeological students discovered a secret graveyard on the property after hearing the Dozier boys talk about it for years, ultimately setting the plot for The Nickel Boys’s opening scene. At Dozier, they determined “…a record of 98 deaths was found in historical documents, including boys aged 6-18 years and two adult staff members… 45 individuals were buried on the school grounds between the years 1914-1952, 31 bodies were shipped to other locations for burial, and 22 cases do not have recorded burial locations" and that "it is possible that additional graves and/or burial areas are present given the practice of segregation and number of cases that are still unaccounted” (Kimmerie, et al. 4). Similar to the Dozier school, graves were found on the property of Nickel Academy: “The discovery of the bodies was an expensive complication for the real estate company awaiting the all clear from the environmental study, and for the state’s attorney, which had recently closed an investigation into the abuse stories. Now they had to start a new inquiry, establish the identities of the deceased and the manner of death, and there was no telling when the whole damned place could be razed, cleared, and neatly erased from history, which everyone agreed was long overdue” (Whitehead 3). The unofficial graveyard on the grounds of Nickel Academy is symbolic of