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.
