This Thursday, State and Federal offices across the country will be closed in observance of our newest official federal holiday, Juneteenth! 160 years ago on June 19th, 1865- 250,000 enslaved people were finally emancipated two years and a war after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Despite this, Jim Crow laws continued until the mid-1960s, another hundred years after the liberation. Today’s Book Club Spotlight, The Nickel Boys, (also a 2024 movie) takes place during the tumultuous 1960s at the end of the Civil Rights Movement inside of a Florida reform school. The 2019 book by author Colson Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Whitehead one of four authors to have won the award twice.
There are three versions of Elwood Curtis. The young, intelligent Elwood dreams of attending college and making something of himself beyond his segregated Tallahassee home. The Elwood of the authoritarian Nickel Academy Reform School, is a righteous young man striving to follow the words and ideals of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But the Academy is stronger and crueler than love can conquer; torturing him and his peers to either submission or death. Finally, there is the Elwood who escapes and lives on. A haunted man, trying to find his way in the world with nothing but his name. How was this goodhearted boy with a bright future ahead of him sentenced to such a life? The truth lies with the bodies of young men hidden on the grounds of Nickel.
“Like justice, it existed in theory.”
– Colson Whitehead
The Nickel Boys is, unfortunately, based on a real reform school in Florida that was shut down in 2011. The Dozier School for Boys, much like Residential Schools, was a state-sanctioned way to force children into submission and assimilation under the guise of civility and patriotism. After the school was closed there was an outpouring of stories from former students who told of the horror faced there, including beatings, sexual assault, and murder. Dubbed “America’s Storyteller”, Whitehead doesn’t shy away from our tragic history, and his influence in writing The Nickel Boys came from a need to make sense of the world and fight back against the “larger culture of impunity”. Book Club groups can discuss the influences of thought and worldviews found in the novel, especially in how they play out between our main characters Elwood and Turner as they must adapt to the school’s barbaric rule of law and its lasting consequences. How do we cope in a world without justice?
Further Resources on The Dozier School for Boys:
- The Official White House Boys website
- Run by survivors of the school
- “For Their Own Good”
- An article detailing stories from survivors
- The Reformatory by Tananarive Due
- A 2023 fictionalized novel about the school
Lincoln Juneteenth Events (2025)
- 6/19: Legal Fight for Freedom: Student Research Panel and Keynote Address – UNL
- 6/21: Malone Center Juneteenth Event
To read more about Juneteenth and related topics, The National Museum of African American History & Culture has curated a “Juneteenth Reading List”, which features titles from our Book Club Collection!
If you’re interested in requesting The Nickel Boys for your book club, you can find the Request Form here. There are 7 copies. (A librarian must request items)
Whitehead, Colson. The Nickel Boys. Doubleday. (2019)
