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When students like Billey Jackson died under mysterious circumstances, they were buried in unmarked plots at Boot Hill Cemetery, a graveyard behind the garbage dump at the Florida School for Boys.
Billey had landed at the reform school on August 8, 1952, after cutting class three times. The small 13-year-old made friends with older students who shielded him from bullies, but their protection wouldn’t be enough. He was sentenced to “12 months or until legally discharged,” but he wouldn’t make it that long.
Boys like Billey were called rabbits because they kept trying to run away. But Billey never got far from the Marianna campus. Each time, officials dragged him to the so-called White House, where students who misbehaved were flogged with a leather strap. After one of these sessions, Billey told a friend, Johnnie Walthour, that they’d “beat him real bad this time.”
Billey’s escape attempts weren’t recorded in the school’s ledgers, but witnesses like Walthour remembered what happened. The last time Billey entered the White House, the guards hit him in the stomach, causing dangerous swelling and bruising. Two weeks later, school officials told Walthour his friend was gone. Then they ordered him to help dig the grave.
A truancy officer broke the news to Billey’s family, though nobody knows how he framed the boy’s demise. According to the death certificate, he died of pyelonephritis, a kidney infection. But his mother told his younger sister, Mattie Jackson, a different story: Billey had been beaten to death.
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Billey’s death wasn’t an isolated incident. Before he set foot on campus, children had been dying at the Florida School for Boys for half a century. Their names weren’t always documented. Neither were the circumstances surrounding their deaths. They often ended up in Boot Hill Cemetery.
None of the graves was marked until the 1960s, when 31 white cement crosses appeared in rows, though they didn’t correspond with actual burials. The school’s superintendent, Lenox Williams, decided on 31 based on “rumors of deaths and indentations evident in [the] ground,” as later investigations reported. He thought that it was “better to have too many than too few.”
But 31 crosses weren’t nearly enough. Not by a long shot.
A full account of the abuse wouldn’t emerge for many years. After the Florida School for Boys (later called the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys) shuttered in 2011, forensic investigations revealed the remains of roughly 50 children in and around Boot Hill Cemetery. Soon after, Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel, The Nickel Boys, which is based on the school’s history, brought these horrors to new audiences.
Now, the story is the subject of an Academy Award-nominated film adaptation. Released in December 2024, Nickel Boys follows Elwood (played by Ethan Herisse), an idealist raised by his devoted grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), and Turner (Brandon Wilson), a cynic who’s learned to keep his head down. The two teenagers meet at the Nickel Academy, a lightly fictionalized version of the Florida School for Boys, in the 1960s.
Elwood and Turner aren’t based on specific boys. But their plotlines weave together real events experienced by the school’s victims, whose stories survive in archival documents and images. These records elicit mixed feelings from director RaMell Ross, who often speaks of his desire to “rescue” the boys from the archives.
In historical photographs, “it was mainly white folks who were imaging people of color,” he says. The boys—many of whom were Black—are trapped in the records, reduced to a “statistical representation of themselves.” They’ve come to embody whatever the photographers were trying to portray. “So how can you address that? I know it’s very conceptual, but can you rescue them?”
When it opened in 1900, the school’s goal was to provide “physical, intellectual and moral training” for boys who committed serious crimes, like theft and murder. But a few years later, lawmakers agreed to accept children without criminal convictions who had committed minor offenses like “truancy” and “incorrigibility.” “It was distinctly sad to learn about the reasons why a lot of the boys were sent,” says Ross.
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When they arrived, the boys—some as young as 5—slept two to a bed, suffering the effects of inadequate nutrition. When they acted out, they were beaten or confined to dark “sweat boxes,” a punishment often reserved for Black students, who were segregated on a separate campus until the late 1960s.
The school’s early abuses are extensively documented in written records, which reveal six state-led investigations between 1903 and 1913. “We found them in irons, just as common criminals,” wrote one investigative committee member. Other reports described the school as an overcrowded convict camp where boys were hired out for labor and “at times unnecessarily and brutally punished, the instrument of punishment being a leather strap fastened to a wooded paddle.”
Not long after these investigations, a group of boys trapped on the third floor of a dormitory died in a fire. All doors, including the fire escapes, had been locked. The coroner’s report listed seven deaths, including two staff members, though newspaper accounts—which refer to the boys as “inmates” and “incorrigibles”—reported ten. School officials claimed that two boys, Earl Morris and Waldo Drew, had made it out alive and ran away. Their families did not believe this story.
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In the years that followed, the suspicious deaths continued. Some are listed by name in the archives, with death certificates and burial locations. Others, particularly of Black students, are documented only in vague terms: “Eleven colored boys died” during the flu epidemic of 1918, for example. The survivors didn’t always know where their friends were buried. But as they gazed up at Boot Hill Cemetery, which was visible from the dining hall, they knew enough to fear it.
They also knew to fear the White House, where troublemakers were punished. Sometimes the guards came for them in the middle of the night and drove them to the small concrete building, where they’d line up and wait their turn. When they went inside, they were brutally whipped—sometimes tied to a cot, burying their face in a pillow—as an industrial fan whirred to cover the sound of their cries, a detail depicted in one of Nickel Boys’ most harrowing scenes.
The White House shuttered in the late 1960s, when corporal punishment was banned at state-run institutions, though rumors of abuse continued. In 1996, superintendent Danny Pate installed 31 new metal crosses at Boot Hill Cemetery. Like the white cement crosses they’d replaced, the new markers didn’t correspond with any actual burials.
Mattie didn’t speak of her brother’s death for more than half a century. But in 2009—just two years before the school closed—her grandson was sent there. Then she learned that guards had broken his arm. “I remember Aunt Mattie calling me and saying, ‘Please don’t let them kill him like they killed my brother,’” her niece Ida Cummings later told the Florida Courier. “It brought back flashbacks and painful memories. Fortunately, he got out.”
Sixty-four years after his death, Billey Jackson got out, too. Researchers identified the boy’s remains at Boot Hill Cemetery in 2016. That summer, his body was returned to Daytona Beach, where his family finally got to hold a funeral—a real funeral—some 300 miles from the place where he’d died.
Several former students attended the ceremony. Pastor Johnny Lee Gaddy, co-author of Dark Days of Horror at Dozier: Rapes, Murders, Beatings and Slavery, delivered a eulogy. Jerry Cooper, who led a survivors group, insisted that Billey’s return wasn’t an exhumation; it was a “rescue.”
For those who have seen Nickel Boys, the beginning of Cooper’s story may sound familiar. Like Elwood, he landed at the reform school after hitching a ride with a man who happened to be driving a stolen car. His sentence was indefinite, and he was told he’d need to earn his freedom through good behavior—a possibility he clung to like a lifeline.
Cooper earned an early release, but he didn’t escape the White House. When the men came for him in the night, they demanded information about a recent runaway. He didn’t know anything about the runaway, but he knew what the beating was really about: Cooper was a talented football player, but he had recently declined to play for the school’s team. The men broke his foot and knocked his front teeth loose before whipping him 135 times. He signed up for the season.
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That summer, as he trained in a gym that lacked air conditioning, he watched an asthmatic teammate fall to his knees, struggling to breathe. When he ran for help, a nearby school official took hold of the gun on his belt and threatened to shoot, Cooper told Atavist magazine in 2013. The official didn’t, but he might as well have. The teammate died on the floor.
When the season ended, Cooper went home. Like many other former students, he spent the rest of his life plagued by an overflowing well of anger. Some became alcoholics, while others struggled to hold their marriages together. Many spent time in prison.
In the early 2000s, the survivors found each other in online forums, where they shared stories of brutal beatings and sexual assault at the hands of school officials. They called themselves the White House Boys—and as word spread, their numbers swelled to the hundreds.
In 2008, five former students returned to the school, where officials had agreed to install a plaque on the shuttered White House. The inscription began: “In memory of the children who passed these doors, we acknowledge their tribulations and offer our hope that they have found some measure of peace.” But peace had proved elusive for the five attendees, who all retained vivid memories of the violence they’d witnessed at the White House. One remembered the sound of the guard’s feet sliding across the concrete floor, while another remembered the look of satisfaction on his face. Others remembered blood splattered on the walls—and on themselves.
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After the short ceremony, the men drove to Boot Hill Cemetery and looked out at the 31 crosses, wondering how many bodies were really buried beneath them.
The White House Boys’ accounts triggered a series of investigations. In a 2010 report, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement announced that “no tangible physical evidence was found to either support or refute the allegations of physical or sexual abuse.” But when the United States Department of Justice followed up in 2011, it reported “systemic, egregious and dangerous practices” at the school, such as “excessive force on youth (including prone restraints) sometimes in off-camera areas not subject to administrative review.”
That year, the school closed its doors for good—though many questions about its past remained unanswered. Erin Kimmerle, a forensic anthropologist at the University of South Florida, received permission to study Boot Hill Cemetery using ground-penetrating radar, a technique previous investigators hadn’t attempted. In 2012, Kimmerle’s team announced that it had found a minimum of 50 grave shafts.
After successfully lobbying for permission to excavate, the researchers released a new report in 2016: They had found evidence of nearly 100 deaths between 1900 and 1973 recorded in the archives—45 buried on school grounds, 31 transported elsewhere and 22 without recorded burial locations. Excavations had revealed 55 burials around Boot Hill, though only 13 were located in the area marked by the crosses.
The researchers found only 51 sets of remains, a discrepancy connected to the 1914 fire. Officials had buried seven coffins designed in a similar style—perhaps because the coroner’s report had listed seven victims. The remains of three victims had been spread between them. The location of the other fire victims’ remains is still unknown.
Using DNA samples, researchers paired seven sets of remains with a name. They identified another 14 based on age, ancestry, burial location and associated artifacts, including buttons, pennies, a polio brace and Coca-Cola bottles. One burial contained a square belt buckle and a stone marble with a swirly white-and-burgundy pattern. Researchers think these belonged to Billey.
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When Herisse auditioned for a lead role in Nickel Boys, he had never heard of Whitehead’s novel or the Florida reform school it was based on. He says he was disappointed to be “learning about it in the context that I was—which was for a project for a movie when I’m in my 20s—when it feels like something that I should have learned in high school or in middle school, whenever the appropriate time would be. It just felt like I should have known about it sooner and learned about it sooner.”
The history was also new to director Ross, who had been asked to read The Nickel Boys with a film adaptation in mind. When his team entered research mode, he was especially struck by the 167-page report detailing Kimmerle’s forensic investigations. Nickel Boys relies heavily on this particular document, which is full of appalling details presented in clinical language. “They end up finding their way into the film,” he says.
Nickel Boys frequently cuts to archival photographs and footage. Some of these images, like clips from a Sidney Poitier film, are only loosely connected to the narrative. But many of them are taken directly from the forensic investigations: Annotated maps of the campus. Orange flags marking anomalies detected in the ground. Tarps protecting newly excavated burials. Belt buckles and buttons caked with dirt, photographed beside checkered photo scales.
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“If you’re telling a story about young boys whose lives end early or went through these traumatic moments, and there is an image that is literal and actual of an item that was found in their pocket when they were taken up from an unmarked grave, it’s like—what a nightmarish thing,” says Ross. “We realized really early on that there were just no images more meaningful than those.”
Nickel Boys is shot almost entirely with a first-person point of view, alternating between the perspectives of Elwood and Turner. Viewers see events unfold as if they were the two leads, and other characters who speak to them look directly at the camera. Apart from occasional glances at reflections in mirrors or windows, each boy’s face is shown only through the other’s eyes.
When Elwood is taken inside the White House, viewers see him scanning the room, taking in the industrial fan and the man with the strap. Just before the beating begins, the camera leaves the boy’s perspective and moves behind him; viewers see the back of his head and shoulders. Elwood is having an out-of-body experience. “What happens when you lose yourself? In traditional cinema, it starts [with] third-person, and then you see the camera gets closer, and it gets more viscerally tied to the body,” says Ross. But Nickel Boys takes the opposite approach. “We’re hoping to be able to explore that kind of separation of self and that loss of unity that happens when a person has these experiences,” the director explains.
Most of the violence in Nickel Boys isn’t shown explicitly. Throughout Elwood’s beating, grainy black-and-white images appear on screen with every lash. These are the faces of real students who attended the school, taken from a group photo labeled circa “1950s possible memorial or funeral service.” Showing these boys on screen while abstracting their faces—which are barely discernible when isolated and enlarged—“allowed them to be in this imaginatively untethered place,” says Ross. When the beating ends, the film cuts to an older version of one of the lead characters. Played by Hamilton star Daveed Diggs, the man stares at the group photo on a computer screen. In these scenes from the future, the camera is always just behind Diggs’ head, implying a state of permanent dissociation.
The production was a unique experience for the leads, who acted in some scenes while also wearing the camera rigs. When they finally saw the film for the first time, both felt overwhelmed. “I didn’t want to talk to anybody afterward,” says Wilson. “I just wanted to sit with what I was left with after the first viewing—just sit with it and breathe it all in.”
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Herisse felt totally immersed during his first viewing. But when the credits rolled, he was hit with a wave of emotion. “Suddenly I was back in my body, and I saw our names, and I just started to cry,” he says. “I was just kind of left with that, and then this feeling in my stomach that I didn’t know what to do with.”
The state of Florida is still figuring out how to acknowledge this dark chapter in its history. In 2017, lawmakers officially apologized to the White House Boys for the suffering they’d endured while in state custody. Last spring, local legislators passed legislation allocating $20 million in restitution to be divided among the victims. Hundreds of former students have applied.
Restitution arrived too late for the boys buried in Boot Hall Cemetery. Like Billey, some of them have been returned to family burial plots. But have their families found, as the White House plaque put it, “some measure of peace”?
The researchers gave Mattie the white-and-burgundy marble found during excavations. Of the thousands of artifacts unearthed, it was one of the only items that could be categorized as a toy. It had been tucked inside her brother’s pocket.
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