‘History was attempted to be buried’: the true story behind Oscar-nominated Nickel Boys

Director RaMell Ross details horrors behind Florida School for Boys that backdropped the moving film adaptation

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.