India, May 13 -- Subjugation, not education, is the cornerstone of Nickel Academy, a reform school for young offenders in America's Jim Crow South. Crushing the spirit overrides igniting the minds of Black students kept separate and unequal on campus. The default language spoken by the staff is violence. As a fresh-faced idealist shaped by Martin Luther King's sermons about loving your oppressor and breaking down racial barriers with non-violence learns, "violence is the only lever big enough to move the world." Colson Whitehead modelled the fictional reformatory of his 2019 novel The Nickel Boys on Dozier School, a Florida institution that closed in 2011 after operating for more than a century despite repeated allegations of beatings, ra...