On the acknowledgment page to his new novel, “The Nickel Boys,” Colson Whitehead writes that in the summer of 2004, he learned about a 111-year-old reform school in Marianna, Florida – the Dozier School for Boys. It had been the subject of a recent Tampa Bay Times report, following discoveries by students at the University of South Florida of secret gravesites at the school. Further investigation turned up testimony of extensive physical, mental and sexual abuse, and flagrant corruption by administrators and their political enablers. Closed only in 2011, the school warehoused blacks and whites, but in segregated facilities that carried on Jim Crow traditions, despite court rulings. Dozier also maintained dark cells and sweatboxes, which violated state laws. Whitehead’s research led him to a website where survivors of the school’s spirit-breaking torture – the few who could – told their horrendous stories, starting from when they were young children left to fend for themselves –