The Boys of the Dark: A Story of Betrayal and Redemption in the Deep South »

ROBIN GABY FISHER is a Pulitzer Prize winner and two-time finalist for feature writing. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling After the Fire.

MICHAEL O’McCARTHY, a journalist and filmmaker, spearheaded the movement to bring to light the Rosewood Massacre, which would lead to government action and become the subject of the feature film Rosewood.

ROBERT STRALEY is a successful businessman from Clearwater, Florida, and the man who, after a lifetime of nightmares, first contacted O’McCarthy about his experiences at the Florida School for Boys.

A story that garnered national attention, this is the harrowing tale of two men who suffered abuses at a reform school in Florida in the 1950s and 60s, and who banded together fifty years later to confront their attackers.

Michael O’McCarthy and Robert W. Straley were teens when they were termed “incorrigible youth” by authorities and ordered to attend the Florida School for Boys. They discovered in Marianna, the “City of Southern Charm,” an immaculately groomed campus that looked more like an idyllic university than a reform school. But hidden behind the gates of the Florida School for Boys was a hell unlike any they could have imagined. The school’s guards and administrators acted as their jailers and tormentors. The boys allegedly bore witness to assault, rape, and possibly even murder.

For fifty years, both men—-and countless others like them—-carried their torment in silence. But a series of unlikely events brought O’McCarthy, now a successful rights activist, and Straley together, and they became determined to expose the Florida School for Boys for what they believed it to be: a youth prison with a century-long history of abuse. They embarked upon a campaign that would change their lives and inspire others.

Robin Gaby Fisher, a Pulitzer Prize—winning journalist and author of the New York Times bestselling After the Fire, collaborates with Straley and O’McCarthy to offer a riveting account of their harrowing ordeal. The book goes beyond the story of the two men to expose the truth about a century-old institution and a town that adopted a Nuremberg-like code of secrecy and a government that failed to address its own wrongdoing. What emerges is a tale of strength, resolve, and vindication in the face of the kinds of terror few can imagine.

Library Journal

In 2006 Straley experienced a disturbing episode while shopping in which his fists were clenched and he was murmuring to himself in terror. A stranger reached out to him and broke the trance. He was remembering abuse. In 1963, at age 13, he had been sentenced to the Florida School for Boys, where he suffered physical and sexual abuse. Straley decided he was going to expose the school, and he contacted the one man he thought might help, journalist and filmmaker O'McCarthy, whose work had brought to light the 1923 Rosewood racial massacre in Florida. What Robert didn't know was that O'McCarthy had also been an inmate at the Florida School for Boys. Pulitzer Prize finalist Fisher (Star-Ledger), with these two men, writes of their efforts to organize other survivors and supporters and to work through their own feelings, which resulted in a 2008 state investigation of the school. VERDICT This deeply moving story is highly recommended to readers of heart-wrenching memoirs (albeit this is in the third person), 20th-century American studies, or true crime.—Lisa A. Ennis, Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham Lib.