The Nickel Boys chronicles the way the promise of the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation—the freeing of enslaved people—evolved into the racial oppression of the 1960s and beyond. The south of the 1960s, when most of the novel is set, is still the segregated south of Jim Crow laws; the system of White supremacy has found a loophole in the words of the 13th Amendment, which forbids forced labor “except as a punishment for crime.” Institutions like Nickel Academy used incarceration to prop up the economic system that slavery began, extracting free labor from incarcerated boys—de facto practice of slavery but with the cover of the law. This means imprisoning as many people as possible—as Elwood’s conviction shows, particularly for Black boys, even being in the vicinity of a crime is enough to guarantee being found guilty.

The system’s financial disparities encourage subjugating jailed workers as much as possible—violence, abuses, and even murders of the boys are tolerated and go unpunished. Nickel Academy profits from the boys’ labor as well as from administrative corruption; the punishments it inflicts are egregious and inhuman; and, while all boys are subject to abuse, the Black boys usually fare worse. Nickel’s entire modus operandi is based on a centuries-old system that depends on a coerced, easily replaceable, and deeply unvalued workforce of disposable Black men.