A Town Without Pity: AIDS, Race & Resistance in Florida's Deep South

In the 1980s, the tiny town of Arcadia, Florida, was “fifty miles and fifty years from Sarasota.” With its cowboy roots, low-wage agricultural industries, and violent frontier history, Arcadia was a curious mix of the desolate ranchlands of West Texas and the stately homes and bitter race relations of the South. In A Town without Pity, award-winning author Jason Vuic recounts two heartbreaking stories from Arcadia that rose to national prominence at the end of the Reagan era and forced the town to reckon with not only AIDS hysteria, but the legacies of a racist past.This book delves into the case of James Richardson, a Black migrant worker accused in 1967 of poisoning his seven children. Richardson spent twenty years in Pr*son due to suppressed evidence for a crime he didn’t commit. Vuic also tells the story of the public mistreatment of the three Ray brothers, white school-age children with hemophilia who contracted the HIV virus from a tainted medicine called factor VIII. The Rays were barred from attending their local church and school, and when their house burned down in a mysterious arson, reporters dubbed Arcadia the “town without pity.”Through extensive use of newspapers, court records, and interviews, Vuic shows how the actions of authorities and residents left little room for the voices that spoke up against bias, harassment, and coercion. At the same time, this cautionary tale places Arcadia as a microcosm of many small towns in the late twentieth-century United States, reminding readers of the staying power of social divisions and prejudice even after the achievements of the civil rights movement.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:

“A Florida backwater—twice thrust onto the national stage over controversies decades apart—is again centered in this fishbowl of a book, a page-turning examination of the machinations of a municipal mob under the nation’s microscope. The haunting questions that gurgle throughout: Can a place be bad, and what makes it so?”—Ben Montgomery, author of Grandma Gatewood’s Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail“A chilling, lurid account of a forgotten era’s dual panics of crime and AIDS. Jason Vuic’s meticulous research into an oft-overlooked region’s history of racism, Jim Crow justice, and medical malpractice has eerie echoes in the present day.”—Ali Winston, coauthor of The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-up in Oakland“Jason Vuic has written a book that the United States desperately needs today. A Town without Pity is bristling with practical lessons in a time when attacks on medical science are coinciding with efforts to censor attempts to learn from America’s troubling racial past. Vuic brilliantly shows how one town in Florida exemplifies the worst as well as the best examples of the nation’s responses to injustices.”—Paul Ortiz, author of An African American and Latinx History of the United States“This well-researched and tremendously readable book spotlights two controversies that buffeted a small Florida town in the final decades of the twentieth century. Through his powerful narration and detailed analysis, Jason Vuic considers what these stories might mean today for this and the countless other American towns still coming to grips with complex, painful, and often unpleasant pasts.”—Paul Renfro, author of The Life and Death of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America“A compelling story of miscarriages of justice and compassion, both in the same small town during overlapping times. It is eminently readable and unputdownable.”—Mary E. Adkins, author of Chesterfield Smith, America’s Lawyer“Highlights the darker side of the Sunshine State’s reputation for sun, fun, and prosperity and is a riveting account of how two events thrust an insular Florida community into the national spotlight.”—James M. Denham, author of Fifty Years of Justice: A History of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida“A fascinating deep dive that grapples with some of the most pressing issues of the post–civil rights era in American history.”—Brandon T. Jett, author of Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jason Vuic is the author of The Swamp Peddlers: How Lot Sellers, Land Scammers, and Retirees Built Modern Florida and Transformed the American Dream, winner of the Florida Book Awards Gold Medal for Florida Nonfiction and the Florida Historical Society Charlton Tebeau Award. Vuic is also the author of The Yucks: Two Years in Tampa with the Losingest Team in NFL History and The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History.

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