A Town Without Pity - An Evening with Jason Vuic

Tombolo Books welcomes back award-winning author Jason Vuic for an evening discussing his latest book A Town Without Pity: AIDS, Race, and Resistance in Florida’s Deep South. In A Town Without Pity 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 also the legacies of a racist past.

More about A Town Without Pity

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 also 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.

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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